Search Results for "Jack Partain"

In the wake of Jawbreaker’s dissolution, singer/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach formed Jets to Brazil with ex-Handsome frontman Jimmy Chatelin and former Texas Is the Reason drummer Chris Daly shortly after his return to New York from the Bay Area in 1997. Orange Rhyming Dictionary is an extravaganza of power-driven pop and depressing lyrics, animated by J…

Earle and Jim Mankey were, respectively, the original guitarist and bassist in Halfnelson/Sparks. When the band’s other pair of brothers left for England without them, Earle wasted no time in becoming a well-known record producer. It took Jim a lot longer to re-enter the spotlight, but Concrete Blonde proved, at least commercially, to be worth…

If not for the fact that John K. Samson had already made a name for himself as lead smart-ass of Manitoba pop-punks Propagandhi, the Weakerthans could have been lost in the vacuum that swallowed most brilliant Canadian artists of the 1990s. When the Weakerthans began in 1997 Winnipeg, Samson was primarily known as a socio-sarcasm…

Vermont doom metal band Witch consists of Kyle Thomas on vocals and guitars, Dave Sweetapple on bass, Asa Irons on guitar and J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr) on, um, drums. While it’s hard to accept that the old fart resisted laying down a single lick on the band’s self-titled debut (metal being the one genre of…

Where else but Detroit could produce a band like the psycho-musical / performance art dryheave Thoughts of Ionesco? Founded by vocalist/guitarist/teenager Sean Madigan Hoen, TOI released a pair of disturbing hardcore albums which blinded listeners with warped and detuned guitars, anguished vocals and supported them with punishing live performances of blood, guts, and spilled liquor…

Monomaniacal home-recordists-cum-outsider-musicians are getting to be a rather common breed, but Columbus, Ohio’s Jim Shepard was hunkered down in his primordial lair back when most people thought “lo-fi” meant listening to music on a transistor radio. Far more devoted to noise than most one-man/4-track operations, Shepard — who hung himself at home in October 1998…

Quick quiz for the Midwest-impaired: which is the most unhip state in the union? Well, it ain’t Nebraska anymore (if it ever was). Since the late ’80s (at least), the quiet confines of the Cornhusker state have nurtured and incubated an oddly talented and eclectic crop of local musicians that some have come to call…

Essentially a British response to the success of the Strokes and dismissed by many as a post-boy-band-era boy band, or, even more sinister, an indie boy band, the Kooks formed in Brighton, England in 2004 and signed to Virgin soon after. At heart a modern pop rock band marketed as an alternative rock band, the…

This quartet — teenagers at the outset, their minds filled with the world — must have felt constricted in the confines of Lawrence, Kansas. The sound on The Mortal Micronotz is a little tinny, but these guys have your standard ’70s Ameri-punk moves down cold — sort of a sub-Dead Boys, but tighter. Dean Lubensky…

Before they broke up in 1983, this quartet from Wichita, Kansas rocked furiously, with less brittle/more melodious guitar than the Scottish new wave pop bands Orange Juice and Josef K to whom the Embos were sometimes compared. While John Nichols’ vocals weren’t incredible (Bill Goffrier’s guitar work nearly was), the Embarrassment did convey a promising…

Lester Bangs once famously dubbed Lou Reed’s gloom and doom opus Berlin “a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressed album ever made.” Well, if that album’s soft-core gothic indulgences struck Bangs as particularly offensive, then it’s probably good for his own sake that he didn’t live to hear Arab…

For a few years in the late ’90s, Glasgow seemed like the center of the music world, and no band epitomized the grandeur of that scene quite as well as Mogwai, the instrumental quartet whose super-cerebral prog-goes-indie- goes-postmodernism-all-fucked-up-and-crazy will certainly keep potheads, acid freaks and weirdo math majors busy for years to come (“Dude, if…

After being booted from Dinosaur Jr for what J Mascis dubbed “excessive social ineptitude” (mull that one over), Lou Barlow focused his energies on Sebadoh, a “band” that had existed since the mid-’80s. Propelled by the creative tension between Barlow’s fractured singer/songwriter delirium and Eric Gaffney’s more aggressive noise collage work, Sebadoh set the standard…