Author Archives: Bill Meyer

Tjinder and Avtar Singh use satire to attack Asian stereotypes head-on, starting with their band’s name, Cornershop. Their songs are full of shrewd political commentary, and deal with racism, politics, and pop culture, sometimes all at once. Their single “England’s Dreaming” name-checks the Sex Pistols, Morrissey, and Public Enemy as it takes on the “racist, […]

Plunder is the last refuge of many musical scoundrels; bereft of good ideas, they lift someone else’s to pump new blood into tired careers. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, on the other hand, gives eclecticism a good name. The San Francisco-based quintet blends folk and rock, improvisation and structured songcraft, acoustic and electric instruments, and […]

Traditional music tends to crystallize people’s everyday experiences. Cajuns, the French-speaking minority in Louisiana, historically have had a pretty rough time of it; along with poverty they’ve long faced the deliberate suppression of their language and culture, and more recently the general homogenization of American culture has threatened their survival. Cajun music, with its stock […]

Yo La Tengo is endowed with an abundant sense of musical and personal history. The Hoboken-based trio draw on the best rock music of the last 30 years; during their Lollapalooza performances here last summer they had the crowd swaying to the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and moshing to the Dead C’s “Bad […]

Mad Scene’s music neatly reconciles apparently incompatible elements. Led by the husband-and-wife team of guitarist-vocalists Lisa Siegel and Hamish Kilgour, the New York City-based quintet takes a loose, shambling approach similar to that favored by Scottish popsters the Pastels and New Zealand’s Clean (cofounded by Kilgour in the late 70s), but the horn-laced arrangements on […]

John Darnielle, singer and songwriter with the Extra Glenns, is a man in love with language. Flush with vividly evocative phrases and economically rendered narratives, his songs may seem a bit out of sync with the times: in an age when the self-conscious deployment of obscenity is a viable marketing tool, he makes old-fashioned phrases […]

The Spiny Anteaters are in love with the myriad sounds they coax from their own guitars: nonstandard cloudy swirls, long low drones, bright trebly accents, stabbing howls, and hazy tremolos. Comparisons to Crystalized Movements or very early Dinosaur come to mind, but the Canadian quartet’s emphasis on sullen songcraft is entirely its own. Their songs […]

Between them Sue Garner, Rick Brown, Alan Licht, and David Newgarden have played ingratiating pop, howling free improvisation, off-kilter rock, and down-home country with Fish & Roses, the Blue Humans, the Mad Scene, the Shams, and half a dozen other groups. In the NYC-based quartet Run On they confine themselves to structured, accessible rock songs. […]

Wild Carnation embodies the best of American rock music from the 80s. That’s probably because Brenda Sauter, the trio’s singer and bassist, once played with the Feelies, one of the best bands of the 80s. Her new group draws freely from the Feelies’ bag of tricks, wielding briskly strummed guitars, propulsive meters, and understated singing […]

Bruce Russell, one-third of New Zealand noise terrorists the Dead C, has published a free-noise manifesto whose philosophy of going beyond music and beyond rules permeates the group’s music; where other musicians stand on the precipice of chaos or walk a tightrope over it, Russell and his collaborators Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats plunge right […]

Jad Fair is the godfather of a legion of bedroom rockers, amateur musicians, and primitive punks. With his band Half Japanese he’s mapped a territory that bands as disparate as the Pastels, Yo La Tengo, Nirvana, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have devoted their careers to exploring. Jad’s brother David best described that territory in his […]

FSK’s music ambivalently critiques the Americanization of their native Germany. Like Wim Wenders’s 70s films, they celebrate American pop culture’s growing worldwide hegemony even as they criticize and undermine it: on their album In Dixieland the last line of “Yankee Go Home” pleads, “And take me with you.” FSK is short for Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, which […]

Rex is a worthy inheritor of the Velvet Underground’s chamber-rock legacy. With its sparse instrumentation, intimate lyrical themes, unhurried tempos, and quietly hypnotic playing, the Velvet Underground’s third album defined a style emulated by bands as disparate as the Cowboy Junkies, Yo La Tengo, and Codeine (which shares drummer Doug Scharin with Rex). Rex creates […]

Helium’s new album The Dirt of Luck sounds a lot like a horror-movie sound track: gloomy keyboards, pounding funereal drums, and lyrics that mention tombs, skeletons, and black angels. But the horror in bandleader Mary Timony’s songs is real–death pervades her music. Sometimes it’s a gradual death of the spirit that comes from growing up […]