Rob Withem collects song titles. Withem, singer-guitarist for the ’80s-flavored pop group Fine China, spends much of his time conjuring up captivating turns of phrase, storing each new idea in a Word computer file, with the intention of eventually building a song around it. Although it’s a method that John…
For a guy generally lauded as a pop alchemist, Eels leader Mark Oliver Everett (a.k.a. E) makes for a pretty unlikely pop hero. For one thing, behind his thick beard and impenetrable glasses, he looks like a pretty undesirable cross between James A. Garfield and Steve McQueen in An Enemy…
Alanis Morissette’s jagged little thrill has subsided. It’s been seven years since her debut stormed pop airwaves and she was crowned queen of angst-in-her-pants self-martyrdom. The underperforming Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie somewhat dimmed the burnished jewels of her tiara, but not enough to knock her out of the palace. With…
We may never get back the true Mystikal, the real Mystikal, the Mystikal who put his skills on the table first, then looked around for some well-deserved ass. That was the Mystikal of “Y’all Ain’t Ready Yet,” and indeed we weren’t. When the New Orleans rapper dropped that single in…
Once upon a time, in Memphis, Tennessee, there were a couple of brothers, Dorsey and Johnny Burnette. They grew up near Elvis and played the same jumbled Mississippi driftwood music: country, blues, boogie music that was like the covers of 1950s dime-store paperbacks and comic books, colorful and lurid. The…
Believe it or not, there are rock critic circles. That’s where pent-up, penned-in pop music detractors spew their spleens making fun of all the music that you good people manage to enjoy. Mention Chicago™ in such ellipticals and you get a head-for-the-hills reaction akin to Typhoid Mary with horns, and…
It’s a sharp, almost violent drop leading to the back entrance of Beeloe’s bar. Down a steep flight of concrete stairs just off Mill Avenue — currently teeming with baggy-pantsed high schoolers out for some Friday night cruising — past a silver-painted door, and you’re inside the club. Inside, the…
In spite of a half-minded president, a slew of bad haircuts and a Me-centric mindset, a few memorable and artistic things managed to slip through the conservative cracks of the Reagan era. Confoundingly, much of the substantive musical activity of the ’80s came out of Minnesota, a frigid and often…
How can you tell when a jam session is working the way it’s supposed to? Reasonable people might have different opinions about it, but I’ve got a theory. Based on watching the Phoenix Jazz Workshop cast a spell over the Lucky Dragon on a recent Sunday night, I think the…
Just over a year ago, when U2 was in danger of losing its constituency, the group returned to its roots with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and — voilà! — the pop-music world responded with a spate of ring-kissing that still has cash registers chiming. Today the lads have…
In a world filled with disposable, soulless music and overly slick production, the Mountain Goats are a refreshing antidote. This is about as simple and honest as it gets. John Darnielle, a.k.a. the Mountain Goats, cranks out songs straight from the heart and captures them on a Panasonic boom box…
How do you like your Cash served? Biscuits and sausage gravy, side of grits and hot coffee in some fleabite Southern truck stop? That’s not a bad metaphor, especially since Cash has come to represent almost 50 years of (small case) americana music. Diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, coffee and cooking…
Let’s say you’re a music-biz Dr. Frankenstein. You want to build the perfect beast for the MTV era, an artist equally adept at visual and musical communication, someone for whom a video and song are all part of an inextricable package. Rob Zombie just might be that beast. Sure, it’s…
The question is pretty straightforward, really. It’s the answer that curves away from me. I’m talking to Evidence — a third of the L.A. hip-hop group Dilated Peoples — about the state of the movement, the much-vaunted L.A. underground that flourished back in the early ’90s with a barely-noticed-by-the-mainstream scene…
Post-9/11, Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter infamously (and prematurely) declared the end of irony, and took a media beating for it. Somewhere in Silver Lake, California, though, five guys must have been wondering what all the fuss was about; how could there be an end to something they’d…
For a long time, the book on the B-52’s was that the Athens, Georgia, pop combo purveyed harmless, at times sophomoric, dance fluff. And if all that comes to mind when you think of the band are beehive hairdos, Day-Glo attire, retro dance steps and lead singer Fred Schneider flouncing…
If you’re not a Spanish speaker, “Contrabando y Traición” by Los Tigres del Norte on the Mexican-music anthology Corridos y Narcocorridos sounds every inch as innocuous as a wedding polka. Jorge Hernandez’s sweet vocals ride a bouncing oompah bass while accordion tootles suggest a nostalgia-laden ranchera that wouldn’t offend a…
Bullfrog guitarist Mark Robertson could feel the heavy gaze of the audience as he took the stage. Slowly plugging in his Stratocaster, he looked out upon a packed house, only to find a sea of angry, disdainful faces staring back up at him and his bandmates. Robertson had expected as…
I’ve had the best album of 2001 in my hands since last August. For weeks after that, it was in whatever CD player I happened to be near, and spinning in my head if I couldn’t find one. Even after all of those listens, I still haven’t heard all of…
This story, like so many in the music press lately, begins in the unlikely creative haven of Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is home to the incestuous Saddle Creek stable of bands, which includes Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos, the Faint, and Lullaby for the Working Class, as well as the…
If you’ve got the time and/or the money and/or the sanity to keep close tabs on America’s bustling indie-rock underground, you no doubt know that quite a few of the scruffy slouches who run things down there are double-dipping in an increasingly shallow artistic gene pool. Simply put, stagnation’s stinking…
The other day I heard someone say, “You know, America is in real trouble.” — Johnny Sea, “Day for Decision,” 1966 All you have to do is turn on talk radio to hear just how much trouble we’re in these days. It’s February and the swell of patriotism that united…
