Sorry to say it, but Silver Lake sounds like Vic Chesnutt light. The veteran singer-songwriter’s southern gothic has gone quasi-gospel, his delicate imperfection and haunted airiness glossed over. A full band of musicians leaves its stamp all over the recording, which, if memory serves, includes the only wicked guitar solo…
If you lined up all the arenas REO Speedwagon, Journey, and Styx have simultaneously rocked and wimped out end to end, it would stretch across the universe and back six times and probably resemble one of their ludicrous space-invader album covers. And if you were to flip over their Power…
Revolving casts of players complement David Bazan’s music, but there would be no Pedro the Lion without him. He is known for brooding internal meditations on existence, man’s struggles with a higher power and the dark aspects of humanity. A Christian artist, Bazan draws more indie kids than church groups,…
Pop culture historians like to pontificate that punk killed the guitar hero. Though anyone who’s seen Doug Martsch’s Stratocaster lead Built to Spill to a kind of Hendrixian Valhalla knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Punk simply reeled in the absurdity of that hero’s myth, sterilizing the…
In the recent past, Mill Avenue in Tempe has been reserved for the aging jangle-pop bands of ’90s yore, but things have started to turn. The relatively young noise-rock outfit Hotfoughtcold has joined the storied avenue’s ranks — and they’re hauling their friends with them. The year before HFC started…
I walked into Stinkweeds Record Exchange in Tempe last week and was stunned by what I heard. Hail to the Thief, the new album by British art-rock giants Radiohead,was blasting from the store’s speakers. I recognized the drum machine distortion that closes “Sit Down. Stand Up” immediately; it was something…
Like other musicians whose primary instruments are laptop computers, Canadian-bred U.K. resident Dan “Manitoba” Snaith is simultaneously saddled by specific sonic expectations and set free in a truly endless field of sound. Most of his contemporaries are often done in by this push and pull. Trip-hop fiddlers and dance-floor superstars…
From H.L. Mencken to the Coen Brothers, patronizing Yankees have always been quick to giggle at the rubes down south. Three decades ago — after watching Harvard-educated Dick Cavett grill high school dropout and then-Georgia governor Lester Maddox on national TV — Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Randy Newman decided he had seen…
Occasionally, a celebrity phone interview can reveal a slice of life not intended for print. It’s usually something mundane, maybe a rock star reiterating he needs his groceries to his nanny or personal assistant. But since rock journalists are like priests and not only in a monastic sense, revealing even…
The rich man can have his green grass back next week. This is our field tonight. I stand surrounded by tens of thousands of party people on this terra-formed oasis. They look happy, smiling, throwing Frisbees, disco napping in pockets of shade, dancing in celebration, rushing from one attraction to…
Virtually all of the hatorade that’s been spilled over Madonna’s sharp American Life has actually succeeded in pointing out what’s great about the album. A sonic palette limited to sliced-and-diced guitar and producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï’s signature synth squelch; over-the-top pontifications from the singer about America’s consumer culture and her search…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a female-fronted three-piece from (where else?) Brooklyn, are being hyped as the latest saviors of raw fucking rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Tony Blair’s kingdom, where mania over the garage-rock phenom runs high. They come to us as yet another American garage-rock tsunami in the wake of…
Every great band has a so-called “quiet” one — they’re the ones you gotta watch. For indie-rock statesfolk Yo La Tengo, that’s James McNew, the “new” member, third wheel to guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley’s marriage for a mere decade. As with most quiet ones, the mask’s a…
The recent chart success of French duo Les Nubians’ One Step Forward is a heartening rebuke and disturbing indicator of our country’s xenophobic culture. Usually, foreign-speaking artists have to sing in English (like Shakira or t.A.T.u.) to succeed in the U.S. at the risk of becoming childlike novelties (like Falco…
Tim McGraw is a kind of fluke — he’s got movie-star looks and a big old hat, and to the casual browser he might seem like a post-Garth clone, especially considering that so much of his public presentation is tied to his marriage to country pop diva and video glamour…
Somehow, someway, critical darling Richard Thompson still makes a go of it. Thompson is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most gifted everythings — guitarist, songwriter, singer, lyricist. The Brit helped shape U.K. folk rock with his Celtic-informed group Fairport Convention more than 30 years ago. Then, with his wife Linda,…
When Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta stone along the banks of the Nile in 1799, little did they know that the tablet of black basalt would provide them with a key to unlocking the thorny riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Perhaps someday,” they might’ve thought, “this slab of carved symbols will…
It’s been a decade since Uncle Tupelo released its major-label swan song, Anodyne. In the passing years, the Belleville, Illinois, band’s two front men — the sullen, grieving and earnest Jay Farrar and the eager, hoarse and earnest Jeff Tweedy — have seen an entire genre, called “alternative country,” emerge…
The Bronx is hundreds of miles away from house-music giant Little Louie Vega’s vantage point on the patio behind Miami Beach’s Panna Café, where he sits and enjoys a cup of coffee. He’s here under some duress: In three hours he has to rejoin his wife, the beautiful Cape Verdean…
At 4:20 p.m. on April 20, the hippies take over. They flock to the Sail Inn, a larger-than-average dive with an outdoor patio and stage tucked anonymously onto a quiet side street in central Tempe, for 4:20 Fest, an Easter Day party for the local jam-band faithful, though a few…
There is a well-worn piece of music theory that states, in sum, that all enduring compositions are constructed around a tonal center. Songs introduce a central pitch, the theory goes, and in returning to this pitch numerous times over the life of the song, the listener earns a release. It’s…
Last year, the skinny white English dude Mike Skinner convinced lots of skinny white American dudes that Eminem wasn’t the only skinny white rapper dude worth lending an ear; on his potent debut as the Streets, Original Pirate Material, Skinner countered the widespread American idea that Brits can’t rap with…
