Music

The Velvet Teen practices in a shack made of long white planks covered in fuzzy, sea-green moss. Located in Petaluma, California, a couple dozen feet off the highway, next to the home of bassist Joshua Staples’s parents, the shack is a small room with low ceilings; if it were underground,…

Every DJ is a junkie — a record junkie, that is. Digging through moldy piles of used vinyl and lining your crates with rare sides isn’t just a means to an end for a DJ, but a sheer rush in and of itself. Dusty fingers, bleary eyes, dog-eared want lists…

Try as they might, veteran performers tend to mellow with the years — but Primus’s Les Claypool and P-Funk vet Bernie Worrell show few signs of succumbing to this inclination. Along with guitarist Buckethead and occasional Primus drummer Brain, both of whom survived the endless sessions for the alleged Guns…

Trashcan Sinatras was already a throwback when it popped up in the early ’90s — a reincarnation of the jangly, Smiths-inflected pop that had been supplanted by the psychedelic groove of the Stone Roses and the ambient barrage of My Bloody Valentine. But the group wasn’t without a certain charm,…

It happens sometimes when you walk down the street in a faraway city: A face floats out of the crowd, so familiar it hurts, so unexpected it makes your chest clench. You can’t place it; it doesn’t belong to any particular person you’ve ever known. But your whole being resonates…

This album has taken so long to arrive that expectation has probably curdled into cynicism in some quarters. Rumor had it that Miss Machine was to be an attempt at a glossy sellout. Others predicted a lame rehashing of Calculating Infinity. Either way, suckage was the prognosis. Well, the only…

Rancid side projects need no longer be feared. The Bastards contain exactly zero members of Blink-182. Instead, Frederiksen has stolen former Forgotten guitarist Craig Leg and borrowed Forgotten/Slip singer Gordy. On Viking, his second solo effort, Frederiksen offers seventeen tracks of variable-speed rock with gruff Motrhead vocals. The first several…

With the release of its third record, Detroit Deli: A Taste of Detroit, Slum Village has been paired down to a duo. Jay Dee and Baatin may be gone, but T3 and Elzhi haven’t missed a step. The bangin’ first single, “Selfish,” featuring Kanye West and John Legend, proves that…

As documented in these pages, Pound Boys Greg Diehl and Craig Christenson, better known as DJ Dealer and DJ Craig C, have gone their separate ways. Fortunately, they left behind this generous collection — three discs’ worth of house improvements that provide a convenient survey of dance music in Denver…

Ten minutes can be an eternity. Take, for example, the Great Redneck Hope’s new CD, Behold the Fuck Thunder — a nine-minute-and-eighteen-second, eleven-track geyser of heaviness and schizophrenia that stretches (shrinks?) the idea of the “full-length album” to the point of implosion. It takes longer to read Fuck Thunder’s song…

In last week’s Beatdown, I insisted that hip-hop was not responsible for the latest melees in Mootown. Never let it be said that I’m not willing to put my money where my mouth is: On Thursday night, I ventured into the belly of the beast — Bash, in the heart…

Vinyl’s kinda pricey. Any DJ who’s serious about his job has gotta have a budget for shopping. Fortunately, Mark Farina funneled most of his scratch into record-store registers while still freeloading off the P and M. After finally moving away from the shelter of his parents’ roof, grocery bills –…

Todd Snider first garnered attention with his 1994 single, “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” from his debut, Songs From the Daily Planet. Unfortunately, the too-clever, Dylanesque sendup of the Emerald City’s self-indulgence — coupled with his too-handsome publicity shots — caused many to write him off as a novelty act…

Carl Newman, as he’s been known for most of his career, has an estimable track record thanks to the estimable tracks he’s placed on records by Zumpano and, especially, the New Pornographers. (Mass Romantic and Electric Version, issued in 2000 and 2003, respectively, provided all the pleasures promised by the…

Like a modern-day hunger artist, the Los Angeles group the Starvations is a caged, anxious avatar of alienation and dread all but ignored by the fickle fans of the garage-rock revival. And for good reason: Rather than hamming it up or dumbing it down, the quintet’s latest releases — 2003’s…

It should come as no surprise that, after a slew of releases on her own SBS Records imprint, Chattahoochee chanteuse Michelle Malone released last year’s Stompin’ Ground through Daemon Records. Daemon, after all, is owned and operated by Malone’s college buddy, cheerleader and homegirl, Amy Ray. It was Ray and…

With just a few months before one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in history, the concert trail has sometimes seemed indistinguishable from the campaign trail — what with the Punkvoter tour, various anti-Bush concerts and a get-out-the-vote tour scheduled for this fall that will feature Dave Matthews and…

The chain saw was immortalized by Leatherface in movies about Texas massacres. But credit for sinking its teeth into music belongs solely to the members of Jackyl — or, more specifically, its power-tool-wielding frontman, onetime Playgirl centerfold Jesse James Dupree. These good ol’ boys from the land of Skynyrd carved…

D’Artagnan was the hero of Alexandre Dumas’s great adventure novel, The Three Musketeers. And while Denver’s Dartanian will readily admit to screwing up the spelling, the foursome’s music is just as swashbuckling and triumphant as its namesake. Sporting ex-members of the much-loved metal-core acts Shogun and Angels Never Answer, Dartanian…

Music journalists everywhere have been declaring the death of electroclash for quite some time now. Yet the music and the scene continue to thrive across America in the underground party circuit. This is largely thanks to the efforts of Gotham club impresario Larry Tee, who coined the term “electroclash” by…