This Is incredibly weird: It turns out the fellow who accidentally shot popular local musician Carter Albrecht once worked here at the Dallas Observer. Will “Smokey” Logg, himself a blues musician, worked in the Observer circulation department for about five years, according to current circ director Carlos Garcia. More oddities:…
We might as well give up the dream right now: There’s no way any of us could ever be cooler than Marc Bolan. Even in our skinniest purple girl jeans and best ironic hairdo, compared to Bolan, we might as well be bovine public school teachers wearing dresses from the…
Screw that lame trolley no one uses on McKinney Avenue—let’s talk about a part of town that deserves some mass transit with panache. The Oak Cliff Transit Authority wants to bring streetcars back to Oak Cliff; they’ve been working on it for a year and half now, and at 6:30…
People are always griping that Dallas is not a “real city.” You know, the suburbs, the questionable public transportation, the lack of a real center—oh, and the Republicans—all these things convince some folks that the shit ain’t real. Well, if you’re one of the haters, we suggest you check out…
Welcome back from summer vacation; hopefully, you’ve advanced a grade at your Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, so sharpen your pencils: Question 1: MatchingMatch the following bands, each of which is releasing a CD in the next seven days, with their type of music: A. Karen Mal (Friday, September 7,…
If you’re digging around in your mom’s attic and stumble across an LP called The Impact Sound of Kenny and the Kasuals Recorded Live at the Studio Club, hold on to it. The sucker is worth about $400, and with good reason: Kenny and the Kasuals are a legendary Dallas…
While we’re a touch confused as to why a Dallas music blog run by a guy who no longer lives in Dallas has any say in the matter, we’re glad to know that the grand tradition of the Dallas Observer Music Awards Losers (DOMAL?) show lives on. Know why? ‘Cause…
My first taste of all the Dallas music I had missed in the eight years I was away from Texas came in the form of Carter Albrecht’s piano playing. Girl on Top’s Andrea Grimes was kind enough when I moved back to Dallas almost a year ago to make me…
Eisley brothers….and sisters: Entertainment Weekly gave Tyler’s family supergroup Eisley a big thumbs up a couple weeks back. Music journo Andy Greenwald gave the group’s second disc, Combinations, a B+, noting, among other things, that the “towheaded Texans” are “unlike stereotypical family bands,” as “their music is neither pathologically cheery…
Rubber Gloves is always worth the dough. Let’s face it, in the last week, we’ve seen Au Revoir Simone, Oh No! Oh My! and Sydney Confirm, all in one show, for a mere eight bones. So the idea of rolling out to the storied spot for free is nothing but…
It’s beginning to look like anytime you attach the word “core” to the end of another word, something’s going to suck. Case in point: There was an article last week in The New York Times about “mumblecore,” a faddish subgenre of independent film that chronicles the young and existentially grumpy…
Notorious B.I.G. D: OK, this is weird. As you probably already know, Violetta Wallace, mother of Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G., is co-producing a biopic of her son, the rapper who was mysteriously gunned down in L.A. in the late ’90s (P. Diddy is another producer). Rather…
Fort Worth’s Burning Hotels remind me of something, but I just can’t put a finger on it. Which is a good thing; this crew hides their influences well enough to avoid the derivative tag, but you can still feel enough familiarity to stay in the groove. The band’s best song…
Weezer’s 1996 disc Pinkerton, which came on the heels of their hit debut, was much maligned. Critics held their noses, accusing the concept album (based on Madame Butterfly, of all things) of not just stinking of sophomore slump, but also of being one of the worst albums ever made. In…
Rock ‘n’ roll history has a long tradition of bizarre incongruities: Sha Na Na at Woodstock—what was that all about? So when I first heard that Black Tie Dynasty was going to play at FireWater, that bastion of mid-cities metal, a place that boasts one of those cold Jägermeister machines,…
It takes a certain genius for a film director to intentionally use surreally garish colors, hyper-stylized sets and goofy/serious plot entanglements to reflect a realistic humanity. This is exactly what the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has done for almost 35 years. Though he’s made films since 1974, Almodóvar first made…
The Godzilla theme of this year’s Dallas Observer Music Awards can be interpreted in many ways. Godzilla could represent the growing presence of corporate venues, their monstrous feet crushing everything in sight. Or it could represent the ubiquitous destruction/construction cycle we’ve seen in Big D over the past, oh, gazillion…
DOMA! DOMA! DOMA!: Little bits of news from the DOMA Nominees Showcase: When PPT agreed to a single-song encore at their closing set at What?Bar, they had already shut down their iMac and were jumping offstage when the crowd insisted “One more!,” which resulted in a rousing version of “Work…
It was the hottest evening of the year so far, a real scorcher. We’ve been blessed this summer with cool rains, so nature chose to unveil that certain Texas heat, the kind that makes your head pound and your eyes water, on Saturday, August 11. The date also happened to…
Puerto Rican-born American citizen William Rodriguez is believed to be the last person to escape from World Trade Center Tower #1 on the morning of September 11, 2001. As a custodian in the building for 19 years, he had the only access key to three fire stairwells, and made repeated…
Not to get all po-mo on you, but half the satisfaction of indulging in Dallas native Harry Hunsicker’s latest thriller, Crosshairs, is savoring the delicious weirdness of the fact that its protagonist is Lee Oswald, a former private dick and Gulf War I vet who, in aiding his femme fatale,…
The Hymns’ singer/guitarist Brian Harding is often compared to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy or Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. In a pinch, there’s a bit of Britt Daniel in there too. And it’s true, Harding’s nasal slacker wail incorporates bits and pieces of those-who-shalt-be-worshiped-by-rock-critics. But to me Harding echoes less these modern voices…
