No matter your feelings on droopy El Lay heartthrob Pete Yorn, give him credit for picking Modesto, California, oddballs Grandaddy to open for him: Sumday, the outfit’s forthcoming third album, is about as far as you can get from Yorn’s radio-ready pop-rock without risking the wrath of the droopy high-school…
Usually you can count on the radio industry’s annual rollout of springtime showdowns to provide a couple of jolts of life across the drudgery of the pre-summer day-to-day. Not this year: This weekend both KDGE-FM’s EdgeFest and the KISS-FM Party, each aimed at a different slice of the lucrative teen-market…
Ready for three more so-so emo bands to separate you from your hard-earned eight bucks? Elliott, Vendetta Red and Mae, three of the so-so-iest emo bands around, sure are. Elliott drops in in support of the new Song in the Air, the Louisville outfit’s third album and its first since…
Unless you knew Miss Cleo before the feds took her down, I seriously doubt you could’ve predicted Wednesday night’s bill at Gypsy Tea Room, or that some of your hippest friends and neighbors will probably be there, nodding along to the sweet guitar-pop sounds of Nada Surf and Sondre Lerche…
Last year, the skinny white English dude Mike Skinner convinced lots of skinny white American dudes that Eminem wasn’t the only skinny white rapper dude worth lending an ear; on his potent debut as the Streets, Original Pirate Material, Skinner countered the widespread American idea that Brits can’t rap with…
Sly hip-hop futurism touches down at Gypsy Tea Room on Sunday night with a triple bill featuring Barcelona-based beatmaster Prefuse 73, ex-Antipop Consortium oddball Beans and Tortoise offshoot A Grape Dope. One Word Extinguisher, Prefuse dude Scott Herren’s new Warp disc, is more of the meticulously microprocessed soundscaping he introduced…
Look, I’m as big an Avril Lavigne supporter as the next ninth-grade girl for whom Christina Aguilera has ceased to be a positive role model; I mean, I’ve never hung out in a dingy Singaporean brothel with oversized stuffed animals and lubed-up bodybuilders running around either, so I can certainly…
If you’ve chosen this weekend as the one to abandon all goodhearted indie revivalism–and, if so, let me be the first to congratulate you for quite an accomplishment–be sure to steer clear of Gypsy Tea Room on Saturday night: Brainy arena-rock dorks OK Go and flowery ’60s-pop naïfs the Essex…
When Stephen Malkmus walks into the conference room at Matador Records’ New York offices, he’s wearing these enormous eyeglasses, like something someone working in an airplane hangar would wear to protect his or her eyes from flying debris. And he’s got this piece of napkin-sized fabric that he keeps rubbing…
Already seen Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses but still got a hankering for twisted trash-culture worship Antiques Roadshow’s just not providing? You’re in luck, my probably-makeup-wearing friend: Creepy garage-rock legends the Cramps turn up Thursday at Deep Ellum Live, and they’re bringing Detroit’s the Gore Gore Girls with them…
Remember indie rock? Every once in a while, in a momentary clearing of the perpetual cloud cover provided by Ashanti and the White Stripes and Cannibal Ox and Kid Rock featuring Sheryl Crow, I realize that bands like Silkworm and the New Year, both of whom will hit Gypsy Tea…
Nashville is a soul-sucker and O brother thank God I found you and blah blah blah stick a needle in my eye. But you know what’s truer than a blind two-dollar hen with no teeth (or whatever)? That what I’m not getting right now from the neo-traditionalist set is a…
The last several releases by former Spacemen 3 guitarist Jason Pierce’s psychedelic-gospel outfit Spiritualized–Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Royal Albert Hall October 10 1997 Live and 2001’s Let It Come Down–have been as much about Pierce’s tendency toward staggering production costs as his desire to capture in…
Three current products of heated record-biz indie-hunting roll through town separately this week; buy T-shirts from them and maybe they’ll make a few bucks for their trouble. First up, headlining a Saturday-night bill at Deep Ellum Live that should woo every eighth-grader you know: the Ataris, touring behind So Long,…
Dave Grohl didn’t intend to fill a niche. Not really. When he released his first album as the Foo Fighters in 1995–a self-titled disc he calls “a demo tape that one person recorded in, like, five days”–he wasn’t applying for the job his old bandmate Kurt Cobain had tragically retired…
Thirty or so nominators, culled from the rank and file of the local music industry, decided what names made it onto the ballot for the 2003 Dallas Observer Music Awards. Slightly fewer than 6,000 of you decided what names made it onto the 15 pounds of sculpted metal we call…
You know what they say about April showers: They bring dour indie-rock duos from the U.K. to the Dallas-Fort Worth area for intimate shows at crowded nightclubs. Arab Strap, perhaps the U.K.’s premier dour indie-rock duo, turn up opening for Bright Eyes on Wednesday night at Trees, and while that…
Whether or not you find the atomic-powered guitar-pop on Mary Star of the Sea, the debut album by former Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan’s new band Zwan, refreshing in its wide-eyed enthusiasm and lack of neo-goth melodrama, you’ve gotta hand it to Corgan for mixing things up. The Pumpkins had a…
Ever been in a tour van? In ours it was always too hot and one window was duct-taped shut and this kid Alan always had his damn peanut butter everywhere and do you have any idea how much fuel air conditioning requires? Oh, and it wasn’t ever a van, either–try…
Openly flouting the normally dependable rules of physics and the universe, the stocky, short-of-hair Minnesotan known as Har Mar Superstar has somehow transcended the indie-rock in-joke situation his first Kill Rock Stars disc virtually guaranteed; his current album, You Can Feel Me, arrives via a new Warner Bros. imprint called…
The Postal Service is the long-distance collaboration between Death Cab for Cutie front man Benjamin Gibbard and electronic-music producer Jimmy Tamborello, who sometimes records under the name Dntel. The pair met when Gibbard contributed vocals to “(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan,” a tune from Dntel’s Life is…
These Los Angelenos and their collective obsession with rejiggering folky guitar music–they’re worse than a gang of Seattlites with the collected works of Foghat! I mean, aren’t there better things to do in permanent 75-degree weather than sit inside and glumly strum old acoustic guitars? Apparently not, as we’ll get…
