Twenty years ago, when gullible tech heads were lapping up the latest improvement in sound reproduction, the compact disc, and tossing all those skip-and-pop-prone LPs into the Dumpster, little could they foresee the consequences. Years ago, when the supposedly indestructible compact disc first started skipping and the lunkheads realized they’d…
To say that this is Rocket From the Crypt’s strongest outing since Paint as a Fragrance is both true and a little misleading. If you were a fan of the band’s guitar-and-horn-heavy rave-ups from the mid-’90s, and felt a little disappointed by 1998’s RFTC, which was a slower and softer…
Good morning, and welcome to the final class period of Contemporary Musical Aesthetics and Political Theory. In front of you is a booklet containing your semester exam, which will count as 35 percent of your final grade. The semester exam will center upon a single group or performer. You will…
Alas, we must begin this year’s South by Southwest music festival recap on a down note. For, you see, SXSW 2001 was something of a disappointment — or least as much of a “disappointment” as you care to call a week’s worth of company-sponsored boozing. It’s hard to find a…
Madonna has called him “a genius” and “the future of sound.” So how does Mirwais Ahmadzai, who produced much of the Material Mom’s latest effort, Music, and now has released his own album, Production, deal with such superlatives, especially coming from such a high-profile source? “I don’t want to deal…
Living back East a decade or so ago, I quite often was the mail recipient of tapes from one Tim Cronin, a hulking, musically hip record store clerk whose off-hours attachment to his portastudio was matched only by his adroitness at coming up with intriguing names for the various ad…
With 1997’s Homework, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo ran a mainline from the subversive dance/rave scene of French clubmongers straight into the electronic oblivion of suburbanites. The group’s roguish Chicago house style not only gave adolescent mutineers something to dance to, but provided the first real…
Marshall Crenshaw doesn’t have much use for self-pity. That’s probably a good thing, since over the years he’s certainly been confronted with plenty of temptation to feel sorry for himself. Inevitably, every article written about the 47-year-old pop singer-songwriter harps on what could have been, on the stardom that teased…
About five years ago, the hard-core punk trio Propagandhi was playing a show at Gilman Street, a club in Berkeley, California, that had a hand in launching the careers of bands such as Rancid and Green Day. Still run as a collective, the club is an institution of sorts and…
It’s not news that Nashville’s current output lacks emotion, grit, soul, imagination — the qualities that make for memorable music, no matter what the genre. Bleach-blond Twinkies in halter tops churn out generic pop with a hint of twang and the heartland embraces them as “real country.” And maybe they…
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear granny shades: The Alternative Nation, having finally subsumed ’60s sounds, from Brian Wilson (Flaming Lips) to Buffalo Springfield (Beachwood Sparks) to Nick Drake (Belle and Sebastian) to the Beatles (practically every band associated with the Elephant 6 brain trust), is on the cusp…
Rod Stewart’s Human bears an ironic title, given that the title cut that leads off the album sounds like the great rock rooster demoing a Christina Aguilera song. Robotic backing beats skitter underfoot while Stewart (whose vocals are produced separately on some songs) mechanically rattles off his lines. It would…
While most career-minded Tucson musicians yearn to get out of the Old Pueblo — fans aren’t so much fickle as they are indifferent to home-brewed sounds, and the print media’s support, at least in terms of serious, critical coverage, has dwindled to a shockingly low ebb over the last few…
It may not have been an evil omen, or even anything so innocuous as a harmonic convergence. But the Figgs, without planning to, predicted their tour trouble in the very first verse of their new record. The New York-based Figgs open Sucking in> Stereo (Hearbox), their latest guitar-driven garage-pop outing,…
Scott McCaughey just might be the busiest man in rock ‘n’ roll. Since 1994, McCaughey’s “day job” has been playing guitar, bass and keyboards, both live and in the studio, as a hired member of R.E.M. The year before, McCaughey had started a music collective he dubbed the Minus 5…
Far too many dead folks recently: The god of American natural guitar, John Fahey, bought the farm less than 48 hours after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation; Eddy Shaver, guitar-picking son of Billy Joe Shaver and co-founder of Shaver, died of a heroin overdose; and James Carr of “Dark End…
Quick, what’s the most abused critical cliché of all time? Barring hoary usage like “throbbing surf bass line” and “jangly guitars” plus up-and-comers “Brian Wilson-like” and “Flaming Lips-ian,” there’s no question the term “Beatlesque” should by all rights be retired and only allowed out of the word processor after a…
Let us once again ponder the arc of Tucson’s Rainer Ptacek, the late slide guitar maestro and folk/blues singer-songwriter whose fateful duel with brain cancer may have brought heartache — but during an extended (if temporary) recovery period also brought an astonishing resurgence of his musical skills that surpassed even…
To look at him, you’d think Redd Volkaert would snap the neck of a Telecaster in half the moment he tried to get flashy with the left-hand arpeggios. He’s a big guy, Volkaert, with thick, tattooed forearms and fingers each about as wide as a single fret. But there’s nothing…
It’s understandable if the only mental image you carry of Bing Crosby is that of a grandfatherly, cardigan-clad duffer crooning Christmas carols with the likes of Rosemary Clooney and David Bowie. The most popular entertainer in the world in the 1930s and ’40s, a friend and champion of bluesmen and…
Stephen Malkmus is discussing the high-tech, corporate domination of 21st-century America, and he’s getting righteously indignant about it. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that the former mastermind of ’90s indie-rock über-band Pavement has long been celebrated for his detachment, his ability to make an eloquent joke of…
Here is Jody Reynolds, circa 1955. Here’s this towheaded 17-year-old rockabilly player, good-looking fellow sporting a low blond pompadour and a guitar slung across his shoulders, playing at a little club in Odessa, Texas. Jody Reynolds is walking down a nighttime street with his buddies Al Casey, Billie Ray and…
