Music

Mike Ness knows all about “bad, bad luck.” Singer/guitarist Ness, who’s the author of that lyric, has experienced plenty of hardship since he formed Social Distortion in 1978, in the midst of L.A.’s burgeoning hardcore scene. The group survived brawls, arrests and revolving membership while making its way through punk’s…

In the hands of introspective virtuoso Robert Eldridge, a guitar can summon the depths of the ocean, conjure deep-space nebulas or transport listeners to a swampy backwoods juke joint soaked in moonshine. Hailing from Charleston, West Virgina, the lead electric-ax-man for Zeut has spent much of his 25-year career exploring…

While dance music has always been about exploring new sounds, it’s the hits that bring people to the clubs. Folks don’t generally go clubbing to hear some DJ strike an esoteric pose with his playlist; what they want to do is party and have a good time. Pete Tong plays…

Sometimes we get things off to a slow start,” says Todd Baechle, revealing a trace of modesty not usually apparent as he slinks and swaggers, often in makeup, around the stage during a Faint show. “And people are a little bit creaky at first.” Yeah, right. The last time the…

Minneapolis’s only suicide hotline. Leave your name, number, and your reason for wanting to die…” This is the message that greets callers when Eyedea’s voice mail picks up. While it’s easy to think that the rapper is just being morose, his friends get it. When they leave messages saying “Death…

Three years doesn’t seem like a long time between records, but kids today — sorry, but that’s who buys Jimmy Eat World albums — don’t have that much patience. The high school sophomore who fell for Jimmy Eat World’s 2001 breakthrough, Bleed American, is now a college freshman falling for…

Omaha’s Son, Ambulance finally delivers on the indie-pop promises of its debut EP, Oh, Holy Fools. Joe Knapp, the reckless and impassioned singer-songwriter driving the ambulance, has assembled eleven timeless and ecstatically melancholy gems into one career-defining album. If Badly Drawn Boy recorded an album of Jackson Browne and Leonard…

Talk about missing the boat. When Moving Units’ debut EP came out in 2002, it actually sounded kind of fresh for being a slab of retro rehash. Filling the cracks between the Rapture’s post-punk appropriation and the Strokes’ garbled, tattered pop, it was easy to imagine then that the Units’…

In the age of Interpol, a comprehensive overview of the rock made between new wave and grunge is as timely as can be. Although Left of the Dial, a four-CD boxed set, doesn’t pin down each influence or solve every mystery, it provides an effective summary of an interesting period…

Explosions in the Sky doing the soundtrack to a jock flick? Makes about as much sense as Korn scoring a Merchant-Ivory film. And yet the ethereal Austin-based ensemble contributes the majority of the aural backdrop to Billy Bob Thornton’s new football fable, Friday Night Lights. Like Explosions’ earlier work, these…

If the name of the label releasing Federation’s debut rings a bell for Denverites, it should. The moniker was chosen by Big Jon Platt, a local-hero-turned-industry-powerhouse who heads the imprint, to honor the metro-area neighborhood where he came of age. The local connections end there, but the disc remains notable…

These days, the term “hip-hop” is used much more frequently than “rap,” and that’s appropriate. Old-schoolers may wish otherwise, but in 2004, the genre is less about words than production. This simple fact makes it more difficult than ever for local artists who don’t have access to enormous recording budgets…

Though it’s often prone to sounding like a malfunctioning Hoover, minimalist music is not made in a vacuum. In fact, when it comes to the tweaking of stark tonal palettes and pure silence, context is everything; each time and place has its own ambient default, a given and unconsciously realized…

I’m a Nancy boy. While everybody’s afraid of something, the things that scare the shit out of me are laughable — perhaps not as grin-inducing as a friend’s irrational fear of midgets, but amusing nonetheless. You want to know what freaks me out more than anything? (Besides being subjected to…

Vinyl has booked some of the planet’s best-known spinners of late, but few are more noteworthy than Sander Kleinenberg. Over the past several years, this Dutch treat (he’s from Holland) has earned plenty of acclaim — and prompted lots of tail-shaking — for the sort of dance-floor versatility on display…

None of the typical jam-band cliches — patchouli, spinning dancers, aimless soloing — really applies to Garaj Mahal. Yet the act often gets unfairly lumped into that unsavory bucket. Far from aimless, this improvisational quartet kicks out bad-ass, well-structured grooves and blazing, coherent solos that mine the fertile territory in…

This Scottish quartet has always had a problem getting its due in the States. Although the Delgados’ members collectively founded the Chemikal Underground label, which launched the careers of Arab Strap, Bis and Mogwai, the group has lurked in the shadows of its better-known neighbors for most of the last…

While it’s tempting to blame the entire Lone Star State for the coldhearted, gold-digging idiot in the White House right now, not all of its citizens voted for him. Even Crawford, Dubya’s supposed home town, recently screened Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11. D:Fuse, hands down the most well-known DJ in…

Allegedly, teachers teach because they can’t do. Damien Jurado, though, shouldn’t have any worries: Although he leads sing-alongs as a preschool teacher in suburban Seattle, it hasn’t inhibited his ability to craft and perform his mordantly clever, darkly catchy songs. After forming the Christian pop-punk band Coolidge with Pedro the…

Fat Possum Records, based in Oxford, Mississippi, originally devoted itself to the marketing of blues at its roughest — music much truer to the spirit of the genre than the slick, tidied-up stuff being peddled by too many so-called roots companies. More recently, the folks behind the firm began applying…

So what if Megadeth figurehead Dave Mustaine vowed “I’m not going to tour again” during an interview last year with Guitar World magazine? So what if he quit the band after a 2002 arm injury left him unable to play the guitar? Mustaine’s back, and given recent debates and the…