Hvarf/Heim, Heima

Rock historians regard the glory years of the Stooges to be 1969 and 1970, when the proto-punk act released The Stooges and Fun House, their two most influential albums. But according to Ron Asheton, the voluble guitarist for the combo, which is close to intact after coming apart more than…

Unlike many of his rap contemporaries, Rashid “Common” Lynn has matured artistically — but he had a head start. In 1992, when he released his debut CD, Can I Borrow a Dollar?, under the name Common Sense, he was already sage beyond his age, and since then, his work has…

Creatively speaking, Sweden’s Gustav Ejstes, the man behind Dungen, refuses to remain earthbound. On Tio Bitar, he takes listeners on a trip to the Fab Nebula, where almost everything within earshot sounds literally out of this world. Ejstes’s ingredients will be familiar to fans of psychedelia, prog, and musical weirdness…

Alright is a love-or-loathe proposition. Plenty of listeners will be enchanted by Allen’s defiantly casual singing, cool-girl vocabulary, and taste for hybrid pop, while others are sure to find these attributes irritating in the extreme. As for the MySpace phenom in the spotlight, she doesn’t appear to care what reaction…

Jazz and hip-hop once constituted a popular combination thanks to the likes of Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest. And though the mainstream has seemingly lost its taste for the blend, there’s plenty of flavor left in it — at least when Future Jazz Project is plugged in. The…

The Game rose to fame with help from Dr. Dre, who godfathered 2005’s The Documentary, a smash that featured cameos by 50 Cent. But a feud with 50 was followed by the sudden end of the Game’s label deal — a split that indicates with whom Dre sided. As a…

Folks fortunate enough to chat with electronic-music maestro Brian Transeau, who performs as BT, should keep a dictionary nearby, because they’ll probably need it. For instance, he explains a technique called circuit-bending by noting that “it’s the first time, I think, that electronic musicians are able to work with something…

At this point, Keane falls short of fascinating, but bandmates Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes, and Tim Rice-Oxley could be headed in the right direction. After all, Radiohead, one of the group’s principal role models, wasn’t considered terribly innovative when it emerged during the first half of the Nineties, but that…

Ryan Raddon, who records under the name Kaskade, isn’t a typical superstar DJ. For one thing, he schedules a late-May interview for 9:00 a.m., a time when most in-demand turntable manipulators are still lingering in slumberland. For another, he speaks just before heading to a recording studio in Salt Lake…

Throw a stick and you’re apt to hit someone who thinks the current pop scene is the worst ever! And who, other than nine-year-old white girls, could argue with that logic? Britney Spears and Celine Dion, to name just two, seem more like actors portraying musicians than the real thing…

Plenty of masculine R&B and hip-hop is little more than narcissistic posturing — a sweaty platform for self-styled superheroes who feel the need to tell you over and over again why they’re the toughest, the hardest, the sexiest, the most street. J-Shin, Miami’s latest smooch-music specialist whose thoroughly enjoyable debut…

Anyone who’s ever complained about the difficulties of escaping the shadow cast by a parent should be shamed into silence by the story of Femi Anikulapo-Kuti. After all, Femi’s dad, the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, wasn’t just a star in his native Nigeria and many other African nations; he was a…

Marc Ribot is best known for contributing a singular guitar racket to several Eighties-era Tom Waits albums put out by a major label, Island Records. In the years since, though, the record industry has grown so conservative that it’s now something of a surprise when a Goliath firm signs anyone…

Over the past ten years or so, Los Lobos have probably been referred to in print as the best band in America more frequently than any other. But the band’s level of popularity has seldom been commensurate with its formidable reputation. While groups capable of far less pack arenas, the…

Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee may have the most famous penis on the Internet, but his prodigious man-part wasn’t the source of his initial fame. Lee has been a popular personality since the early Eighties, when he and bandmates Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, and Mick Mars burst on to the…

Sunny Day Real Estate is less a band than a psychodrama. Decisions aren’t just made; they’re agonized over. Relationships don’t simply end; they shatter. Reunions aren’t merely satisfying; they’re life altering. With these guys there are no half measures. They’re as openly creative and nakedly sincere as their songs, and…

Ani DiFranco is a singer, a songwriter, and a producer, but you’d hardly know it from most of the articles that are written about her. “Music?” she squeals in mock terror in response to a question about her primary vocation. “What’s that? Nobody ever asks me about music.” Part of…

Various Artists Good Will Hunting (Capitol Records) Most movie soundtrack albums function more as marketing ploys than coherent musical statements. Songs are either tagged on as blatant record-company favors or used to sell a piece of Hollywood hackwork on VH1. Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting is a different story…

You Am I Hourly, Daily (Sire Records) You Am I is a Sydney, Australia, trio that has achieved an oddly impressive distinction during its six-year history: It has somehow managed to build a zealous American fan base without actually releasing anything in America. Hourly, Daily, its third album (following hard-to-find…

Metallica Reload (Elektra) Put plainly, Metallica’s last album, 1996’s Load, made me angry: To see a band that I had always valued for its integrity change its music for what appeared to be commercial reasons was deeply frustrating. But after catching the quartet in concert earlier this year, I was…