I’m disappointingly normal,” Craig Finn insists. “I watch a lot of baseball. I’m a huge Twins fan. I listen to music, hang out with my wife, drink beer, whatever. It’s very average-American.” The Hold Steady frontman may indeed be normal, but his band is anything but. In fact, the New…
As Brave Combo founder Carl Finch talks about polka from an office phone in Denton, Texas, his passion for the multicultural art form knows no bounds. But get him going about the mainstream perception of his chosen trade (he plays accordion, guitar and keyboards and handles most of the singing…
“People pay me well to work them out, and then they avoid me,” Christophe Cranberri says with a laugh. “You can tell me your goal is to lose fifty pounds — you’ll lose seventy just trying to get away from me.” It’s 2 p.m. on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon, a…
Perhaps the only thing more self-indulgent than issuing a double album is planning a surprise party for yourself and then feigning astonishment when your guests emerge. Many such releases have been ostentatious excursions of masturbatory significance, while others (Bitches Brew, London Calling, Sign of the Times, Life After Death) have…
BEP’s commercial breakthrough, 2003’s Elephunk, may have been a sellout, but the relentless catchiness and gleeful stoopidity of its hip-pop moves generated guilty pleasure. This time around, however, the guilt’s often by association, and the pleasure’s in shorter supply. Several of the cameo-laden tunes here are moderately effective, including “Like…
Just in time for the 32nd edition of Telluride’s namesake bash (June 16 through 19), Rounder has released a CD and separate DVD documenting the event’s thirtieth anniversary, in 2003. Both projects exemplify the non-traditional nature of the gathering — an approach that usually pays dividends but comes with some…
Getting older and wiser means taking the guilt out of your guilty pleasures. Annie serves up opulent dance pop — all white fur coats and milk served in champagne glasses, the kind of thing you might expect from an unlikely mating of Beyoncé and the Tom Tom Club, or Vanity…
Andrew Douglas’s art-house documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus gave David Byrne a good enough reason to expand his worldbeat label with a soundtrack. Accompanying troubador Jim White down the back roads of the ol’ Confederacy with a 300-pound statue of Jerusalem Slim in the trunk, this collection features Appalachian…
With Commit This to Memory, Motion City Soundtrack has carved a milestone in music history. Behold: the worst rock record you will ever hear. Okay, so that’s a pretty strong claim — after all, the CD’s insipid, Weezer-ass- licking-Jimmy Eat World sound is hardly offensive. Tight and spotless, Commit This…
The lo-fi crusade of the ’90s seems to have left almost as many casualties as the Summer of Love did — only instead of burned-out old hippies, we’ve been bequeathed with bummed-out ex-slackers, still slouching in some post-collegiate cloud of dirty socks, pot smoke and scratched Sebadoh records. Landlordland’s laundry…
Stevens is generating big buzz among local scenesters these days, and that acclaim has placed a considerable burden on her latest full-length. But while I’m Okay shows promise at times, it can’t quite live up to the hype. Unlike those singer-songwriters whose repertoire sounds like the same tune with a…
DJ Hipp-E may sound like an oxymoron to some, but anyone involved significantly with either culture should recognize the inherent ideological similarities — namely, community transcendence through music, mind-altering substance experimentation and indiscriminate brotherly love. Granted, these similarities aren’t always apparent in all cases, but Hipp-E is obviously down with…
Halfway through 2005, nothing should set off a music fan’s cred alert quicker than a band whose sound falls almost exactly between those of the White Stripes and the Strokes. Cincinnati’s Heartless Bastards fit that description — and yet such simple comparisons come nowhere close to doing justice to the…
If it’s pioneering, trailblazing, armed audio warfare you’re after, Meat Beat Manifesto is your answer. From 1989’s Storm the Studio — a tour de force of hip-hop, dub, industrial dance noise — to this year’s At the Center, a blend of electronica and jazzy live instrumentation (including a shocking amount…
Lorin Ashton, who’s christened himself Bassnectar, comes at electro-dance music from a different angle than the typical club jockey. Instead of stereotypically accelerating rhythms and pumping up the volume, this Burning Man veteran, who’ll share the Cervantes stage with Friends in Stereo, promotes an unexpectedly heady and complex agenda. His…
Leave it to the Amsterdam underground to come up with a sleazy, hard-chugging duo that combines a bombastic and bellowing drummer with an abusive, psychedelic pump organist. Meet Bjrn Ottenheim and Daan Schinkel, bellower and organ bully, respectively, whose riotous live sets channel the less cornball antics of Jim Morrison…
Despite having been around for years, the Atomic Bitchwax is practically a new band. At the time of its late-’90s launch, the group was a largely instrumental outfit in which moonlighting Monster Magnet guitarist Ed Mundell was viewed as more equal than his partners, bassist Chris Kosnik and drummer Keith…
First you throw it on, blasé, one ear on the stereo and the other on the evening news reporting the dramatic conclusion of the Michael Jackson trial. After all, who expects anything from Elevator, Hot Hot Heat’s second album? The band blew its load with Make Up the Breakdown, a…
An insomniac’s dream come true, the Sleepers drift effortlessly between loosely structured pop and casually aggressive fuzz-core — a fitting tribute to what Bill Shakespeare once referred to as “the honey-heavy dew of slumber.” Gathered from the cast-off ashes of Denver’s Worm Trouble, this drowsy post-rock trio of songwriter/vocalist Kat…
The typical superstar DJ’s career can sometimes span decades. Jocks like Paul Oakenfold, Wink and Bad Boy Bill, who’ve been around forever and show no signs of letting up, can make it tough for an up-and-comer to make a name in the scene. But it’s these new faces who are…
The process of making music isn’t always idyllic. Just ask Jme White. Blusom, the duo he co-founded with singer/guitarist Mike Behrenhausen, just released The Metapolitan, its sophomore full-length on the eminent Kansas City imprint, Second Nature. And while the group’s mix of sweet, sad indie pop and warped electronica may…
For listeners of a certain bent, the Futureheads present a genuine enigma. The British group’s self-titled 2004 CD is thoroughly enjoyable, yet it’s also extremely reminiscent of memorable new-wave platters from the late ’70s and early ’80s. So is The Futureheads good because it’s good? Or because it sounds like…
