Countless historians and critics have tried to write the consummate definition of blues music, but B.B. King may have put it best in his 1996 autobiography, Blues All Around Me: “I could see that the blues was about survival.” Rooted as it is in the hearts of despairing souls –…
Electronic music has evolved and splintered into about a million subgenres since Karlheinz Stockhausen started messing around with wires and primitive tone generators in the Fifties. Style Encoding, the debut album from Seattle-based producer Tom “Codebase” Butcher, traces a chart that flows from Stockhausen through Kraftwerk, Bambaataa-esque electro, Detroit house,…
Some of you may know Dave Derby as the voice of the criminally underappreciated Nineties altrockers Dambuilders. After that Boston quartet split in 1998, the singer/multi-instrumentalist spent a couple of years pursuing his solo muse under the moniker Brilliantine — a loose collective of musicians that included Lloyd Cole, Ivy’s…
Think of electroclash as the NASDAQ tech sector circa spring 2000, when it crashed and burned once the astounding hype finally subsided. Now think of Client as a dot-com trying to make a buck by rolling out an IPO in the midst of that environment. The hackneyed formula the British…
Try to hear this unlikely musical encounter in your head: Shane MacGowan, possessed by the ghost of Joe Strummer and twenty pints of Guinness, staggers into his rehearsal space, only it’s not the Pogues staring at his disheveled ass — it’s Ian MacKaye and the rest of Fugazi. Instead of…
In preparation for their sophomore album, Loses Control, the four members of Hey Mercedes spent a couple of weeks last year at punk-rock summer camp. Not the Vans Warped tour, mind you — we’re talkin’ wilderness, lakes, canoes, bears shitting in the woods, that kinda thing. “We went to this…
You would be hard-pressed to find a genre besides instrumental surf music that can paint such vivid pictures in the mind’s eye. It doesn’t take much more than those first strains of twangy, heavily reverberated Fender guitar and primal, frenetic drumming to evoke crystal-clear images: fearless wave riders ripping the…
Like a paunchy, aging executive trying to wedge into the ripped jeans, band T-shirt, and Chuck Taylors of his college days, the return of Lollapalooza feels forced, hollow, and a tad disingenuous. There’s a reason why the traveling festival petered out in 1997 after seven editions: It simply couldn’t sustain…
Going to the Vans Warped tour is like taking a trip to Taco Bell: It’s cheap, there’s dozens of configurations of essentially the same ingredients, and you know ahead of time how it’s gonna taste. But damn if it doesn’t hit the spot every now and again! It’s a pretty…
For nearly a decade the inventive Welsh quintet Super Furry Animals has been chomping on the tenets of prog and psychedelia while gleefully undermining them with elements of electronica, ragged folk-pop, and indie-rock dissonance. This is a band that has written a track around studio guest Sir Paul McCartney munching…
From their formation in 1979 to their dissolution in 1997, the Cocteau Twins traveled far above the clouds and well below the radar. In Britain the group’s legendary, uniquely divine ethereal-pop atmospherics earned heaps of critical praise and established a sound and vision for the renowned English indie label 4AD,…
Whether or not you’re into garage rock there’s one inescapable fact: It’s meant to be encountered live in a seedy and disgusting dive, not on an album played in your comfy little IKEA-furnished apartment. There’s something about that loud, scummy guitar raunch, those teetering rhythms, and every rabid scream and…
Like a string of overhead power lines running endlessly across remote, rolling fields and tree-dotted hills, Grandaddy brings a current of New Wave and prog-rock electricity to its lush, bucolic altcountry. Frontman Jason Lytle is cut from the same cloth as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in that he’s not afraid to…
Dean Wareham has been down this road before. Back in 1997, the Luna frontman and his then-wife, filmmaker Claudia Silver, recorded an odd little covers album under the moniker Cagney & Lacee, but their endeavor was definitely more of a miss than a hit. Six years later, Wareham’s giving the…
Like tumbling down a rabbit hole and finding yourself wandering dizzily through a strange, surreal new world, attending an Of Montreal show necessitates a wholesale abandonment of reality. Led by the ever-fanciful Kevin Barnes, the Athens, Georgia band dwells at the intersection where Sgt. Pepper, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, and…
Though they’re named after a Smiths song (which in turn was named after a quote from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums), Pretty Girls Make Graves has precious little to do with English fop-pop. The loud-rawkin’, female-fronted, energetic Seattle quintet is well-versed with life on the road, though, having toured incessantly…
If you can imagine being straitjacketed and locked for a few days in a tiny white room illuminated by the harshest of fluorescent lighting while being deprived of your schizophrenia medication, then you’re on your way to understanding the Ex Models’ second album, Zoo Psychology. Like the Jesus Lizard but…
