Wait, wait…who am I listening to, again? I’d heard rumors of a stylistic shift happening in the Iron & Wine camp, with frontman/songwriter Sam Beam moving away from his trademark downhome, low-key folk, but looking back, I honestly had no idea…
Let’s be up-front about it: if you’re looking for polish, Art Institute’s First in a series of audio demonstrations doesn’t have it. Not much of it, at least. In fact, the band consciously seems to shy away from today’s hyperproduced sounds…
Golden Triangle borrows its sound from the White Stripes, crossed with a bit of that wall-of-sound feel of Sonic Youth. On Double Jointer, their debut, the band thrashes along at garage-punk tempos, but the vocals are woozy-sounding, sort of like Janet Bean if she’d been drinking…
Librarians are an indie psychedelic/pop band from West Virginia. Present Passed, released earlier this year on Postfact Records, is a follow-up to 2006’s Alright Easy Candy Stranger and captures beautifully — although at times boringly — the band’s unique version…
There’s a bit of a head-fake going on with “Lucky,” the opening track for the self-titled debut EP from Houston trio Wails. The song starts off fuzzy and hazy, with rising-falling guitars and staticky drums that sound like they fell right off a Darling Buds B-side…
“Everything I do is guided by DJ Screw. 100% of it. I do exactly what he would have done.” I was talking to DJ Lil’ Randy of the Screwed Up Click from his small studio…
If you’ve heard The Apples in Stereo, then you can probably guess that they put on a pretty good live show. The most accessibly poppy group of the now legendary Elephant 6 collective, they’ve been creating feel-good songs…
In 2007, director Frederick Wiseman applied his renowned cinema verité to Austin, Texas’ Lord’s Gym. Without interviews or narrators, Wiseman employs the patience of a Buddha, waiting for events to unfold around him…
Much as I like lyrics in general, I’m fully of the opinion that at the end of the day, you don’t really need them. At least, you don’t necessarily need to be able to understand them to be able to get the emotion behind them…
I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Roky Moon & BOLT (then just known as “BOLT,” all caps), I thought it sounded fun, but I seriously doubted it would last. It seemed like one of those one-off things a bunch of scenesters do when they get bored…
So, the two-song 7″ Well & Goode is supposedly the product of a mysterious, possibly psychotic duo of adopted Irishmen, Upton O. Goode and Midas Wells, who stalked power-pop hero Brendan Benson over the course of his last overseas tour…
Javelin’s sound is remarkably broad. Much more broad than most bands. Javelin, a duo based in New York, likes to try doing just about anything. Their sound revolves around samplers and keyboards and has a digital groove to it, but that’s about the only defining quality…
Senses Fail rocked the stage in the “Out With The In Crowd” tour at Warehouse Live. The New Jersey post-hardcore band toured with Bayside, Title Fight, and last but not least, Balance and Composure…
Just when I think I’ve got the Born Liars all figured out, have ’em pegged down neatly on the Great Big Board of Bands as a no-frills garage-punk band and not much else — and hell, that’s great right there — they go and change on me…
There’s a point early in Roky Moon & BOLT where you can feel the change, like a switch being flipped. Suddenly, it feels less like you’re listening to an album by a rock band and more like you’re listening to/watching some quirky, sidewise-smirking musical about a mythic rock band…
Tonight at the MFAH, Soul Kitchen premieres, as part of the museum’s Premieres: Contemporary World Cinema series…
Wolf Parade’s music has always been a little bit all over the place. Their penchant for reverb-drenched vocals and brash, buzzing guitar has always kept them on the messier side of indie-rock. This messiness isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
A few months back, Passion Pit stopped by our fair city and brought with them the relatively unknown BRAHMS. A wonderful show overall, but it was BRAHMS who served as the perfect foil for Passion Pit’s sugary sweet, love-stricken beats…
With It Comes Electric, Featherface does the near-impossible — in my book, at least — by taking loose-limbed, organic, all-over-the-map psych-rock and marrying it to full-on, wide-grinning, right-in-your-ear arena-pop…
An hour didn’t seem so long to wait once we entered the Senses Fail tour bus. La June and I had arrived promptly at 3 o’clock, looking for someone to speak to about the interview we had set up at 4…
