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…
As many people have read, Rice University has agreed to sell the radio frequency that KTRU uses to crosstown college The University of Houston. While this has been the subject of many a conversation among the local music scene…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Now, I had picked this up because the artist had seemed vaguely familiar, and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to hear ANR’s unique mix of guitar drones, power-pop synths, and pitched vocals; it strangely seems to work…
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…
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…
I was needing something a little laidback and trippy to just unwind a bit. It had been a busy, slightly stressful couple of weeks for me lately, when I came across 7 Miles from the Sun’s self-titled EP. It was just five tracks, but five tracks of slightly acoustic, spacey, instrumental noodling…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The last time I saw Opposite Day in concert, guitarist/singer Sam Arnold started playing this riff that was so scintillating familiar, yet I couldn’t quite place it. The next thing I knew, they broke out into a rendition of the greatest song ever written…
I like the guys from Opposite Day. I really do. Up in Austin, these guys are kind of local legends. With Sam Arnold on guitar and vocals, Greg Yancey on bass, and Pat Kennedy on drums, they’ve enjoyed a longevity that evades many bands…
