Music

No, not Jim Bakker. This one isn’t a disgraced televangelist, but a keyboardist whose intriguing new album comes courtesy of Delmark, a Chicago firm that’s among today’s most underappreciated indies. Although Delmark also puts out modern blues CDs and classic reissues, the imprint’s at its best when keeping the spirit…

The Cars’ Ric Ocasek is a pop genius. His songwriting skills enabled the Boston-based band to become an indisputable rock-radio success story and resulted in a cavalcade of simple, catchy tunes, as Substitution Mass Confusion: A Tribute to the Cars displays. With the exception of Butch Walker, who takes the…

Hardcore rap tends toward redundancy because far too many of its practitioners feel that the only way they’ll be accepted by their peers, not to mention by fans, is to imitate the subject matter and language of pretty much everyone who’s come before them. Fortunately, the S.P.I.C.S. — the acronym…

Does the phrase so smart, its dumb mean anything anymore? If so, you couldnt find a more perfect example of it than Sexyharrasment, the debut full-length by an enigmatic Broomfield duo known as Lint! Swinging blindly between remedial electro-pop and Negativland-esque noise collages, vocalist/programmers Arlo White and Jason McDaniel (a…

If you believe what critics have written about Hopesfall’s debut, the quintet is the brutal, sonically ambitious spawn of Obituary and Radiohead. While The Satellite Years established the band among the smartest of the screamo set, its followup, A Types, left the death-metal posturing behind, flexing melody and emotions more…

In 1994, the Wonder Stuff broke up. Now, twelve years after the act’s last album, the UK pop-rockers have released Escape From Rubbish Island, a sturdy, energetic set of radio-friendly alt-pop. Original members/founders Miles Hunt and Malcolm Treece recruited a new rhythm section and set out to prove their enduring…

Like a troupe of wayward minstrels lost in the woods en route to Canterbury, circa 1369, Faun Fables spins a fairy-tale romance that combines pagan imagery with wildly costumed musical theater. As if that wasn’t weird enough, Dawn “the Faun” McCarthy delivers her unsettling allegories about magical mice and bloodthirsty…

Hip-hop feuds have always been good money-makers, but in the past, many of the people who cashed in were rappers’ relatives, since the MCs themselves had already been perforated. Today, in contrast, rhymers such as the Game, né Jayceon Taylor, have found a way to capitalize on beefs without dying…

With his witty self-deprecation, weirdly wordy narratives and odd rhythmic pacing, Pigeon John (above) is one in a long line of underground superstars to emerge from the legendary Project Blowed, a weekly hip-hop workshop on the notorious Crenshaw Boulevard that helped birth the West Coast underground scene over a decade…

The first line of Slipknot’s record-company bio says the band was “born of the near-desolation of Iowa.” Since the act was actually founded in Des Moines, which isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is hoarded and children prefer eating their pets to playing with them, this description is patently…

Three words: Bono for Pope. Seriously. I mean, what other job would interest this guy? Some folks honestly suggested him as a candidate to head the World Bank, but such a menial task was clearly beneath him — and as proof, consider that the post eventually went to Paul Wolfowitz,…

At their last performance, the band was billed as “Flowbots” on Herman’s Hideaway’s marquee, but if this high-energy rap act keeps stealing the thunder from the headliners like it did that night, the Flobots shouldn’t have that problem again any time soon. After existing for years as a sort of…

Trance-music don Christopher Lawrence is arguably the best-known name in dance music to come from the United States, a country with no shortage of top-notch DJ talent. Consistently ranked alongside the U.K.’s hottest jocks in DJ Magazine’s annual poll, in 2004 Lawrence checked in at number seven, placing higher than…

You know what they say about 99 percent perspiration? Well, it’s true.” Donnie Jerome, bassist for Denver’s Local 33, is commenting on the fact that it’s taken his band seven years to release its debut full-length, Hearts That Bend. The outfit was formed in 1998 by singer/guitarist Eric Lowe, the…

London-born Dylan Mills, who’s better known as Dizzee Rascal, has a biography that gives record executives their 50 Cent’s worth — but unlike many of his U.S. contemporaries, he seems largely indifferent to exploiting it. Examples? In July 2003, mere weeks before the British release of Boy in Da Corner,…

“I’m just a little dude trying to do some good hip-hop and give love to my people by supporting their music,” says Adam Dent of Low Budget Soul, the local-centric hip-hop compilation he’s put together with Solpowa from Rraahh Foundashun. “I want to try and help as much as I…

The Stone-Agers are down to one monarch. Nick Oliveri and Dave Grohl, whose rhythms anchored 2002’s first-rate Songs for the Deaf, are nowhere to be found on the group’s latest, and vocalist Mark Lanegan, Deaf’s secret weapon, essentially cameos this time around. The changes leave singer/guitarist Josh Homme as the…

When you realize that South San Gabriel’s new album involves a song cycle about Will Johnson’s cat, it’s easy to get that sinking feeling that record executives must have had when Stevie Wonder delivered a concept album about talking to houseplants. Thankfully, Johnson, who also leads the gruff pack of…

Refused, although one of the most important punk groups of the ’90s, was far from original. The Swedish quintet swiped caterwauls from Fugazi, posture from Rage Against the Machine, rhetoric from Nation of Ulysses and song titles from Born Against. Still, the resultant clusterfuck turned out to be vital and…

Moz is the current poster child for career resurrection, ’80s rock-star division — and if issuing Live less than a year after the release of 2004’s You Are the Quarry, his studio comeback, seems ill-advised, the set’s quality more than justifies its existence. The album is both a satisfying musical…

Independence: Some die for it. Others just rap about it. Living Legends fall into the latter category — though the longstanding Bay-Area crew would have you believe that its staunchly indie ideal is noble enough to boast about in every other verse. Classic continues the tradition of sparse beats and…