Tracy Chapman’s songs are comfort food for the eternally dejected. With her dusky voice and spare arrangements, the former street busker has built a career on tales of heartache and pain (“Fast Car,” “Give Me One Reason”), little of it more starkly expressed than on Let It Rain, her sixth…
Once upon a time, Pearl Jam seemed to live for a reaction, a trait that catapulted it to the forefront of grunge. The band blazed its brand of arena rock for the sole purpose of shoving it in listeners’ faces. Their faithful hung on every power chord and deep Eddie…
With his latest Mushroom Jazz compilation, Mark Farina, the preternatural DJ who’s made his name on the looped-out frames of San Francisco and Chicago house, continues the trend of cut-up artists sampling a more soothing style in search of a vibe that will satisfy a club crowd not as young…
MC Paul Barman’s musical credentials stray from the beaten path. Few could’ve predicted that a white, Jewish graduate of Brown University would issue one of 2002’s best hip-hop albums, and Paullelujah!, a polychromatic tour through Barman’s cracked cranium, is just that. Too smart for his own good and too horny…
The Lords of Acid love whips. Chains. Leather. European hotties. And sex with multiple ambiguously oriented partners, all while under the influence of illegal substances. Yet even without lyrics like “Put me on your burning spear” or “I wanna sit on your face,” the talented Lords of Acid would still…
Tank top, $15, by Calvin Klein. Platinum-rivet jeans, $450, by Armani. Baseball bat, $180, by Louisville Slugger. . . . Dante “Akil” Givens, one of four rappers in tag-team hip-hop crew Jurassic 5 — the in-favor crew of the moment on college campuses — thumbs through the stack of magazines…
“I think Darryl Worley might be the next Alan Jackson.” These words pour from DreamWorks Records president James Stroud, producer for Worley, among the year’s breakout country stars. That’s a tall order when you consider that celebrated everyman Jackson (“Chattahoochee,” the 9/11 memoriam “Where Were You”) walked off stage at…
Late last month, Interscope Records at long last released Nirvana, a 14-song best-of with not only tracks from Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero and Unplugged, but also the long-lost “You Know You’re Right.” The song, recorded in 1994 by Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, had been stalled by litigation…
Orville “Shaggy” Burrell has returned for his fourth act. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Jamaica reggae superstar reached stardom in the mid-1990s, fell back into obscurity and then reexploded in 2000 with the 10 million-selling Ho tshot, which fused his roughneck dance-hall sound with slick R&B production to spawn the massive hit “It Wasn’t…
In this media-soaked age, when every move a pop star makes is an “event,” it’s easy to overlook the genuine article. Nowadays, Bob Dylan tours more than constantly. But in 1975, his live appearances were rare, and news of “The Rolling Thunder Review,” as that year’s tour was called, was…
Floetry is the sound of Great Britain trying desperately to grab onto the burgeoning U.S. neo-soul movement. The work of young chanteuses Floacist and Songstress, as they call themselves, appropriates the languishing rhythms of Maxwell, the Afrocentricity of Erykah Badu, the quieted vocal delivery of D’Angelo, the smooth rapping of…
Until 2000’s The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, Damon Gough could make his music without a fuss, which is clearly the way he likes it. Since the beginning, he’s cultivated a look-at-me anonymity, like a superhero with a secret identity, conspicuously hiding behind his trademark knit cap and beard. But after…
Poncho Sánchez’s reputation as the ultimate Latin jazz party bandleader is quite misleading. The guy has been a top conguero since the 1980s, but his sin was growing up in Laredo, Texas, not in Cuba or Puerto Rico. After he won a Latin Grammy (his first major award) in 2000,…
Gogogo Airheart defies clear description. Hooray, them! But here goes: GGG Airheart is lo-fi, smart-art rock — electrifying and mysterious. Old and new simultaneously, the music is moody and off kilter. You may laugh at the unusual musical fusions upon first listen to their new release, Exitheuxa, but by the…
Children of the Black Sun is an elliptical journey, an invigorating passage through one orbit of Boyd Rice’s vision. It’s an album riddled with clues as to Rice’s intent. To his credit as an artist, however, he leaves the particulars of your voyage unexplained. From the opening invocation of “Arkaö”…
“If you’re getting old, you’re getting old,” says Curt Kirkwood, the 43-year-old former front man for Phoenix’s pioneering Meat Puppets. He may or may not be pissed off, but he does have the green light to rant, and he’s racing: “This is America. We shit on our old people here…
I was in Amsterdam cooking stir-fry for a house full of people when I got the news about Tupac. “Oh my God, they shot ‘Pac! They shot ‘Pac!” What, who, huh? “They don’t shoot people in Amsterdam,” I mumbled to myself in a fog of disbelief. It was true. One…
John Doe shudders at the scenario. It’s the first night on X’s unofficial reunion tour, the seminal L.A. punk band’s boldest attempt at a bona fide comeback in seven years. And somehow, Doe’s asked to imagine, the anarchistic fans his band used to play for have been replaced by what…
With all the music that’s out there in this crazy world, any data beyond a band name and song title might seem superfluous. So give credit to local oddballs Fatigo for giving you even less information. Pero los Chivos!! contains no band data, recording information or even a thanks to…
By now, the story of the Foo Fighters’ fourth album has been well-documented. There was drummer Taylor Hawkins’ near demise from the dumbass cocktail of booze and painkillers last year, the scrapping of four months’ worth of recordings, Dave Grohl’s decision to play drums with stoner-rock kings Queens of the…
Recordings of whale calls aren’t for everyone. Neither is Iceland’s Sigur Ros. But those hooked on this symphonic rock quartet — whose glacial sound mixes Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine and various 4AD atmosphereniks — are unlikely to find another group even remotely similar. With eight nameless songs, crooned in a…
Guys like Delbert McClinton ought to be looked at the way people think of fine wines: Some things just get better with age. The 62-year-old McClinton finds ways to strengthen and sharpen his vision, telling stories that are personal and universal with the same few strokes. The cover of McClinton’s…
