For songwriter Jim White, finding hidden blessings in times of catastrophe is nothing new. A charming backwater intellect who is as comfortable discussing Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as he is Alfred Hitchcock, Hurricane Earl or Jefferson Davis (“the mad scientist who got a $60,000 grant from MIT to record information…
It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday, and the Orb’s Alex Paterson enjoys the beautiful view as he works his way through the evening’s third interview. “It’s almost a full moon tonight,” he quietly interrupts. “It’s a very clear night, and I’m standing in the garden.” At home with his girlfriend…
Has the Wu-Tang dynasty fallen off? Rumors of strife within the group, along with Old Dirty Bastard’s legal troubles and declining record sales, all suggest the kings of Shaolin may have lost the power that they once wielded over the rap industry like a mighty sword. With so many Wu-affiliated…
The first thing listeners will notice about Lucinda Williams’s new album, Essence, is how dramatically it differs from her 1998 Grammy-winning classic Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. The rich narratives and roadhouse swagger have given way to a starkly introspective sound that ranges from gentle repetition on “Lonely Girls”…
This long-awaited four-CD collection contains nearly every song commercially released by Buffalo Springfield, the short-lived but seminal Los Angeles-based rock band. In fact, disc four presents, in their entirety, newly remastered versions of the group’s first two albums: Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again, its masterpiece. And most of the…
The passage of years tends to color perceptions of music conceived for the stage, no matter how good it is. Take Oklahoma!, which has been referred to so frequently as the play responsible for revolutionizing American musical theater that most folks consider it to be as musty and cobwebbed as…
Alex Lemski’s mind is a little like the jazz music he promoted as founder and president of Creative Music Works: It’s associative, non-linear, complicated and, right now, swimming with activity. But after eleven years of hard work on behalf of progressive music in Denver, Lemski is leaving town for good…
If you haven’t jumped on board yet, don’t worry, there’s still room: Nikka Costa’s bandwagon should be fuller, considering she’s been around for years. The 29-year-old singer — who appears at the Bluebird Theater on Tuesday, July 31 — opened for the Police when she was only eight and is…
A common theme among today’s rockabilly groups is purism. Often, bands measure themselves by how authentic their look is, how old their equipment and pomade is or how many original parts went into restoring their ’57 Chevys. It seeps into the music as well, and there are schools of guitarists…
Since the breakup of A Tribe Called Quest — the group that, for ten years, consistently put out some of the best records in hip-hop before disbanding in 1998 — fans have had varied success keeping up with the careers of its founding members. Last year, Jonathan “Q-Tip” Davis III…
It’s almost a given that any really good rock-and-roll documentary begins in a smallish town in the middle of nowhere, as, flanked by dreary industrial surroundings and repressive blue-collar mentalities, young artists see music as the only escape from a lifetime of factory work. For the Beatles, it was Liverpool;…
Talk about mood swings. Just about the time you grab a sonic handle on the Blue Noise Band (“Listen, Margaret, there’s a real purty steel-guitar waltz”), it slips away and the tune instantly morphs into something else (“Jesus, Mags, it’s Napalm Death!”). Born and raised in the musical melting pot…
In the jungle canopy of Belize grows a moisture-loving fungus — a member of the Geotrichum family, to be exact — that has recently been caught in the act of attacking compact discs, munching on their plastic and aluminum with a glee that only a fungus can know, destroying whatever…
Back when grunge was the flavor of the week, its spiritual cousin, garage rock, seemed ready to bust into the mainstream. But after Kurt Cobain aerated his head, blowing a hole through the movement he’d come to personify in the process, garage went back to where it came from –…
Few players in the jazz realm can satisfy every audience. There are traditionalists and there are progressives, and not often do the two meet. Ellyn Rucker, Sunday, July 22, at the Mercury Cafe, is a notable exception, a longtime local songstress whose music is easily as welcome on KUVO as…
In the early days of electronic instruments, the use of such noisemakers virtually guaranteed that the resulting music, good or bad, would have a certain metallic/robotic feel. But that’s becoming a thing of the past. Thanks to better equipment and an increase in the number of artists able to take…
Garnered from a series of 1999 shows that featured a who’s who of contemporary pickers and twangers, Concerts for a Landmine Free World is most satisfying when performers address the shows’ theme indirectly, if at all. A case in point is Patty Griffin’s “Mary,” which laments both the Virgin Mother’s…
Back when Robert Pollard’s liver was pinker, Guided By Budweiser earned its cult stripes with a foolproof formula: It created jillions of lo-fi, anthem-baiting sketches that recalled mid-period Beatles/Who, sported intentionally vague lyrics and rarely exceeded two minutes. Pollard hasn’t stopped honoring his forefathers of the British Invasion — he…
In the vapid days of the early Reagan years — that period when the musical world turned as gray and dreary as Margaret Thatcher’s underthings — you couldn’t walk out the door without running into a Bangle or a Flock of Something. The first ballistic surge of punk had mostly…
You expect a band as well-traveled as the Voodoo Glow Skulls to have its share of bad-luck road-trip stories. You just don’t expect them all to come from the same tour. On the phone from somewhere between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Canada, in an area he refers to as “no man’s…
Now that twangy, Appalachian-rooted singers like Dolly Parton and Patty Loveless have effectively been banished from the country-music airwaves, where lowest-common-denominator blandness rules, there’s only one thing left for a hillbilly girl to do: put out a bluegrass album. Two years ago, Parton jump-started her singing career with the critically…
At this point, no one doubts that a lot of great music has been made under the influence of marijuana: As my first exhibit, I present the island of Jamaica. But the history of songs written about marijuana is not nearly as storied; after “Legalize It” and a handful of…
