Search Results for "Jason W. Smith"

“I’m caught between hideous and forgotten,” bemoan Mary’s Danish in one of the finer tunes from the lamentably forgotten band’s far-from-hideous and impossibly eclectic catalog — a catalog whose eclecticism is especially notable considering its relatively small volume. Mary’s Danish, which came together in Los Angeles in the late ’80s, was itself a diverse lot…

As leader of Mission of Burma and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic — provocative groups that tested various musical possibilities from a progressive rock-derived context — Michigan native Roger Miller established himself as Boston’s preeminent new wave sonic experimenter in the ’80s. Beginning with the Maximum Electric Piano examinations of No Man Is Hurting Me‘s second…

Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin arrived on the electronica scene in an era of dance-oriented techno like Chemical Brothers and kitsched-out space-age pop like Dimitri From Paris. To say that the French duo (not to be confused with the jazz-fusion Air Henry Threadgill led in the ’70s) fell somewhere in between is one way to…

While ambivalently shoddy production values have been part and parcel of independent recording since the dawn of the 4-track, Pavement was the first band to explicitly equate the medium with the message, thereby precipitating the lo-fi revolution that agitated the indie world in the early ’90s. Yes, cellar-dwelling auteurs existed before these Stockton, California savants…

Onetime Glenn Branca collaborator Wharton Tiers’ enduring claim to fame is his role as Fun City recording studio guru, the man behind the dials on key releases by Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., White Zombie and Helmet. In the mid-’90s, while maintaining employment in a variety of music production gigs (including, with Helmet’s Page Hamilton, producing…

During its original existence, Mission of Burma was one of the most important American bands surviving outside the major-label record industry. The Boston band’s thrilling and challenging vocal rock is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. Staking out bracing post-pop guitar turf with hard edges and sharp corners, Burma’s records never leave melody or structure behind;…

As if Seattle didn’t already have enough scrungy sponges guzzled to the gills on ’70s and ’80s Britrock, the Supersuckers arrived there from Tucson at the start of the ’90s and set about proving that Sabbath and Zep weren’t the only malevolent forces creeping around Mr. Gates’ neighborhood. On The Songs All Sound the Same…

Philadelphia’s Dandelion might best be remembered as poster children for the underground/popular music clash of the early ’90s, rising as they did in the era that saw a shift in the red-blooded hard rock dynamic from long-haired metal to shorn grunge leftovers purveyed by countless hordes of candidates caught up in the major label search…