Kill Rock Stars is owned by a man named Slim Moon who has better taste in music than you do. His ears are irrefutably sharp: The KRS roster is a dense handbook on indie-underground innovators and breakthrough wonders ranging from Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith to The Gossip and Xiu Xiu…
Regina Spektor’s tricky tongue and fading Russian accent separate her from the ever-expanding crowd of Tori Amos/Fiona Apple wanna-bes who sport “funky” hats and own well-worn piano stools. Begin to Hope might be less histrionic than 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, but it’s still great fun to bear witness to this NYC…
Fresh off a brain aneurysm, Neil Young gives the right wing an earful, clobbering our befuddled Decider-in-Chief with a righteous bitch slap that exceeds 40 minutes. Leave it to Johnny Rotten’s favorite hippie — a Canadian with health care, no less — to hold up the mirror, cluck his tongue…
Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. Cex, certainly knows how to keep listeners guessing. On his first few records, he adopted a white rapper persona and came across as a wittier and less violent Eminem; he then turned on a dime, picked up a laptop, and became an intelligent dance music composer who…
The side project is an established rock phenomenon. Distanced from the bread-and-butter band, one can engage in pursuits that might not fit the profile of the mother-ship group. The late Jerry Garcia played bluegrass banjo with Old & In the Way, and The Mekons’ Jon Langford played big rock riffs…
Indiana’s Murder By Death may draw from wild sources like Dante’s Inferno and Johnny Cash for inspiration, but we’re fairly certain that “Raw Deal,” off the newly released In Bocca al Lupo, has nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Quite the opposite — on this latest album, the band delves…
Instituto Mexicano del Sonido (IMS) is a one-man type of project, with lots of after-hour editions and additions at a home computer. During the day, Camilo Lara is the well-known industry man and savvy record label guy who works for major companies in Mexico City. By night, he finds magic…
“No shoegazers here!” swoons Vibration singer Anne Fitzgerald on “Muscle Memory,” the lead-off tune from this Brooklyn band’s debut. Well, there might be a few boot-staring palookas in their audience, as most of Amarilla is raw, sauntering guitar churn and rolling drums, calling to mind moody early ’90s mashers like…
Maybe the only thing shocking about Madonna’s 2004 “Reinvention” tour was how completely unshocking it was, at least by her standards. No cone bustier, no simulated masturbation on a bed, no topless backup dancers (female ones, anyway) to writhe against . . . just a safe two-or-so hours of classic…
The old-school Brooklyn-based dance-punks in Radio 4 vividly illustrated their dissatisfaction with The Man on 2004’s pissed-off Stealing of a Nation, but they forgot to have any fun in the process, which made joining their underground resistance a very hard sell. Though it doesn’t match the punk-funk intensity of 2002’s…
Now that summer’s upon us, we have a dearth of entertainment options and the promise of sweaty afternoons spent waiting for the sun to drop below the horizon so that the concrete heat islands stop sizzling. Once the natural light has faded, though, there are still a few places you…
Thursday 8Acme Roadhouse: College Night with DJ J. Alan (Top 40) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Tsunami (hip-hop, dance) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with DJ Jeremy (goth, industrial) Axis/Radius: Ladies’ Night with Scooter & Lavelle (hip-hop) AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Hard Rock Cafe: Skandilis (hip-hop, R&B, Latin)…
1. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere (Downtown) 2. Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom (Ipecac Recordings) 3. Les Claypool, Of Whales & Woe (Prawn Song) 4. Tool, 10,000 Days (Volcano) 5. Blue October, Foiled (Universal/Motown Records) 6. Angels & Airwaves, We Don’t Need to Whisper (Universal/Geffen) 7. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium…
This Windy City trio likes to lambaste pop-culture targets — especially the Warped Tour world it gets lumped into. Blame the clipped, bubblegum pop-punk drum sound and tempos the group has employed since its formation in ’99. But then the band members lay on slashing riffs and gruff vocals that…
“Hype” is probably the nastiest of all four-letter words these days, and no band on Earth right now has more of it than the Arctic Monkeys. Over the past seven months, the Sheffield quartet — none of whom is of American drinking age — has been lauded as 2005’s “Best…
Merging heavy metal’s satanic symbol with love’s shorthand icon, the heartagram ranks among modern music’s most popular designs. “The symbol is better known than the actual music of our band,” says H.I.M. singer Ville Valo, who invented the emblem. Hundreds of H.I.M. fans, including MTV stunt dude Bam Margera and…
The Hush Sound’s guitarist and co-lead vocalist Bob Morris has his hands full. His band is set to open tonight for Fall Out Boy and the All-American Rejects, his mother won’t stop ringing him (she’s in line outside, confused by how to collect her ticket), and, oh yeah, there’s this…
Interviewing Sammy “The Red Rocker” Hagar woulda been great and all, but I had a few other things I had to get done last week. Like the dishes, and, uhh, taking some naps. So let’s just let Sammy’s lyrics do the talking: Me: Hey, man, how’re you doing these days?…
On Tuesday, which happens to be the one time this century that the calendar’s readout is 6/6/6, the local rawk prophets in Steppchild — Adam Jacobsen, Adam Roach, and Adam Carter — will debut the band’s long-in-the-making rock opera, appropriately titled King, Adam. (And yes, the comma is supposed to…
Daniel Smith usually gets by with a little help from his friends, but lately he’s been getting a lot. In the case of the heavenly new album Ships, released by this musical mastermind under the new, all-purpose moniker Danielson, that means contributions from at least 30 of his family and…
You know Elvis Costello: angry young punk with talent to spare turned middle-aged (52 candles this summer) master collaborator. Preceding projects have promulgated an array of songwriting trysts (Bacharach and McCartney and wife Diana Krall, to name but a few) as well as orchestral dalliances with the Brodsky Quartet and…
Impatient ears will hear the pretty indie gloss of Camera Obscura and quickly dismiss it as twee chamber pop, but while the sextet’s sunny music pleases on contact, front woman Tracyanne Campbell has more on her mind than sweet refrains. While the galloping opener, “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,”…
