Morrissey You Are the Quarry (Attack) The Cure The Cure (Geffen) On April 13 the New York Post’s gossip page ran a story titled “Clash of the Britons.” What followed wasn’t a rundown of another sad scuffle amongst the royals, but rather a thumbnail summary of a bitter public feud between–ready for this?–Robert Smith and […]
Tag: Rock, etc.
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Music Without a Map
Nat Pwe: Burma’s Carnival of Spirit Soul DVD Jemaa el Fna: Morocco’s Rendezvous of the Dead, Night Music of Marrakech DVD Folk Music of the Sahara: Among the Tuareg of Libya DVD and other releases on the Sublime Frequencies label On my first visit to Turkey a decade ago my efforts to find the sort […]
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Navel-Gazing Nation
Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo by Andy Greenwald (St. Martin’s Griffin) Not long after finishing Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, I got an e-mail from one of the book’s subjects, Jimmy Eat World singer Jim Adkins (an old friend of mine from Arizona). “It’s so weird, dude. […]
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Bringing It All Back Home
Paul Westerberg Come Feel Me Tremble (Vagrant) Come Feel Me Tremble DVD (Redline Entertainment) Grandpaboy Dead Man Shake (Fat Possum) Don’t look back, Paul Westerberg thought to himself the first time he crossed paths with Bob Dylan. It was early 1990, and the Replacements were wrapping up a long, boozy session at Hollywood’s Ocean Way […]
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The Alternative Universe
Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Rock Explosion of the 90’s by Jim DeRogatis (Da Capo) To Jim—Now It’s Your Turn. Best, Lester This brief inscription, scrawled across the inside cover of his quickie bio of Blondie, were Lester Bangs’s parting words to fledgling rock critic Jim DeRogatis. It was mid-April 1982, and the future […]
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Just Like All the Rest
Liz Phair Liz Phair (Capitol) The kindest thing I can say about Liz Phair’s eponymous new album–her first in nearly five years–is that it’s easy to forget. Produced primarily by the Matrix, the trio of former pop musicians (including a refugee from Haircut 100) responsible for Avril Lavigne’s hits, the disc’s relentlessly radio-friendly tracks are […]
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Jazz and Pop
The Bad Plus These Are the Vistas (Columbia) The theory behind Herbie Hancock’s 1996 album The New Standard was sound: contemporary pop-rock songs can facilitate jazz improvisation in much the same way as older standards like “Night and Day” and “Body and Soul,” even if their harmonic makeup provides less to work with. But in […]
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Every Little Thing He Does Is Magic
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists at Empty Bottle, February 22 Ted Leo’s Epiphone hollow-body has “No War” affixed to it in rough strips of duct tape. It was a quick tape-job, done minutes before going onstage at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, where the message was broadcast to millions–a week and a bit later, the […]
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Groping Toward Greatness
Yardbirds Ultimate! (Rhino) The Yardbirds were harbingers of metal, psychedelia, jam bands, and world music, but they were never England’s greatest hitmakers. In the U.S., they skidded into Billboard’s Top Ten only twice, with “For Your Love” and “Heart Full of Soul.” (In Britain they scored six top tens.) They were a typical Invasion band […]
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Heavy Meddling
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Part One (Sundazed) West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Vol. 2 (Sundazed) West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band A Child’s Guide to Good and Evil (Sundazed) In the late 19th century, composers wrote highly detailed scores to preserve their particular vision of a piece of music. For them the […]
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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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Almost Famous
Shuggie Otis Inspiration Information (Luaka Bop) In 1974, as Shuggie Otis was putting the final touches on what would prove to be his final solo album, he got a call from keyboardist Billy Preston, who’d been touring in Europe with the Rolling Stones. Guitarist Mick Taylor was leaving the band, and Preston had been enlisted […]
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Smart Moves
Lloyd Cole The Negatives (March) Stephen Malkmus Stephen Malkmus (Matador) Well-read, wryly funny, emotionally aloof, bookishly handsome–if Lloyd Cole and Stephen Malkmus hadn’t become successful songwriters, they would’ve made charismatic English professors. Instead, each helped define college rock in his respective decade, Malkmus by fronting Pavement through the 90s and Cole by providing the prefix […]