For the rest of us, language flows on a nonlinear yet generally straightforward neural pathway before it reaches our tongues, picking up a few personal significances and even trace bits of wit — if we’re lucky. Every so often, though, a few people receive Valis-like transmissions from somewhere, which act…
When he’s onstage, James Hall looks as if he’s experiencing exorcism via electrocution. The singer and gifted iconoclast is on fire, with ants in his pants and a heavy dose of James Brown in his shiny shoes. Occasionally, the executioner turns down the juice, and Hall stands still long enough…
Texas music history swarms with stories of Texans who went to Nashville dreaming of fame and fortune. The most celebrated stories hinge on spectacular failure, which is followed by a return to Texas, and after regrouping back on home turf, eventual triumph. The most famous of these tales is that…
As a friend said while we were driving through New Orleans’ French Quarter listening to the rock critic Tom Moon calmly declare on NPR that numero-uno Southern soul man Al Green’s new album I Can’t Stop is an improvement over his early-’70s classics: “Motherfucker, you did stop!” Certainly, he did…
Numerous long shadows fall across Choronzon: Metallica circa Master of Puppets, Opeth’s Blackwater Park, the Current 93 school of drawing-room satanism. This could bode well — or poorly. It all depends on who’s working with the source material. Akercocke, four Anglo-Saxon agents of Satan who have the good sense to…
In case you haven’t heard, this is Madlib’s year. Actually, come to think about it, you probably haven’t. Stones Throw Records’ workaholic beat man has got more hustles going this year than Timbaland and the Neptunes combined. He released the Blue Note Records remix compilation, Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades…
There’s death in the undergrowth, black and loamy. It crouches beneath broad green leaves like puddles of shadow, insulating the banks of the Cumberland and the Monongahela with the muffled hush of decay. The Appalachians ache with it. So does Jolie Holland. Holland is a restless Bay Area songwriter and…
Criticism and Korn have always gone hand in hand, and the group has been subjected to some of the most venomous barbs ever fired at a successful rock band. Some of them center on an endorsement deal with Puma. Other wags malign occasional A&R man Jonathan Davis for inflicting Orgy…
Among the world’s richest gutter punks, Rancid rose from the streets, the alleyways and the septic tanks to sing with authenticity about fistfights in cemeteries and the dead-broke, NyQuil-chuggin’ lifestyle. After they had a mid-’90s hit with “Salvation,” a song about collecting junk in wealthy neighborhoods for the Salvation Army,…
Just as sure as you’ve never heard anyone profess, “I love waiting in a doctor’s office because the magazines are topnotch,” you’ll never hear anybody bragging about the riveting experience of recording an album. After the excitement of who the producer will be and what gear you’ll be using wears…
Much like their ambitious funk workouts that can extend into the wee hours of the morning, the members of Particle take a stream-of-consciousness approach to communicating about their music. “I’m looking for the word. I’m trying to find it in my mind,” says Particle drummer Darren Pujalet by phone from…
Yours truly hasn’t taken a day off since suffering the after-effects of Scottsdale’s 1995 Raw Pork Festival, which means he’s accrued enough vacation days to stay home studying Baywatch reruns until he’s post-menopausal. Maybe it’s time for a trip somewhere farther than Discount Cheeses. No can do, unfortunately. Who would…
In her self-indulgent, autobiographical R&B album I Am Right Here, Phoenix’s Jodi Light does her best Erykah Badu impersonation. Complete with an awkward voice-over introduction that defines the album’s title and its intentions, the disc is an odd celebration of, well, Jodi Light — the spoken intro ends with a…
At one point on her new album This Is Not a Test!, Missy Elliott defines her style as “old-school rap to old-school R&B.” That’s pretty accurate. Back in the ’80s, when George Clinton and Roger Troutman spiked their funk and disco with synthesizer machines and vocoder, then cut down their…
If current trends are any indication, we’re going to be hearing a lot about acid in the coming months. Not the chemical that bound Haight to Ashbury to create 1967’s Summer of Love, but the catalyst behind the other so-called Summer of Love, in 1988, when thousands of British teenagers…
The title track of Denali’s second album, The Instinct, opens with the sound of a machine pulsing a little too hard, its fate underscored by a dusky keyboard vibrato. Four bars in, Maura Davis’ weary voice drapes over the rhythm like an oversize trench coat, accompanied by broken guitar chords:…
When you see a flier with a picture of a girl screaming as she is being — ahem — serviced in a stall of a Mexican washroom, you should name your band after the lone word describing the scene: Kinky. That’s what Gilberto Cerezo and mates did a while back,…
David Allan Coe, unlike some of his peers, didn’t have to manufacture outlaw cred for the outlaw-country movement of the 1970s. Coe essentially grew up incarcerated, first tangling with the system at age 9 and spending the next 20 years more or less behind bars. When he emerged, he had…
Though it doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, an all-star punk-rock cover band, transforms frothy pop songs by the likes of James Taylor and Lionel Richie, which should make any self-respecting punk sick to his stomach, into raging karaoke numbers, which often blow…
David Dondero, of course, is not the first windblown wanderer seduced by the romantic allure of the road. As integral to the culture as the endless paved arteries crisscrossing between coasts coursing with this nation’s vitality, our itinerant nature has cast its story upon our land’s expansive canvas countless times…
Travis Graves, a.k.a. Mt. Egypt, has friends in high places, which is the only explanation for his fledgling act’s phenomenal luck at performing alongside legends of both rock and country. Mt. Egypt, whose first LP, Battening the Hatches, was released this past summer, experienced its inaugural tour (with Mr. Graves…
I’ve been a huge Michael Jackson fan for most of my life. I mean, you couldn’t attend a mostly black elementary school in 1983 and not worship Michael. To this day, to me, he’s just Michael. Michael was the African-American equivalent of a Greek god, and he had an uncanny…
