Search Results for "Matthew Kaplan"

The Japanese independent scene evolved through a multitude of forms in the ’80s and ’90s, ranging from the psychotic sonic excursions of Boredoms and Fushitsusha and the noise brutality of Zeni Geva to the garage rock of Teengenerate, the pop-punk of Shonen Knife and the twisted disco of Pizzicato Five. Somewhere on the outskirts of…

Since 1985, Chapel Hill singer/guitarist Rick Miller has been leading his merry band of North Carolina trash merchants, dressing up in hillbilly threads but playing bugeyed rock’n’roll, instrumentals, R&B and country swill with a lurid sense of humor, abundant skill and true historical dedication. The trio takes a loose and evidently well-meant minstrel-like approach to…

Cardiff-born singer Alison Statton’s first group, Young Marble Giants, lit and carried a bright torch for the lo-fi indie scene that would flourish in the ’90s. Her subsequent group, the coolly jazz-inflected Weekend, anticipated the suave cocktail pop that Everything but the Girl, Sade and others would popularize. After the end of Weekend, Statton went…

While the Loved Ones physically call Northern California’s Bay Area home, spiritually, their musical domain is Chicago by way of London’s Marquee Club. By the time the foursome united their bowl cuts in 1991, most of the rhythm and beat groups that littered the West Coast in the ’80s had faded away, but that didn’t…

Amid such peers as the Bevis Frond, Bristol’s Seers and such Japanese exponents of new psychedelia as High Rise, Ghost and Fushitsusha, England’s Gary Ramon lives in a world of mind expansion and trippy hallucinations, with one ear on today’s alternative sounds and the other firmly pointing to the past. The river of music upon…

Although widely unknown until the early 1990s, Nic Dalton has been releasing records under various names since 1985. While still going through his primary musical education as a member of Australian punk band the Plunderers, Dalton began to write songs that he felt were inappropriate for such use. In time, he found the friends to…

In the late ’50s, Scotland’s youth looked westward, saw American jug band music, decided it was good, and produced Lonnie Donegan, the lively superstar of skiffle. Three decades later, having witnessed stylistically self-willed homegrown inventions like Big Country and the Postcard popsters (Orange Juice et al.), Scotland’s young people turned again to the colonies for…

What a wrong, strange trip it’s been. In the grand British tradition of selling a band on self-hype and a look — with the music added on as an afterthought — Pop Will Eat Itself became the guiding lights of England’s “grebo” (slimy-looking lowlifes playing retrograde raunch) movement of 1986-’87, probably because nobody else wanted…

The Barnabys typify the second generation of America’s indie-pop scene. The trio, formed in Philadelphia in 1990, grew up listening to all the right records; when they synthesize those sounds, the results can be either pop perfection or musical mediocrity. On Delightful Browns, singer/guitarist Joey Sweeney shows that he knows how to craft a good…

New York punk rock has always been about playing bars on the Bowery where the beer and urinals have a lot in common. The Devil Dogs followed the hefty footprints of the Dictators and the Ramones through that battlefield, and-like those forefathers-looked to ’50s rock’n’roll to bring back the spark that once made it great.…

The obsessions and ingredients that make Helen Love a mad scientist’s (and my) dream of giddy pop perfection may seem utterly random — punk rock, glam rock, bubblegum, disco, Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, synthesizers, robotic vocal processors, ABBA, the Sweet, the Shangri-La’s, Wings, the Pooh Sticks, Talulah Gosh, “Planet Rock,” the Queers, Primitives, Rezillos, Freshies,…