Yes at the Arie Crown Theatre, August 8 By Warren Sentence Rock means two simultaneous and interconnected things. Thing 1: a form of music as defined by artistic characteristics (see Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic for one proposed definition). Thing 2: the market for the aforementioned form. These two things, though they share […]
Author Archives: Warren Sentence
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Fetal Machine Music
Sigur Ros Agaetis Byrjun (Fat Cat) If we accept Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music (and if not his, then whose?) as music that rewards but doesn’t demand close attention, then I guess Sigur Ros is ambient. Their lush, majestic textures conjure pop maestros of the distant past (Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Joe Meek) while […]
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Artificial Intelligence
Autechre at Metro, May 11 By Warren Sentence Dear Liesl, It is one of those curious coincidences which create the impression that perhaps there is a master plan. On the night you came to Chicago in the sing-along version of The Sound of Music, Messrs. Sean Booth and Rob Brown (whom perhaps you know conjointly […]
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Monstress of Rock
PJ Harvey at the Vic, October 28 In the October 26 issue of the New Yorker, in the occasional department called “A Critic at Large,” Hilton Als wrote such a misguided meditation on PJ Harvey and the dire state of popular music that I found myself wondering what exactly a writer has to do to […]
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Craven Images
Liz Phair at the Vic, October 25 By Warren Sentence In The Last Rock Star Book or: Liz Phair, a Rant, the new first novel by New York guerrilla rock critic Camden Joy, the protagonist (also called Camden Joy) is hired to write a quickie biography of Liz Phair. The novel is set in the […]
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Great Unknown
Elliott Smith at the 70th Annual Academy Awards, March 23 By Warren Sentence Between NCAA tournament games last Saturday on CBS, a man was given the opportunity to take one three-point shot for two million dollars. The contest’s sponsor, Gillette, would pay out the cash–one million to the shooter, one million to his chosen charity–if […]
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Butterglory
In retrospect Butterglory seems inevitable. Like children with a set of building blocks, they conjure a beauty that exists only in the simple and the obvious. The 14 songs on their three singles (two on the Superchunk-owned Merge Records and one on Little Brother) combine a barrel o’ monkeys’ worth of hooks with an understated […]
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Smog
The advantage of being a one-man band is that you answer to no one but yourself. On his 1993 full-length Julius Caesar, and on the new six-song Burning Kingdom (both on Chicago’s own Drag City Records), Bill Callahan–aka Smog–lays bare an idiosyncratic sensibility that is as disturbing as it is engaging. In the homespun, lo-fi […]
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Gold Diggers of 1994
TINDERSTICKS LOUNGE AX, JUNE 16 In the June 10 edition of this section Peter Margasak closed his article on the band Combustible Edison and similar 50s kitsch revivalists by saying, “Celebrating America’s pop-culture history is one thing: emulating it without a drop of irony is either impossible or moronic, and maybe both.” And he’s right. […]
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Person to Person
LOU BARLOW WINNING LOSERS: A COLLECTION OF HOME RECORDINGS (SMELLS LIKE RECORDS) In 1959, after lunch one day, the poet Frank O’Hara founded a movement known as Personism. In the tradition of other great cultural movements–Dada, Fluxus, punk–Personism makes serious points in unserious ways. In Personism: A Manifesto, O’Hara wrote that the movement’s aim was […]
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Aural Vertigo
PAVEMENT METRO, MAY 5 Pavement creates the sonic equivalent of guitars propping ladders up against each other and then climbing them frantically and recklessly. The only other band I’ve ever heard invoke this kind of aural vertigo with two guitars was Television, the late-70s New York art-punk quartet. But where Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard […]
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Disarmed Forces
Elvis Costello Brutal Truth, Warner Bros. Three things happen to rock stars when they hang around too long. First, they lose their spunk (their anger, their passion, their frustration) and end up trading in their rock ‘n’ roll shoes for a pair of La Brea Tar Pit booties. Second, they drop any pretense of invention […]