So, the Grammys are well and over, so I guess it’s about time to get the Official Space City Rock Top-Ten Lists of Amazingly Cool Things You Must See/Hear/Whatever (late, late, late, sure, but hey, we meant to do that, alright?). Read it, and obey…
In complete freak-out mode, I headed to Warehouse Live. Not only was I excited, but I was also late for the interview with Stephen Keech, Haste the Day‘s vocalist. To my surprise, however, it all worked out perfectly…
Bunny Gets Paid is Red Red Meat’s best album, and one of the best albums of the ’90s, period. Red Red Meat’s woozy grandeur came to fruition on Bunny Gets Paid, with its warped, thrilling arrangements, its skewed, slightly Beefheartian groove…
Chris Becker is a recent addition to the Houston avant-garde music scene. He’s an electronic musician and a composer whose work ranges from improvised pieces for silent films to hour-long compositions for ballet and contemporary dance…
With Unite, The Wheel Workers’ Steven Higginbotham definitely starts things off on the right foot. Opener “The Mop” (the title of which may stand for the concept “means of production” or a plain-old, real-live mop, or both, I’m not sure) combines a bouncy, jaunty…
What you have in A Thousand Suns, the fourth studio album from Linkin Park, is a band at a crossroads. After a multitude of multi-platinum albums, remix albums, live albums, and countless EPs for their massive legions of fans…
The first time I heard a John Cage piece, I was floored. Being in a pretty steady post-punk revival phase at the time (give me a break, I was fifteen), the idea of music that was non-melodic was totally foreign to me. Yet when I was confronted with this…
My best friend and I arrived anxious and late at Warehouse Live for The Get Up Kids show, right before the band released its new album, There Are Rules, which came out January 25. The band hails from Kansas City, Missouri…
BOAT is a band from Seattle that plays sloppy punk rock music and sings about the most random things. Their sound is kind of like a more punk rock version of The Mountain Goats. The first time I heard the band’s most recent record, Setting the Paces…
I have to hand it to The Literary Greats: the band definitely knows how to keep you on your toes. When they release their second album, Ocean, Meet The Valley, back in 2009, I was surprised then to see/hear how much they’d changed from the sound…
Thursday January 20, 2011 was not only my birthday but it was also the day Underoath started their Headlining winter Disambiguation tour. I had an interview with Keyboardist Chris Dudley at 6 but La June and I decided to arrive earlier. At that time it seemed like a good idea but after sitting outside in the freezing cold; it wasn’t a good idea after all.
The Silver Seas’ recent album Chateau Revenge seriously runs the emotional gamut. You’ll hear blissful confessions of love, bleak break-up stories, and nostalgia for the way things used to be…
WAREHOUSE LIVE — 1/20/2011: We arrived at Warehouse Live at around 5PM — we had an interview with Chris from Underoath at 6PM — but wanted to be there a bit early. It was freezing outside and it definitely felt like winter…
SCR was extended an invitation to sit in on the recording sessions of American Honey the new album by Roky Moon and BOLT. It was a chance for me to soak in the creative process of a band that has been an enigma to me for the better part of two years…
Houston has always, always had awesome, amazing bands. Screw the naysayers; it’s the honest-to-God truth. Even in the lean times, even when 99.9% of this city thought “Houston music” was pretty much ZZ Top, Destiny’s Child, and nothing else…
There’s something very, very cool about actually getting to hear a band growing up, in the process of finding and evolving and tweaking their particular sound. And believe it or not, it’s a pretty rare thing, at least in the modern, rarefield realm of indie labels…
Okay. I think, finally, that I get it. Up to now, I’d vehemently resisted Gregg Gillis’s primary-colored, seemingly universally-lauded mashup artistry under the Girl Talk moniker, shrugging it off as a neat trick and not much more…
No Age is a D.I.Y experimental/punk band hailing from Los Angeles, California, and consisting of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt. Their third studio album, Everything In Between, follows a steady trend of honest and sincere records…
When I started this review, I’d initially figured to only write about Netherfriends’ latest release, the free-on-BandCamp album Alap. I cringe to admit it, but I’d let the group’s previous release, last summer’s Barry and Sherry, slip past…
Women plays abrasive, noisy no-wave with strangely catchy, low-key pop hooks. Crafting hooks isn’t something you’d normally associate with students of early Sonic Youth, but this Calgary quartet manages to do just that…
