Spending time with the Starlight Mints’ latest release, Drowaton, is like wandering through a carnival funhouse, bouncing down rippling hallways past mind-bending mirrors to the bipolar accompaniment of lusty keyboard swirls, dagger-wielding lyrics and sighed choruses. Funny thing is, the longer you stay in the Mints’ funhouse, the more the…
Music-biz publicists probably feel as if they’re on a safari these days. Earlier this year, Britain’s Arctic Monkeys rode a wave of hype onto these shores. And now here comes Wolfmother, three Aussies dubbed by Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly as rock’s next saviors. In truth, there’s absolutely nothing new…
Picking a favorite from Drive-By Truckers’ last three albums is a fool’s errand. Even so, A Blessing and a Curse may prove their most enduring. Not as yoked to the Southern-fried country-rock sound they built, the Truckers’ stylistic stretching on Curse is accompanied by several gut-wrenching paeans: Mike Cooley threatens…
At one point in hardcore’s past, Detroit’s legendarily nihilistic Negative Approach was one of the scene’s big influences. Today it’s been eclipsed by Professional Approach. Pro Approach, however, isn’t a band; it’s an attitude, a mindset that makes young groups pay more attention to “promotion techniques” and “potential fan bases”…
In the hard-rock world, “invisible orange” is a term used to describe the claw-like hand gestures that trendsetters currently prefer to devil horns, which are now so commonplace they’ve lost much of their demonic power. That means members of the band called Invisible Orange would like listeners to throw invisible…
Kip Boardman, Hello, I Must Be(Mesmer Records). Short attention spans will miss the sledgehammer slyly hidden in Skip Boardman’s deceivingly delicate pop songs. But make it to the steel-guitar-accented cover of Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” and you’ll almost certainly dig deeper into this sophisticated, too-cool little record that contains a…
For some reason, musicians put a lot of pressure on themselves to come up with clever and ironic band names. This seems especially senseless considering how many good bands have really stupid monikers. Take Sweden’s The Sounds, for instance: Shamelessly generic epithet? You bet. Fortunately, the music doesn’t suck, and…
Depending on your point of view, Armando Perez, who goes by Pitbull, is either a musical pioneer or simply a guy with impeccable timing. The son of Cuban immigrants, he grew up in Miami and eventually got involved in a scene where Latin grooves and dirty-South hip-hop mingle as naturally…
Remember that one cheerleader in high school? You know, the one who discovered Camus, Marx and black lipstick in her junior year? Yeah, that one. She got all nihilistic and started shouting inane chants about murder, social injustice and revolution. And on game days, she dutifully wore her uniform but…
Casual music listeners in the States probably know Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom for just one song: his 1992 cover of LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.” Bloom’s rendition of this hip-hop seduction opus, which earned substantial airplay on a slew of radio formats, treated the tune with unexpected respect, resisting…
On that first real spring day — when the air still carries winter’s crispness but the sun feels just a bit closer and the smells are a tad greener — even the most mirthless life gains a spark of joy and hope. It’s the kind of day when stoplights turn…
Considering indie rock’s post-ironic weltanschauung, it’s about fucking time a new band came up with a name that actually sounds like its music. New York City’s Psychic Ills resembles a head full of chaos in which chemical imbalances clash with hallucinogenic bliss, where OCD-looped drones overlap with closed circuits of…
Goatwhore really gets around. Based in New Orleans, where all devilishly good-and-evil music comes from, the four-piece death-metal group boasts guitarist Sammy Duet (of the now-defunct Acid Bath) and lead growler Ben Falgoust (who moonlights with Soilent Green). Rounded out by drummer Zach Simmons — who replaced Zak Nolan –…
Boysetsfire is still a band? Apparently, yes. Bred in Newark, Delaware, the quintet has been shucking out albums for the past decade and racking up as many travel miles as that damn Frontier Airlines dolphin. The Boys are now bearded men, and after burning through four different labels, they’ve settled…
Rocking a laundromat with shitty jam bands? Playing a benefit show for Rwandan refugees while dressed as Chippendales dancers? It’s all par for the course for Fort Collins’s Guns N’ Rosa Parks. Formed in 2004, the band has spent the past couple of years living as irreverently as its name,…
In the 1990s, Toronto may have boasted the biggest dance scene in the world outside of the U.K., but it didn’t have a monopoly on talented jocks emerging from the Great White North. Pushing a sound steeped in dirty bass lines and heavy grooves, Vancouver’s Jay Tripwire (due at Shelter…
Kronow’s new van is an eyesore. There’s a sheet of plywood bolted to the passenger-side sliding door where a window used to be. The vehicle has oxidized so badly that its paint job, presumably once a deep shade of maroon, is now faded like a month-old bruise. If this van…
Asking Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase to discuss the stability (or reputed lack thereof) of his revered band is like asking George W. Bush about, well, anything: Both clearly know the truth, but neither are talking. Oh, Chase will answer all your questions, sure. But only in a hemming…
Kid Rock is a whore for the spotlight. He admits as much. But sometimes it shines on him when he’s not even looking for it. For instance, a 1999 videotape in which Rock and Creed’s Scott Stapp receive backstage blow jobs was leaked online recently. “Is anybody surprised that’s going…
During a performance at March’s South by Southwest music confab, Editors, a fast-rising Brit quartet, were “building up a nice head of steam,” according to an account by Fort Worth Star-Telegram scribe Cary Darling, when singer Tom Smith “inexplicably threw down his mike and guitar and stormed off stage, with…
When you listen to Taking Back Sunday’s third album, it’s quite clear why the band’s fan base consists mainly of adolescents. Like its prone-to-conformity teenage admirers, the Long Island quintet prefers to let outsiders dictate what it sounds like — and hasn’t yet cultivated a unique identity. Whereas producer Lou…
Some listeners will interpret the Girls’ third disc as the sort of mainstream move currently being attempted by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — but the alterations in their sound seem inspired more by creative concerns than by commercial calculation. Instead of replacing former guitarist Nathan Thalen with another ax-wielder, the…
