Tag: etc.

Anthony Braxton Four Compositions (GTM) 2000 (Delmark) Roscoe Mitchell Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancing Shoes (Nessa) Ken Burns’s (or anyone else’s) great-man theory aside, some of jazz’s most profound developments result when a nexus of players assembles to exchange information in performance, collectively shaping new dialects. At the birth of bebop, in New York in […]

Bettie Serveert at the Abbey Pub, April 4 Never trust a bohemian under 30–they’ll skip town when the rent’s due, borrow your car and forget where they parked it, accidentally ash on the carpet. Actually, we bohemians over 30 do that stuff too. But if we don’t get more responsible as we get older, we […]

Blood Brothers Burn, Piano Island, Burn (Artist Direct) Screams just ain’t what they used to be. At South by Southwest a few weeks ago, just days before the war, I was searching for shouts of joy, anger, anxiety–any signs of emotion. Instead I found the Rapture, a well-hyped New York band that screams over disco […]

50 Cent Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) Born and raised in Jamaica, Queens. Mother killed when he was 8. Drug dealer by 12. Shot nine times in 2000. Almost any hip-hop fan can rattle off the pertinent details of 50 Cent’s life story. Originally these factoids dribbled out as gossipy supplements to the acclaim […]

Vince Gill Next Big Thing (MCA) Few music stars are willing to publicly accept that their heyday will inevitably pass. Fewer still have the insight to write a song capturing the experience of spiraling downward in their profession. So I was surprised to discover that Vince Gill, a country star not generally known for his […]

Lou Reed The Raven (Sire/Reprise) There’s been a lot of loose talk in recent years to the effect that Lou Reed is a literary chap, a wide reader and a deep thinker. And now this hideous, flightless, songless bird called The Raven has come home to roost. I hope the blathering flatterers responsible will enjoy […]

Bright Eyes Lifted, or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Saddle Creek) Justin Timberlake Justified (Jive) Nobody ever went broke selling hummable romantic agony to teenage girls. Not Justin Timberlake, for sure, and not Conor Oberst either. Granted Oberst–an Omaha indie songpoet who composes his bands from a loose […]

The Pocket: The DC Go-Go Movement Directed by Nicholas Shumaker and Michael Cahill From Madchester to Miami Bass, regional scenes have a way of drying up once their mass appeal has subsided. Folks outside the beltway might imagine that go-go–the funk variant birthed in Washington, D.C., that seemed poised to cross over nationally in the […]

OT Crew “Dubplate” Dizzy Rascal “I Luv U” When it comes to per capita rap talent, Great Britain ranks somewhere between North Dakota and Yemen. Brit-rap has seemed moribund since the early 90s, when rave culture, as Simon Reynolds put it, “swallowed hip-hop whole.” The MC was largely relegated to a supporting role–his job was […]

Various Artists Virginia Roots: The 1929 Richmond Sessions (Outhouse) Various Artists RCA Country Legends: The Bristol Sessions Vol. 1 (RCA/BMG Heritage) In 1929, the record industry was hoping to make lightning strike twice. Two years earlier in Bristol, Tennessee, a session recorded by a Victor Records talent scout named Ralph Peer had brought the Carter […]

Camper Van Beethoven Cigarettes & Carrot Juice: The Santa Cruz Years (Spinart) It takes a lot to laugh when you’ve been trained to cry. Like a bunch of bands in the 80s, California dystopians Camper Van Beethoven tried to find a way out of Reagan-era alienation that went beyond the antiauthoritarian knee-jerking of hardcore’s demagogues. […]

Jay-Z The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse (Roc-a-Fella) Commercial hip-hop’s near total immersion in the cliches of guns ‘n’ girls ‘n’ cash is a given–complaining about it has become almost the biggest cliche of all. And perhaps no rapper has cashed in on those materialist commonplaces quite as spectacularly as Jay-Z. The Brooklyn […]

Sigur Ros ( ) (MCA) Without quiet, there could be no noise, and without noise, no music. A simple statement, sure, bordering on the “well, duh,” but by playing those three elements off one another, Sigur Ros bring this truism to life. On the fourth track from the Icelandic quartet’s latest album, ( ), guitar […]

When it comes to hip-hop, Chicago gets no respect. The speedy run-on vocal style that Cleveland’s Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rode to platinum in 1994 was invented at least three years earlier by Twista and Do or Die, Chicago acts who hover below the mainstream radar even today. Despite his underground rep, Common’s career didn’t blossom until […]

Every so often, no matter how far I stray, something will happen to remind me I still give a massive hoot about rock rock rock and roll. At least about those parts of it I still give a hoot about. Back in February, I was asked to participate in a George Harrison’s birthday whatsit, an […]