With seven albums and fourteen years under their belt, the swashbuckling Aussie bandmates of Dirty Three have finally found their land legs on Cinder. Always adept at conjuring the heaving swells of oceanic drifts and tides, Dirty Three has hedged its extended instrumental sprawls so as to hew closer to…

Over the past two years, the Kali-worshipping Dadaists at Sublime Frequencies have been bringing their skewed take on their Middle and Far East travels back for Western ears. Eschewing academic and anthropological dissection and analyses, the Sublime Frequencies folks instead opt for something more impressionistic and surreal. During stops in…

With degenerate drones dripping from their 808s, drum machines, and effects boxes, Excepter is dance music for noise nerds. But for the rest of us, the group hews far closer to Throbbing Gristle than anything you’ll find in a club, at least this side of Armageddon. Excepter’s most recent releases,…

Known more for his coke-smoking exploits in Vice magazine than his robotic tenure in New Wave descendents Six Finger Satellite, The Juan MacLean walks a tenuous line between retro and futuristic on his debut full-length. The synthetic surfaces of “Shining Skinned Friend” shimmer like sweaty cyborg midriffs, while vocoder-rendered voices…

Having grown up with the words to “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” all but a priori in my head, I have found it hard to appreciate the scope and reach of Willie Nelson. Sure, he penned classic songs for country superstars like Patsy Cline, Faron…

Chicago’s Bobby Conn is a pint-size dynamo. At least he seems that way, especially when he stands next to his statuesque vocalist/violinist Monica BouBou. Perhaps such a diminutive stature is what accounts for his deep baritone soaring into a high falsetto à la Prince. At times he is sexy too,…

For those worried by recent photos showing Jack White becoming Michael Jackson, the cover shot of Get Behind Me Satan should come as a relief: He has turned Goth mariachi instead, offsetting Meg White’s proffered white apple. Better news is the highly compressed opener, “Blue Orchid,” on which Jack sounds…

Three albums deep into his post-Pavement solo career, Stephen Malkmus has somewhat abandoned his obscurantist tendencies for Face the Truth. On the opener “Pencil Rot,” he pleads “save me from me” amid synth squiggles lifted from the Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat. He speaks of languish somewhere in the nonsensical language…

Every decade or so, Bruce Springsteen toys with a return to the heartland, to the isolated, icy bleakness of Nebraska. He strips down to just a guitar, his raspy voice, and stark songs that intimately identify with both the crooked cop and the cop killer. Although 1995’s The Ghost of…