The roots of Los Angeles’ Grant Lee Buffalo stretch back to 1985 when former film student Grant-Lee Phillips and Jeffrey Clark started Shiva Burlesque. (They’d earlier been in a band called the Torn Boys.) Phillips specialized in “psychedelic acoustic 12-string,” feedback included, while Clark’s Jim Morrison-influenced vocals were the stuff of high sweeping drama. They…
With far too many modern bands falling on the wrong side of Spinal Tap’s “clever/stupid” demarcation, it’s easy to mistake “uncategorizable” as a subgenre of the latter. Vegetarian Meat, the peripatetic basement-recording duo of Manish Kalvakota (guitar and drums) and Alex McAulay (everything else), doesn’t help matters by hopping genre fences at random (not to…
Some rock bands are born of the rustbelts and heartlands; the members of Radial Spangle, however, had either the misfortune or the good grace (take your pick) to be stuck in Norman, Oklahoma. Unlike fellow Normans the Flaming Lips (an early influence), Radial Spangle opted not to tour, instead digging in and writing songs that…
That Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson have built a modest indie empire with their Simple Machines label is admirable enough; that a pair of young women could rise to the top of the straight-edge, terminally macho DC-area indie heap is nothing short of amazing. Amid the usual apprenticeships in assorted punk and folk bands (Toomey…
Pop’s rocky road is strewn with innumerable tattered gig flyers and dented band buttons. What would an alien traveler think if he picked up a scrap of debris bearing the words “Jean Paul Sartre Experience”? “So poetic, so perfectly evocative…but of what?” his musings would no doubt begin. Upon hearing the actual music, he might…
More than one observer of the Arizona rock scene has noted that had the Sidewinders not been derailed by legal and label problems, the Tucson quartet might’ve beaten neighboring Tempe’s Gin Blossoms to the brass ring. Or maybe it was just a case of the too-good/too-early American band syndrome in the conservative pre-Nirvana era. Formed…
When North Carolina’s Small formed in the summer of 1991, not only was the quartet unaware that a massive amount of hype was about to descend on the Chapel Hill scene (Superchunk and its Merge label being magnets), it didn’t plan on duking it out, record-bin-wise, with several other similarly named combos: Rhode Island’s Small…
These folks either wrote reviews that appear on the site or wrote for Trouser Press magazine. If anyone listed below cares to E-mail us with a link you’d like added, just let us know. And ditto if anyone is AWOL from this list. Grant AldenDavid AntrobusJem AswadTroy J. AugustoMichael AzerradCary BakerMichael BakerEmily BeckerSeth BenderJohn BergstromArt…
