Tag: etc.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky Question: What would you say to a band that’s just starting out on the rock scene today? Cliff Burton, former Metallica bassist: Quit! Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, a new documentary currently showing at 3 Penny, teaches us that heavy metal isn’t just […]

Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection (Casablanca Trax) Acid Classics (Casablanca Trax) Mayor Daley has officially declared August 25 “Frankie Knuckles Day.” That evening the godfather of house will close SummerDance’s “DJ Wednesdays” series with a set in Grant Park, and earlier in the day Chicago will make his legacy a part of its landscape […]

Ricky Fante Rewind (Virgin) Van Hunt Van Hunt (Capitol) The nomenclature of pop music has never been an exact science, but neo-soul has to be one of the most useless terms ever coined. Any genre that can accommodate Stevie Wonder pretenders, Afrocentric fusion, European quasi-jazz grooves, and hippies isn’t really a genre, especially when much […]

DNA DNA on DNA (No More) Arto Lindsay Salt (Righteous Babe) Arto Lindsay picked up the guitar a month before he played out with his first band, DNA, in 1978. He was helping his friends in Mars load in for a gig at Max’s Kansas City in New York when booker Terry Ork (who also […]

Loretta Lynn Van Lear Rose (Interscope) Conventional wisdom has it that country music is a more conservative genre than rock, and in some senses that’s true–you’ll hear worse things said about George W. Bush from the stage at a rock club any night of the week than Natalie Maines has come out with in her […]

Divine Comedy Absent Friends (Nettwerk America) Does anyone have more than the vaguest idea what the lyrics in a typical Radiohead song mean? Care to explicate a few Guided by Voices couplets? Forget discerning a message in the vocals to a My Bloody Valentine tune–under those gusts of squalling guitar, can you even tell what […]

Einsturzende Neubauten at Metro, April 30 Much as I love to thumb through ’em myself, I fear rock encyclopedias exert a pernicious influence on the way people think about music. History isn’t really just a long series of movements and battles and critical moments–it only seems that way when you press it out flat in […]

Jon Langford & Rob Lentz The Rise & Fall of the National Barn Dance at the Chicago Cultural Center, through May 30 Don’t bury me on the lone prairie Take me where the cement grows Let’s move down to some big town Where they love a gal by the cut o’ her clothes And you’ll […]

N*E*R*D at the Riviera, April 8 N*E*R*D’s sophomore release, Fly or Die (Virgin), is a record that could only have been made by somebody who’s got other ways to pay the bills. Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, aka the superproducer team the Neptunes, play all the instruments themselves, and with their plinky piano chords, rudimentary […]

Khanate at the Empty Bottle, March 24 Grief used to be a big part of pop music: Bessie Smith, Roy Orbison, the Shirelles, Hank Williams, Smokey Robinson, Black Sabbath. Yep, Black Sabbath. Early Sabbath songs bitterly mourned the godless vapidity of the modern world, often at an appropriately funereal tempo. And though adrenaline- and testosterone-fueled […]

Johnny Cash Unearthed (American) Unearthed, last fall’s five-CD collection of outtakes and unreleased material from Johnny Cash’s ten years with the American Recordings label, comes in a box as black as Cash’s tormented soul. The sleeves are made of CD-scratching cardboard, as unbending as Cash’s famous raised middle finger. The shrink-wrap is tenacious, as tenacious […]

Kelis Tasty (Arista) On the back of her third CD, Tasty, Kelis Rogers poses in girlish white undies atop two pink scoops of ice cream the size of beanbag chairs. Inside the jewel box, she’s licking a big, round, red lollipop. In case all this was too subtle for prospective consumers, Arista at one point […]

Faun Fables at Schubas, March 5 The fauns in ye olde books of yore–I’m looking at you, Pan and Mr. Tumnus of Narnia–were at once loving and treacherous, typifying more than anything the relationship people once had with nature. When the early horror master Arthur Machen wrote about Pan, the king of all fauns, in […]

Black Heart Procession The Tropics of Love DVD (Touch and Go) Black Heart Procession & Solbakken In the Fishtank 11 (Konkurrent) The Black Heart Procession’s 2002 concept album, Amore del Tropico, was a mild departure from their previous work–a bit more upbeat, a bit more up-tempo, with an actual title instead of a number. But […]

Pandit Pran Nath Midnight/Raga Malkauns (Just Dreams) Early on in The Concert for Bangladesh, the sound of Ravi Shankar’s group tuning up is received with applause from the Western audience, which has mistaken it for the actual music. Three decades later, it’s still not such a small world after all. The sitar craze of the […]