What Cheer? Brigade is a 19-piece brass band that borrows from Bollywood, balkan, New Orleans, and samba, and rev everything up to the level of punk rock, in a similar way to Mucca Pazza or other marching bands. The tunes on their debut, We Blow You Suck…
John Nova Lomax‘s hero, the late, great Sig Byrd, wrote about Houston in a way that made the city feel downright intimate. Tiny, in fact. The city was smaller then, in the 1950s, but as he spent mornings downtown, afternoons in the then-nearer suburbs…
Every so often, a group of musicians walk on the stage and really owns every aspect of the performance. They have a magnetic energy that attracts people from both poles and anywhere in between, causing them to migrate…
I spent last night at DiverseWorks, previewing director/artist Brent Green‘s sculpture installation and talking about Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then…
The last time I saw The Hold Steady, they were playing Walter’s to a packed-in crowd of diehard fans and seemingly new converts, and it was — hand on my heart — one of the most amazing shows I’d ever seen…
Listening to Future Islands’ Undressed EP, I feel like I’ve inadvertently walked in on a weird scene in a dimly-lit, avant-garde coffee bar somewhere in the dingy, half-arty part of a city that’s not this one but is perhaps cooler, or more pretentious…
Of all the bands I’ve run across in the past year, few have made as huge an impression as Brooklynites Freelance Whales. I went into the band’s debut album, Weathervanes, totally blind, expecting throwaway Pitchfork-friendly pop…
On Friday, November 12th, at Diverseworks, the Catastrophic Theatre will debut the world premier of their adaptation of Pixies singer Black Francis‘ concept album Bluefinger, titled Bluefinger: the Fall and Rise of Herman Brood…
“The most important thing to know about Herman is that he was Dutch, and white. But he wanted to be American, and black.” That was among the first lines I heard as I sat in on rehearsals for the stage play Bluefinger: The Fall and Rise of Herman Brood…
The Mandukhai EP marks Opposite Day’s latest release; they regard it as an EP even though it has nine tracks. What’s so impressive about these guys is to see their growth from disc to disc. Mandukhai marks a crowning achievement to me…
Canal Plus‘ and IFC Films‘ new five-hour epic about the international terrorist-revolutionary commonly known as “Carlos the Jackal,” Carlos, remedies everything that’s wrong with American studios’ action movies…
Goldspot’s And The Elephant Is Dancing is one of those albums to always keep nearby to call on for good times or for comfort on those crappy days when everything seems to be falling apart. Siddhartha Khosla’s clear, sweet voice, a broad vocal range…
Deastro creator Randolph Chabot started recording songs in his parents’ basement in Detroit when he was in high school — the usual story of an optimistic young musician. The music he made in those formative years isn’t quite usual, though…
For my money, the true talent of Ketch Harbour Wolves lies in the way the band’s able to ride a fine, fine line between swooning, majestic, synth-tinged, Britpop-influenced romanticism and rough-hewn, rural-sounding, half-jangly rootsy indie-rock, evoking both at once…
Perhaps I should have been prepared for the crowd that I encountered at the Ghostland Observatory show last Friday, it being Halloween weekend and all, but walking into a crowd of Lady Gagas and cartoon characters was pretty surreal…
I saw The Chinese Stars — formed out of the ashes of Arab on Radar in 2003 — play about five year ago at Mary Jane’s Fat Cat, with The Mean Reds and The Blood Brothers. I remember them being a loud and heavy dance-punk band, and their third studio album, Heaven on Speed Dial…
After listening to “dog”, the second full-length from listenlisten, several times now, I think I’m starting to understand. I was surprised at first, because after 2009’s Hymns From Rhodesia, I was expecting something, well, something a bit more grand, really…
In September, Ghostland Observatory successfully piqued the interest of fans with the free release of the spoken-word track, “Codename: Rondo,” for their new album. With keyboard player Thomas Turner’s dark and funky beats backing a strange and sexual-innuendo-filled monologue by singer Aaron Behrens…
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not into rap music, per se. I mean, I’ll always support Lil Wayne, because he came from that same little hell town of New Orleans that I came from, and then he went on to become a mega-superstar…
If you have ever been to the palatial worldwide headquarters of Space City Rock, you know of the plethora of CDs that litter the mail room. With so many to choose from, it can be tough to decide on which ones to listen to. Being the metal guru that I am, any cover that has a dragon…
