On the best recordings, lyrics, vocals and music are all first-rate — but CDs that fail to score in each category shouldn’t automatically be dismissed as losers. Take Premonition, Cryogen’s heavily metallic debut. Although the disc is only one for three from the plate, the hit is pretty damn solid…
Guitar solos have a lot in common with human speech. They can be whispered. They can be screamed. They can be slurred or articulate, concise or long-winded. But, as with verbal communication, they simply need to say the right thing at the right time. 8:05, the debut by Denver’s Bad…
Baumer, Come On, Feel It (Astromagnetics). Did Howard Jones join the Postal Service? Wait, there are also riffs sloshed into the melodramatic mix. This must be emo-electro. Riding the Franz Ferndinand backwash of ’80s dance-rock hybrids, Baumer brings nothing but empty gloss, airbrushed beats and guitar that’s more soullessly boob-jobbed…
Claude Coleman Jr. has sat behind the drum kit for Skunk, Chocolate Genius, Elysian Fields and Eagles of Death Metal. But he’s been Ween’s acrobatic timekeeper ever since Gene and Dean toured in support of Pure Guava. That’s thirteen years, mang. And while Ween’s brand of eccentricity has allowed him…
Folk-soul man Amos Lee has backing. Appearances with TV’s favorite breakfast flakes Katie and Matt aside, he’s got the unpredictable Blue Note Grammy machine behind him, which could easily launch him into obscurity. On the other hand, he could follow Norah Jones into the public conscience. Now’s the time to…
News flash: Henry Rollins is one of the most hilarious comedians on the entire planet. Although the former Black Flag frontman’s self-described “talking shows” are usually billed as spoken-word performances, implying some kind of slam poetry is involved, “storytelling” is probably a more accurate description of Rollins’s actual on-stage activities…
It’s difficult to reconcile why the Adicts draw slews of Generation XYY kids while all-ages sections at the Briefs’ shows are occupied by three claustrophobic straight-edgers. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the loom, after all. But it takes the younger Briefs to get geriatric punks back into the pit…
In addition to being cyclical, pop music is counterintuitive, as the marketing of Early Man demonstrates. The band’s two-person lineup mirrors the Jack and Meg White configuration, yet on Closing In, their new album, guitarist/vocalist Mike Conte and drummer Adam Bennati eschew modern rock for heavy ’70s sludge and the…
You never know which Conor Oberst is going to show up. Last spring at the Ogden, it was the recalcitrant hero, tiny and hidden behind his aren’t-I-tortured bangs and a keyboard, reluctantly forging the indie electronica from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, backed by members of the Faint. Then,…
The glaring lack of new ideas in indie rock makes 90 percent of the bands that waste their time aping Sonic Youth seem as bright and interchangeable as a forty-watt lightbulb. At least San Francisco’s Deerhoof distinguishes itself from the herd with a dense and distinctive radio-unfriendly brand of art…
Google Kylesa, and the first thing that shows up is www.kylesa.com, with the tag line “We want to play your party.” Now, if the band were touring houses instead of clubs, it’d be like that scene from Weird Science when the post-apocalypse bikers crash through the living room, wielding barbaric…
The Johnny and June Carter Cash biopic Walk the Line hits the big screen this month. But if you want to see some real country-music chemistry in action, put your money on Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell. The North Carolina comrades’ new collaboration, Begonias, is a throwback to the golden…
“We don’t do cool,” reads the Machine Gun Blues website. “We work our asses off to bleed on stage.” Of course, the outfit is wrong on both counts: Its ragged, pounding fusion of the Stooges and ’60s British R&B is infinitely, if not self-consciously, hip. And no matter how much…
Orlando’s Baby Anne (slated to hit the Church this Thursday, November 3) is more than a token female DJ — she’s one of America’s most popular DJs, period. Encouraged by DJ Icey to start spinning back in ’92, Baby’s mix of breaks and booty-shaking Miami bass quickly gained a dedicated…
The real Devendra’s never actually done an interview,” Devendra Banhart deadpans. “The label just pays people to do it — like Bozo the Clown. There’s an entire fleet of politicians answering my questions. They’re the ones who are trained to do that shit. I have an intensive Devendra Banhart retreat…
“It’s almost like it goes in one ear and out the other,” says Chris Cory, flashing a grin as he describes the irony of what happens when people learn he suffers from tinnitus. “It doesn’t really make too much sense to them — it’s something that doesn’t get better. They’re…
Does Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen mind talking about life without a left arm? Apparently not, since he’s the one who brings up his absent appendage, which he lost following a New Year’s Eve car crash in 1984. Moreover, he refers to it frequently when describing how he went from…
Peter Bo Rappmund and Grant Hazard Outerbridge — the duo who make up the Very Hush Hush — pulled up stakes and headed for the warmer/weirder climes of northern California earlier this year, taking with them the damaged, moody compositions they’d crafted together in a dilapidated house in Boulder. This…
Some grand faiths have their own adversaries (like, say, Pharaohs and Pharisees) to scourge the faithful. But for those of us who hold music on high, there is but one many-faced demon — named not Legion, but Record Company. As digital music leads us to the promised land, we must…
I wonder what Metric (and sometimes Broken Social Scene) frontwoman Emily Haines was like in high school. Like most emerging indie-rock icons, she was probably socially awkward, the only sort of pre-adult state of mind that allows for a future of musical talent (no dates = more time alone with…
Playing the Angel’s first cut is called “A Pain That I’m Used To.” Its second is called “Suffer Well.” And the disc’s back cover bears the epigraph, “Pain and suffering in various tempos.” We get the idea. Yes, pain and suffering are spelled out — if never actually conveyed –…
You might recognize Lisa Shaw’s voice as the Lexus of deep-house divas, a staple collaborator for the artists of Naked Music, a label that specializes in tripped-out soul music, downtempo grooves with a Millie Jackson flavor. Shaw is like the Stephanie Mills for a generation of Portishead fans, where the…
