Back before there were long-form videos and CD-ROMs for overweening artiste types to wallow in, musicians used the concept album to overextend their half-baked ideas. Not content with letting a single song do its job, groups charged an entire collection of tunes with the mission of delivering a single dunderheaded…
At the suggestion of a friend, this week’s column was going to be a breakdown of the ten best and worst locally produced albums/cassettes/compact discs of 1996. The best-of thing was easy to compile — Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa’s Music For Meditation, Relaxation and the Imminent Overthrow of All World Governments,…
Another New Year’s Eve has slipped by, so we can get on with the truly important things in life. And this Friday, January 3, it’s all about renewal when the Kitchen Club reopens its doors after a monthlong hiatus. Experience the dark and the dank as this party place moves…
The Louvin Brothers were country music’s best-ever brother team, and when they titled their greatest album Tragic Songs of Life, they weren’t kidding around. Over the course of that record, a woman wanders “this wide world all over,” leaving her abandoned lover to contemplate suicide; a man, rich beyond his…
New Year’s Eve again, kiddies. Surely the most overrated night ever to enjoy celebrity. It’s the annual call for overindulgence (“amateur night,” Jimmy Breslin once dubbed it). Oh, well, no amount of complaining will rid the streets of throngs of club kids and grooving grandmas. So you might as well…
1. Sex Pistols (no future, no integrity, no point) 2. Styx (oh, no, Mr. Reduxo) 3. The Monkees (another Pleasant Valley payday) 4. Kiss (The Elders) 5. Journey (open palms) 6. The Who (will get fooled again — and again) 7. Van Halen (slummin’ with the devil) 8. The [Talking]…
I could have easily filled this space with my own review of the music year that was, not to mention reel off at least 40 albums that helped carry me along from day to day and month to month. But as this is a charitable time of year, I figured,…
The news that there’s a new Van Morrison album out should be thrilling. But for some of us there have been so many Morrison discs in the last year alone that it’s a bit anticlimactic. And if anyone mentions that Ronnie Scott or that Georgie Fame is on the album,…
I used to know a girl who swore that the most useful gauge of whether a relationship would work was how you travel: If you and your partner travel well, with only minimal bickering over this or that, your lovers’ fate was as good as sealed; fight like hell and…
If visions of stockings and sugarplums dance in your head; if dreams of silver bells and cockle shells disturb your sleep; if you can no longer tell which is worse, family or fruitcake — well, you need to get out more, my friend. And what better way to warm the…
Hype! The Motion Picture Soundtrack Various Artists (Sub Pop) In 1994 four records by four Seattle bands debuted at number one on the Billboard charts — Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies, Pearl Jam’s Vs., and Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York — and sold a total of 25…
First, Bush’s Gavin Rossdale stole Kurt Cobain’s sound, right down to the last sad but fuzzy guitar chord and strangled vocal growl, and then he and his hired helpers rode it to a quintuple-platinum hit with Sixteen Stone, primarily because modern-rock radio programmers were damned if they were going to…
In 1992 producer Steve Helvey approached filmmaker Doug Pray about documenting the Seattle music scene. Pray thought it was a terrible idea. Anyone who had followed the rumblings in the Pacific Northwest, as Pray had, knew Seattle was over before Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit its second chorus. Making…
It could have been any town in America, and it often was: Athens, Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, Austin. Seattle was just another stop on the A&R Express, another destination where the gold-card crowd could run up their expense accounts while they looked for the Next Big Thing. At the end of…
Snoop Doggy Dogg Tha Doggfather (Death Row/Interscope) Various Artists Dr. Dre Presents … The Aftermath (Aftermath/Interscope) Makaveli The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (Death Row/Interscope) In the wake of Tupac Shakur’s death, these three albums have little chance of being heard objectively. Certainly the conventional wisdom about each lacks…
Intrigue Acoustic Soul (Universal) Tony Toni Tone House of Music (Mercury) Think back to the abyss of early Eighties urban thump-thump music. New technology had yet to be mastered by artists like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, black pop music was in assembly-line mode, and it seemed that maybe real…
I don’t think of myself as an especially sentimental sort, and Lord knows I’m no Christian, but something about Christmas music makes me all mushy and dopey. Every year for the last decade or so, after the last batch of Thanksgiving chow gets burped into the Tupperware, I drag out…
1) Darlene Love, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” 2) Elvis Presley, “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” 3) The Drifters, “White Christmas” 4) Otis Redding, “Merry Christmas, Baby” 5) James Brown, “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” 6) Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, “Silent Night” 7) The Moods,…
Talk it up at the debut of Chit Chat on Tuesday, December 17, at Sticky Fingers (3399 Virginia St., Coconut Grove, 461-3313). The brand new restaurant/bar/club opened last week, injecting some new flavor into the we-are-presently-remodeling-and-will-be-done-by-the year-2000 Mayfair Shops. The joint is open seven days a week, serving up finger…
Rock music hasn’t traditionally been the musical genre that best expresses vulnerability. Teenage angst maybe; romantic loss certainly. But that frightening revelation that usually comes well after adolescence — that nudge from the universe that lets you know you won’t live forever and, by the way, you’re on borrowed time…
After a weekend of as much pump and thump at your favorite club as you can cram into a couple of days, gear up for a rock and roll week. It’s live-music heaven on Monday, December 9, when everybody’s favorite boy-next-door band Weezer steps out of the garage and into…
Like anyone who listens to all sorts of music in search of various forms of aural stimuli, certain records hit me in different ways and in different places, while others punch the same buttons even if they exist in practically parallel galaxies. Recent examples? Well, there’s Stillupsteypa’s Car Dirty with…