Hype is a terrible thing — it can push the good into the realm of legendary or relegate the mediocre into something to be despised. On paper, 24 Hour Karate School had all the ingredients to be a spectacular album…
The Henry Clay People sound a lot like Pavement and the Hold Steady, two bands that are always good reference points. They may have an annoying name, but their music is a lot of fun. Their fourth record, Somewhere on the Golden Coast is solid all the way through…
With “New Dress,” Forth Worthites The Orbans’ When We Were Wild starts off on a nicely subtle, roots-pop note, with drums that rumble low to the road, guitars that slide and drift like on a Son Volt album, a hint of a Britpop influence…
The Houston electronic noise band The Dee Use have a delivery that is very similar to a swarm of angry bees attacking. Angry robot bees. Short and not-so-sweet, the band’s 4-song EP Shave or Make Massive is a little gem…
Howl is composed from court records, interviews, and Allen Ginsberg‘s epic poem Howl. James Franco, as Ginsberg, reads the poem from a coffee house stage, explains it to an unseen interviewer…
The Manichean’s name might be at the top of the marquee, so to speak, but on their new EP, Lacerus Rising, the band’s most definitely not the star of this particular show. Instead, this time out they’ve handed the reins over to a gang of remix-happy friends…
There are so many bands in the wild world of metal, it’s hard for bands to do something that hasn’t ever been done before. Sadly, many bands go unnoticed, even though they have tons of talent — sometimes more than the famous bands do…
To me, hip-hop was buried a long time ago. They didn’t even have the decency to hit him upside the head with a shovel, sedate him, or anything. They just hog-tied him and chucked him in a six-foot hole, the poor bastard pleading for his life and hoping that anyone would come along and save him…
You can usually judge a metal band by its name. A good band name will allow you to easily identify them with their genre. The first time I saw the name “Dew-Scented,” I assumed that they would have a Gothic/romantic sound…
It had to happen, honestly; with guitarist/vocalist Chris Rehm and drummer Sean Hart’s previous “main band,” The Riff Tiffs, apparently going the way of the dodo, what started out as a side project to occupy time while away at college has morphed into a real-deal band…
Inspired by other female artists such as Liz Phair and Mary J. Blige, as well as her father’s classic rock records, K.Flay is an example of genre-hopping gone very, very right…
It seems like every time I see or hear Austinites The Sour Notes, they’re a different band. Okay, that’s not exactly true — they’re always the same “band,” but said band seems to be doing something at least slightly different each damn time…
In 2004, award-winning film maker Reggie “Bird” Oliver visited DJ Screw‘s grave with Screw’s mother a week before her death and promised her he’d do whatever he could to tell the world about her son’s accomplishments…
When the Age of the Guitar Gods died, back in the mid-’90s, I wasn’t all that sad about it. I’ve always only been a mediocre guitarist myself, so I selfishly embraced the Cobain-/Mudhoney-ian ethos of just pounding the fuck out of your guitar…
I have to admit it: when I caught The Mahas live, back in the summer at the Free Press Summerfest, I wasn’t all that impressed. They weren’t bad, by any means, but as they banged on their guitars and yelled to a relatively sparse crowd…
Beneath the scruffy, raggedy-edged surface of Alive At The Same Time, the new EP from frontman/guitarist/singer Daniel Pujol’s eponymous band, there beats a steel-shiny power-pop heart. At least, that’s sure how it looks from the first two tracks…
I went to the Posies/Brendan Benson/Aqueduct show not really knowing what to expect, and the sparse, rather lifeless crowd that was standing about at Argentum wasn’t very encouraging…
Question: when was the last time you listened to a soundtrack? Better yet, when was the last time you listened to the soundtrack of a silent film? If you answered anything but “never” for the last question, then consider yourself a pathological liar not fit for civil society…sort of…
Premiering at the MFAH December 16-19, director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth is the family unit as Madagascar. An isolated, claustrophobic, continental island where familiar situations play out counter-clockwise…
I have a bit of a knee-jerk negative reaction to instrumental rock bands. Let’s face it — “instrumental rock” can be code for “stoned late-night jam sessions.” That’s why Bellingham, Wash., math-rock band Rooftops was such a pleasant surprise…
