More than any other group that emerged during the Amerindie boom of the early Eighties, the Replacements summarized everything that I had ever loved about rock and roll. R.E.M. was great, but I always found Michael Stipe to be an infuriatingly obtuse songwriter and I always wanted guitarist Peter Buck…
Brother J.T. and Vibrolux Music for the Other Head (Siltbreeze) John “J.T.” Terlesky has more extracurricular music projects than anyone this side of George Clinton. In addition to his regular gig as frontman for garage rockers Original Sins, Terlesky has released a slew of savagely bent albums and singles over…
The Grifters Ain’t My Lookout (Sub Pop) For the past six years, the Grifters have made some beautifully fractured and schizophrenic music — loose yet deceptively complex, chaotic and noisy but susceptible to moments of majestic pop splendor. Over the course of three albums, an EP, and a slew of…
In a cockfighting-arena-turned-nightclub perched on a sheer cliff, high on a mountain overlooking Port-au-Prince, the eleven members of Kanpech crowd on-stage on a warm Sunday night in late March. Frederic “Fredo” Pierre Louis, the band’s cherub-faced leader, sporting short braids and a blue print dashiki, throws his hands in the…
Steve Earle I Feel Alright (Warner Bros.) Alejandro Escovedo With These Hands (Rykodisc) Survivors are nothing new in rock and roll. Survivors with something interesting to say, however, don’t come rolling out of rehab or obscurity every day. Alejandro Escovedo and Steve Earle are survivors. Escovedo has logged time in…
They chose their name as a joke, but the trio of rock and roll goofballs known as the Presidents of the United States of America has been the object of intense media questioning about their intentions in Campaign ’96. Therefore the band has released the following statement through press secretary…
The artistic demise of Rod Stewart is a cataclysmic event in rock and roll history, a betrayal of his abilities and potential that has been written about many times by many esteemed rock scribes. No piece of criticism, however, better illustrates the husky-voiced singer’s mid-Seventies nosedive than a comparison of…
When you flip through the CD racks and see compilations of who-cares Eighties bands such as Wire Train and Translator, it’s tempting to think that nearly every sound and aural nuance ever committed to Edison cylinder or magnetic tape is now available on digital plastic. You’d be wrong. Some very…
Some songwriters spend their entire careers hunkered over a keyboard or a guitar, scribbling words and fiddling with melodies in hopes of obtaining that most elusive of songwriting trophies — the standard, the kind of song that worms itself so deeply into the fiber of the pop-cultural subconscious that it…
Iggy Pop Naughty Little Doggie (Virgin) Wayne Kramer Dangerous Madness (Epitaph) As punk rock’s generational cycle spins ever onward, with last week’s angry young thing replaced by this week’s rabble-rousing shaver, it’s reassuring to know that two of the music’s fortysomething architects are still around spewing bile and caustic protest…
Billy Mann figures he’s lost more day jobs than the average person will hold in a lifetime. He’s delivered pizzas, hawked futons, worked as a photocopier, and during an early-Nineties stay in Miami he sold classified ads for this newspaper. Despite the crushing realities of the nine-to-five work week, Mann…
DJ Muggs is tired of talking about reefer, so if you don’t mind could you give it a rest, please? With an unmistakable hint of exasperation, the turntable whiz and musical mastermind behind Cypress Hill says yes, the members of the Southern California rap trio smoke pot — a whole…
Aimee Mann I’m With Stupid (DGC) Aimee Mann has been hauling her dented and dinged heart around for more than a decade now, pulling it out of a box for show-and-tell on three albums by her old band ‘Til Tuesday, and on two solo records, 1993’s remarkable Whatever and now…
Veteran punk group Antiseen has been described as ugly, revolting, and obscene. (Hey, thanks for the compliments!) Since 1983 the North Carolina quartet has been performing what they call destructo rock: straight-ahead punk loaded with chain-saw guitars that’s delivered with a woolly sense of humor in a Southern twang. During…
As the Derek Cintron Band hits the final note of its deceptively buoyant “Song for Nothing,” most excellent squeals and screams and whoops erupt from the dozen or so votaries, more than half of them young women, sitting at the large table directly in front of the Churchill’s Hideaway stage…
Answering a musical question that few have asked, Rhino’s Youth Gone Wild begs for an explanation. Even those with the longest of cultural attention spans are not yet leaping at the opportunity to revisit the still-twitching corpse of pop metal, as documented on this three-disc compilation featuring 42 of the…
Five snare drums, each of them precisely tuned to a different pitch, are positioned around a grand piano in the Center for the Fine Arts. When composer Alvin Lucier hits certain notes on the keyboard, the heads of one snare drum or another rattle in discord. This was among the…
The woeful state of mainstream country music was a hot topic among the artists who took part in the recent HighTone Records Roadhouse Revival. The package tour showcased the Oakland-based independent label’s roster of new-country trailblazers, including Buddy Miller, Dale Watson, and former Blasters’ guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin, all…
Dread Zeppelin No Quarter Pounder (Birdcage) According to official legend, Elvis Presley once remarked, “I may not be Led Zeppelin, but I can still pack ’em in.” This was in the mid-Seventies, when Led Zep was the biggest band in the world and Elvis was, well, big. The twin ocean…
“Who’s that freaky old man?” “It’s Jethro Tull!” “No, no. It’s Aqualung, the guy in the song. Snot is running down his nose!” Truth be told, you can’t actually see any snot on the cover art to Jethro Tull’s fourth and best album, from 1971. But my friend Mike, who…
Bill Orcutt is on the phone, sounding perplexed, bemused, and slightly exasperated. “We’re like the 2 Live Crew of noise bands now,” complains the guitarist and vocalist who makes up one-third of Harry Pussy, the lords of Miami’s small but noisy avant-garde underground. He’s just found out about the hubbub…
Curtis Mayfield People Get Ready!: The Curtis Mayfield Story (Rhino) Although this lavish three-disc set is devoted to the musical achievements of one man, it also acts as a kind of rhythm and blues history. As much as James Brown, Curtis Mayfield has helped chart the course of the music…
