In the grand tradition of the wisecracking duo, Brett and Rennie Sparks guide the Handsome Family over cold, windswept snowscapes, replete with dogs, birds and the rest of God’s creatures. They mirror the stark, haunted visages of patrons at Snow White diners, the minds of tormented blind men, and universal…
Jesse Maxwell made sure to take a box of earplugs to his Friday gig.It’s not all that unusual for rock musicians to protect their ears at live shows, but Maxwell — guitarist and singer for the art-punk quartet Employee of the Moth — didn’t intend the earplugs for himself or…
Prince’s first gospel album might just be his least spiritual work. If media speculation is to be believed, his latest identity switch has been to Jehovah’s Witness. And though he hasn’t confirmed the conversion, the convoluted music and dry scriptural narrative that dominate The Rainbow Children is hard evidence of…
Although best known — at least outside of England, where he’s recognized as the host of the BBC-TV show Later — for his stint as keyboardist in the arty pop group Squeeze, Jools Holland’s own musical tastes have always been considerably earthier than that band’s. Holland’s passion is American boogie-woogie,…
Five young men. One band, three years old, with two acclaimed EPs released. This is where it starts. At the end of 1999, Chris Simpson, Jeremy Gomez, Ben Houtman, Brian Hubbard, and Brian Malone entered a recording studio in Austin, Texas, to purge themselves, to whip through the catalogue of…
The dB’s defined the Southern power-pop/jangle pop movement of the early-to-mid-’80s . . . a quirky blend of smart pop and psychedelia crossed with the more experimental side of new wave [that] provided a key link between Big Star and alternative guitar acts such as R.E.M. — All Music Guide…
The spectacular pre-holiday sales success of Echoes isn’t especially surprising. America is filled with people who greatly enjoyed taking drugs during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s but are no longer in a position to do so on even a semi-regular basis. For them, two discs of Floyd offer a safe,…
If 2001 was a maddening, schizophrenic year for America, that goes double for the music that bubbled to the surface in the last 12 months. For most of the year, bland frivolity and mindless chest-thumping ruled the airwaves. Then, as the World Trade Center went down in a monumental pile…
It goes without saying that fuzz is gonna be hitting Valley streets en masse tonight, enforcing our states fearsome DUI laws and hunting down anyone who’s idiotic enough to get behind the wheel after a couple of drinks at local bars and clubs tonight. (It even brings to mind…
The 110 famed lunchboxes sit neatly organized in a special collector’s shrine in Robin Wilson’s Mesa home — just like the gold and platinum record awards the singer accumulated during his glory days with the Gin Blossoms, inarguably the most successful band Arizona produced in the ’90s and the quintet…
While waiting for the day the turntable would finally be acknowledged as a musical instrument in its own right, hip-hop DJs, feeling they weren’t receiving their due as artists, coined the title turntablist. More than just a marketing ploy, it was a job description, placing the emphasis solely on hands…
Pete Townshend once had a theory about solo albums. Although solo projects are generally regarded as a threat to the sanctity of a band — and bands as an impediment to a fully realized solo career — Townshend didn’t see it that way. He believed that a band could operate…
There’s no need for the exchange of overpriced trinkets to distract me from the agony of having to play the same old tired roles — rankled adult child, tormented kid, alcoholic uncle — that I spend the rest of the year struggling bravely to escape. Hardly. This Christmas Eve I…
In theory, one without the other is like bread without jam. But sometimes in hip-hop, the DJ and the MC are at war, even if the rhetoric is all together-forever. Case in point: Cypress Hill’s trackmaster Muggs, and the crew he’s hitched to. Muggs constructs deeply satisfying music. He boasts…
As film critics everywhere have pointed out, the first Ocean’s Eleven, released in 1960, isn’t much of a movie. The assorted “actors,” led by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., look as if they’re either suffering from lingering hangovers or are still tipsy (which mostly they were), and…
A spiritual aura surrounds the legacy of John Coltrane. No other jazz musician has been given the hallowed blank check that was long ago bestowed on the late saxophonist. When his work is considered now, too often it’s treated as one more step in a mystical — rather than a…
In this threatened Yuletide of 2001, it’s comfort items that are shaping up to be the season’s big sellers. Fluffy slippers. Bubble bath lotion. Comforters. Cozy sweaters. The same goes for music. The charts have gone soft in the head with good ol’ fluff country, airheaded new age, soft-core dirty…
Oscar-nominated Alfre Woodard chooses to call herself an actor rather than an actress, because “actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing.” Adapting that comparison for a discussion of female musicians, let’s say that a pop diva is more concerned…
Lots of colorful musician biographies have recently been added to bookstore shelves, as well as a handful of other unique music tomes. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are worth your time — and you’ll get more smut for your entertainment dollar than you would with a VH1: Behind the Music…
When we last encountered Less Pain Forever (previously known as Lush Budget Presents the Les Payne Product), the mercurial duo was going mobile, hitching its fate to a 1983 Chevy Southwind RV, and heading for the East Coast.More than six months ago, the irreverent, jumpsuited musical pranksters (guitarist-singer James Karnes…
“I’m in the mud and the mud’s in me.” So sings North Mississippi Allstars front man Luther Dickinson near the end of the Allstars’ sophomore album, 51 Phantom. On the one hand, it’s a declaration of loyalty to the band’s Mississippi Hill Country roots, but it’s also an explanation of…
Like the Repeater/Steady Diet of Nothing days of Operation Desert Storm, Fugazi is still keenly aware of the injustices in the world and suspicious of the bigwigs with the big bucks, suspicious of where their loyalties lie. It’s even in the band’s name — Vietnam slang for “a fucked-up situation.”…
