The next time the sky cracks open and hails bloody murder, conjure up heavenly angels spitting over the rail. That’s something Ed Hamell is good at doing. A brutally frank songwriter from Syracuse, New York, the narrative-based guitar slinger works exclusively from a jet-black palette — imagining, for example, the…
Mishka Shubaly is staggering home. The singer-songwriter wrote his first tunes while living in a Colorado basement, where his blissfully black sense of humor helped him handle a hard-knock life and the stigma of clothes that smelled like pickles. (He kept his duds in pickle jars from his job at…
It’s a muggy August night in Omaha, and outside the weathered Sokol Auditorium, kids line the sidewalk like a string of firecrackers waiting to go off. It’s kind of a weird setting for a big rock show: a snoozing residential neighborhood full of gas stations, dusty signs and weeds poking…
Most stoner-rock bands draw from the same template: Black Sabbath. Kyuss. The Melvins. But when Puny Human constructs its songs, instead of consulting the gospels of St. Iommi and First Josh, the band’s members summon divine inspiration from an entirely different book: St. Mark. Farner, that is. “The thing about…
For years, Me’Shell NdegéOcello (her surname means “free as a bird” in Swahili) has consistently produced a prodigious amount of seductive, sensual and, at times, subversive soul music that has never translated into multi-platinum record sales. And despite several Grammy nominations and a plethora of critical accolades, the closest she’s…
As many of you bad boys and girls know from personal experience, history lessons can be tedious — but not My Dad’s a Fuckin’ Alcoholic. A compilation assembled by the Australian label Afterburn, the disc offers a wild trip back in time with the Frantix, a band whose role in…
Geez, aren’t you supposed to lighten up as you get older? Love Me Destroyer is the new incarnation of Pinhead Circus, the much-loved outfit that spent ten years belting out its brand of catchy, heartfelt punk rock. But where Pinhead Circus once cast a youthful, almost happy-go-lucky glow on its…
Semifreak’s fans have been jonesing for their 8 O’Clock Fix, the debut disc long delayed on its road to release. Entering the studio as “Man in the Shade,” the group encountered creative differences between original bassist Chad Williams and its other members, leading to Williams’s exodus in early 2002 and…
I’m all about the music; I have no time for the bullshit that often goes along with it. I learned early on to just listen and to disregard everything else. So when someone tries to sell me on a band’s look, angle or image, he might as well be speaking…
Who’d have thought that a band like the Clash would ever make it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? True, Joe Strummer and company did flirt with the mainstream a bit, but even in today’s climate of punk patronization, it seems creepy to lump the group that wrote…
While deciding whether to call its unique, infectious, wildly irreverent music “whiskey grass” or “whiskey folk,” the Single Malt Band trotted out a few other ideas — including “fiendishly adolescent, fried chicken, monster music” and “flies on the folk cuisine.” Good luck, pickers ‘n’ grinners. Ever since progressive bluegrass earned…
Unsung champions of the Delta blues have often boasted colorful nicknames. And while a memorable moniker never hurts a shot at notoriety — Jaybird, Bo Weavil, Scrapper and Peg Leg, for instance — few bluesmen go on to become household names, let alone footnotes to Robert Johnson. For Willie Houston,…
Expectations. Sometimes they can ruin everything. Most people spend half their time trying to cram everyone around them into molds and the other half of their time bitching about how nobody fits. Having a history doesn’t help; the things other people presume about you can hang around your neck like…
“I might have to go all of a sudden,” Holly Golightly says by way of introduction. “I’ve got food in the oven.” Golightly has cooked from a musical perspective since at least 1991, when she made her first impact on the global garage-rock scene. Still, it’s difficult to reconcile the…
It’s an age-old proverb: A prophet is never revered in his home town. That is, not until he moves to Los Angeles, signs a record deal, makes a brilliant debut album and becomes the hottest brand going. That the story of Patrick Park, Morrison native and Columbine High School graduate…
Prometheus, says the myth, stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this heinous transgression, he was chained to a rock and forced to listen to an infinite loop of the new Dashboard Confessional album. (Or maybe it was having his liver torn out and eaten by…
“Life?” asks Victoria Woodworth. “Mine’s a mess. That’s how I like it.” This take-it-as-it-comes attitude regularly shakes up Faultline, an impressive new disc that’s being celebrated this week by a trio of CD-release shows: Wednesday, October 1, at the Lion’s Lair, with Luther Wright & the Wrongs; Thursday, October 2,…
Sounding as excited as someone stuck in traffic, Lisa Marie Presley settles in for yet another goddamn media probe. Immortalized by enough tabloid clippings to sink a garbage barge, the Princess of Graceland knows the drill of being drilled all too well. After all, she’s lived in a publicity bubble…
It’s like the flutter of a bug caught in a cobweb, or the jittery split second before a first kiss, or maybe even one of those tics throbbing deep in your eyeball that make you seriously contemplate clawing out your vitreous humor to get at your retina. It all starts…
Shortly after releasing a critically acclaimed debut album — 1998’s 2000 Fold, on the Dust Brothers’ imprint, Ideal — a couple of left-coast emcees, Ryu and Tak, and their turntablist/producer, DJ Cheapshot, single-handedly created a deafening buzz in the underground, only to quietly disband early last year. After a brief…
It’s really easy to make fun of Dashboard Confessional: the bleeding heart on the sleeve, the unreasonably handsome frontman, the painfully adolescent angst. It’s all a bit cloying and laughable. And then there are the fans. Watching the diehards at a Dashboard show is almost like watching the last days…
Everyone’s cashing in on this whole “black” thing. Black Keys. Black Eyes. Black Dice. Black Flag. Black Sabbath. Ritchie Blackmore. None More Black. But California’s Black Rebel Motorcycle has got them all beat. Besides their black band name, the guys in the band have black hair, black boots, black jeans…
