It’s a safe bet that at least one member of Editors has a tattoo commemorating Ian Curtis. The act’s debt to the joyless Division is so elemental that lack of corporeal acknowledgement would almost seem disingenuous. Even so, Editors aren’t merely mired in slavish imitation. Building on a foundation of…
Anyone who saw Liars cover Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings” during last year’s summer tour might have suspected that, despite the seemingly irredeemable freakiness of 2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and 2006’s Drum’s Not Dead, the New Yorkers hadn’t lost track of their more conventional roots. Sure enough, they brought…
“They say you can’t please everyone,” Talib Kweli declares at the outset of his latest CD, 2007’s Eardrum, and his career stands as proof of that maxim. Since the days of Black Star, a 1998 disc that teamed him with Mos Def, critics have championed Kweli as a rhymer whose…
Haven’t we heard more than enough dusky, moody post-punk? Even efforts to make the sound more relevant by updating it with electronic refinements have ultimately turned out to be bland and embarrassingly derivative. The members of Kansas City’s Roman Numerals have done their utmost to subvert this hackneyed trend by…
The post-Fall Out Boy school of rock that encompasses Cobra Starship doesn’t feature an especially hard-edged curriculum. Throughout ¡Viva La Cobra!, their latest disc, the New York combo’s members (joined on this bill by Metro Station, the Cab and We Three Kings) eschews killer riffs, lethal vocals and anything remotely…
The Kenny Chesney co-produced Moment of Forever seeks to modernize Willie Nelson’s iconic sound by inserting the Red Headed Stranger’s distinct vocals into a series of flush, Nashville-tinted arrangements. A decidedly bleak collection laced with dark tones and darker themes (social malady, death and Hurricane Katrina are all covered here),…
It’s easy to dismiss Cat Power’s covers CD Jukebox as a lazy way for a label to deal with its artist’s latest bout of writer’s block. But Chan Marshall is known for stuffing her live shows with other people’s songs and already has one Covers Record under her belt. Besides…
The men of Gallows, a rough-hewn throwback to the days when U.K. punk was perilous, not pop, are known for gigs at which music and injuries share the bill — and guitarist Laurent Barnard admits that this reputation is well-earned. “It’s always an accident. No one goes to a Gallows…
Eddie Van Halen’s son looks like Peppermint Patty. There’s no getting around it. I wish things could be different — as do, presumably, fans of Van Halen. This weekend, the long-beleaguered pop-metal behemoth pulls into the Pepsi Center with its disembalmed original frontman, David Lee Roth, for a long-threatened and…
Under the “sounds like” heading on DJ Forest Green’s MySpace page, it reads, “Electronic Dance Music Identity Crisis!!!” This seemingly humorous line says worlds about what Green brings to the decks. Her mixes and bio reveal a woman with an insatiable, voracious appetite for anything and everything danceable or electronic…
Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans). Rise Above is probably one of the most creative — and subsequently insane — ideas out there. Take a classic album (oh, say, Damaged, by Black Flag) and then pull an Alec Baldwin on SNL on it and create something no one asked you…
Here’s a selection of the best of last week’s music blogging from around the Village Voice chain: Before there was rock opera, there was real opera and this review of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is a fine reminder that there was some pretty kick ass music around in the days…
Slide Show Stand By Your Band II Saturday, January 26, 2008, hi-dive Better than: Sitting at home and watching The Last Waltz again. What makes a scene great? Better yet, what makes a scene viable and important? One could say the quality of music, even still it could be said…
LOCALS ONLY When it comes to hip-hop, one of the main requirements in making the music is to represent where you’re from. Although Colorado may not seems as fresh as places like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta or Chicago, most Colorado emcees are very proud to represent the state where…
It’s always darkest before the dawn. Or so the music industry has been reassuring itself lately. You really can’t blame record companies for that whiff of optimism: Over the past few years, they’ve been bleeding like a hemophiliac with a razor fetish. The numbers are indeed grim. SoundScan figures for…
The music business as we know it is dying. And as I witness its continued collapse, it’s gratifying to see a shift in the balance of power. For once, artists actually have some leverage, and it’s about damn time. If you ask me, the tail has been wagging the dog…
Recordings by the Mars Volta are almost always accompanied by extensive backstories. For instance, 2003’s De-Loused in the Comatorium was inspired by the late artist Julio Venegas, who jumped to his doom from an El Paso overpass, while 2005’s Frances the Mute reportedly sprang from the pages of a diary…
Last year, the sales of hip-hop albums dropped 30 percent, a figure that includes digital downloads. But going by recent rap lyrics, you’d think the average MC was too rich to stand up. Literally. Fat Joe’s latest single, “The Crackhouse,” begins, “I’m sleeping on a billion dollars.” Bear in mind…
George Inai is like “a Model T built by Toyota in a Mexican factory.” At least that’s the closest the singer-songwriter says he has come to describing his unique cross-cultural blend of gothic Americana and Mexican folk music. “I think the Japanese culture tends to take other ideas and pull…
True to its title, the latest album from Stephin Merritt’s long-running prickly pop project the Magnetic Fields is full of feedback and reverb. While it might seem that such sonic intrusion would disrupt these carefully crafted tunes, that’s not the case. In fact, Distortion is as pretty, melodic and fully…
The departure of a performer as strong as Jason Isbell, who went solo last year, would cripple most bands — but not Drive-By Truckers. The group has rolled on for a decade-plus despite personnel changes because songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley continue to share shifts behind the wheel. Thanks…
All too often, when bands try to splice together musical styles, they forget to develop their own identity within their songwriting. Or, more important, they forget to write music that anyone with anything beyond a rudimentary level of artistic discernment would ever want to listen to. With that in mind,…
