December
Author Archives: Bill Wyman
Posted inMusic
Urge Overkill
A number of things conspire to make Urge Overkill’s new album Exit the Dragon the perverse, irritating, compelling, and scabrous mess that it is. One is the decline of National Kato, one of the band’s two key songwriting forces. Where his decrepit but oddly irresistible ideas of rock songcraft ignited tracks like “Sister Havana” and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Shane McGowan & the Popes
“I ruined my life with drinking, bad wives, taking pills and cursing / Rock and roll you crucified me, left me all alone / I never should have turned my back on the old folks back home.” Those lines, howled with sarcastic, fuck-all glee by Shane MacGowan, are the spiritual center of his first solo […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Billy Bragg
The division between Billy Bragg’s by turns giddy and serious song crafting and his more unsophisticated desire to preach politics has been de facto resolved by his absence from the pop scene for nearly four years. His partisans (I’m one) recall that Bragg was a jut-jawed folk punker who, stolidly hitting the stage with an […]
Posted inMusic
Lloyd Cole Grows Up/Urge Stalkers Blow Town/More No Depression/Shannon is Gone
Cole’s Back With Love Story, his second Rykodisc album, Lloyd Cole completes his transition from fervid rocker to adult crooner. Looking back, you can see that this romantic Scot’s work with his original backing band, the Commotions, and his first solo album, were of a piece; his second solo outing, the aptly titled Don’t Get […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Presidents of the United States of America
The Presidents of the United States of America are Seattle pop punkers who have much more in common with jokesters like the Young Fresh Fellows than with the city’s reigning grunge gods. This is good and bad. On the one hand, the music coming out of the town can be a bit dreary; on the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Terence Trent D’Arby
Terence Trent D’Arby: pop-soul messiah or hemi-demi-semi genius? It’s a complex issue: D’Arby is full of shit a lot of the time, from his chest-beating pronouncements about his incipient superstardom round the time of his debut Introducing the Hard Line to the song on his second album that warned a gay friend not to make […]