Instrumental and churning, Explosions in the Sky is a transcendent Texas quartet that produces sounds, songs and albums that could be Sunday morning church music for people who have been up all night. The intensity and severity becalms the anxious listener as it celebrates the possibility of partial forgiveness. The band’s wordless gymnastics display extraordinary…
With his trippy, logorrheic drones and hipster irony, Devendra Banhart, a San Francisco-based former art student, is helping to push forward folk music. The fascination with his work comes not so much from his roughhewn DIY talent, but from his unique view of antecedents and their music. Whereas the likes of Sandy Bull, Bert Jansch…
Jocular, poetically aslant and fearless, the English MC who calls himself the Streets (Mike Skinner) — part Birmingham, part London — is essentially a throwback to the UK dancehall beats of the 1980s, filtered through minor-key social sadness and American tough-guy urban throwdowns. Borrowing heavily from his peers is just part and parcel of the…
Man, what a comeback! On its debut, England’s oozing pop quartet Clearlake was a dismal and dreary affair, an unoriginal cover band with no aspirations beyond the routine melodramatic and hyper-elegant suicide watches and the navel-watching guitar sounds of PulpBlurGeneComeSuede. To make matters worse, Lido omits emotion, melody and basic principles of song structure. Climaxes…
Fueled by tumultuous and raw pagan holy rolling, Memphis’s indie-rockin’ Oblivians don’t want to transform ’50s music so much as to infuse it with unbridled rapacious re-visitations. Their songs and relentless lo-fi bass-less discordance revitalize the precepts of Jerry Lee, filter them through an incendiary Williamson/Stooges ethos, mixed down by Satan himself. Their albums’ hilarious…
It’s almost impossible to believe that a band so fierce and ferocious — live and on record — could reinvent itself, and hallowed rock traditions, with such humor and talent, but Memphis’ Reigning Sound has and does. Spearheaded by formidable guitarist-singer-songwriter- producer Greg Cartwright (Oblivians, Water Daniels, ’68 Comeback, Compulsive Gamblers, Mr. Airplane Man) and…
You can’t accuse this enormously talented multi-instrumentalist and composer of ordinary ambition or inadequate work habits; he has, in a short span, created quasi song cycles from Emersonian nature, the Chinese zodiac, his home state of Michigan and Christianity. If at times the imagery seems arch and the sentiments slightly askew and half-baked, there is…
Part of the recent Montreal renaissance of musical chance-taking innovators and cataloguers of the obscure and independent (Sunday Sinners, les Sequelles, We Are Wolves, Unicorns, BBQ0, Arcade Fire), the Dears offer hope to others on the outside, musicians and artists who have a disdain for the status quo and a love for individual expression, even…
This Australian band is carrying the much-needed bright banner of sweetly sung studio-driven exultant pop into this musically unsteady century. The idiosyncratic and gifted octet is a participatory democracy that cooperatively writes the endearing mini-masterpieces, plays every instrument ever conceived of and shares vocals. The superb debut is never simply pop for poppy’s sake. The…
Even by their finely crafted second album, San Francisco’s Rogue Wave had not quite matched their chops to their considerable vision, which is not to say that over the first couple of years of their existence that they were not consistently teeming with a profusion of idiosyncratic bits and pieces of solid indie pop. Traces…
The Liars’ debut is an exciting mix of audacious punk rock stammering held together by such disparate art-rock nomenclature and tendencies as vocal transmutation, discordant climaxes and ironic herky-jerky rhythms. Just when it was getting safe to venture onto the dance floor, this band (initially, two Nebraskans and two So Cal art students) boldly and…
When the first songs from eccentric and gnomish Badly Drawn Boy appeared, they felt like stuttering, muttering loony-tune works in progress. Although exceedingly ragged and rough, the EP songs (some included on the spirited singles collection, How Did I Get Here?) are distinguished by a relentless creative spark. From his Manchester bedroom, Damon Gough offers…
Edith Frost is a Texan transplanted to Chicago; her records demonstrate that, while less can be more, a little more can be even better. The debut EP was culled from home-made solo four-track recordings that, while pleasant, fail to do justice to Frost’s splendid songs. Her writing is rooted in the country-western tradition, but with…
The manic take on Stoogeian dynamics by Sweden’s Union Carbine Productions was meltdown beautiful: exultant, sinister, ragged cacophony. The yelping, fingers-in-toaster guitar smash-ups, the blocking out of common sense — music as deranged and as eerie and as jagged as rock can be, a sonic equivalent of Dresden after the bombings. The Soundtrack of Our…
The notion that this fine emo band can rest comfortably in so many overlapping rock adjectival labels (math rock, punk rock, post punk Gang of 4dom) speaks volumes. The French Kicks possess more talent than most of their contemporaries; that they take basic post-punk song structure and infuse the occasional confession, swath of shoegazing or…
Once the musical agitator for the fine Chapel Hill quartet Archers of Loaf, who thrived on him on for five fine and intense albums starting in the mid-’90s, Eric Bachmann packed it all in for this four-LP career as a wandering minstrel called Crooked Fingers. A multi-instrumentalist and sordid chronicler of limping despair and off-the-mark…
Few bands court anonymity more assiduously than (and with as little luck as) My Morning Jacket. Following in the wake of such fellow Kentuckians as Will Oldham, Tara Key and Slint, Louisville writer/guitarist/singer Jim James allows few, if any, commercial compromises in his band’s music, a rich hybrid of reverby stadium rock rhythms, Harvest-era Neil…
It’s possible that a New York City guitar-driven quartet which started out at the turn of the century in the same neighborhood as Interpol, opened for The Strokes, recorded with sonic scenesters Dave Fridmann and John Leckie, signed a major-label contract after issuing a fine debut on a boutique hipster label and knowingly borrowed an…
Blustery and bludgeoning, young English trio Muse is unafraid to take chances. Built up from saccharine piano wanderings and roaring merged guitars, Muse’s sound nicely fits the aims and aesthetics of charismatic leader Matt Bellamy, whose voice is both tender and audacious. While seemingly in the process of evolving from what was once operatic Radioheadedness…
Formed in 1992 by rival rappers at a suburban Atlanta high school, OutKast — the greatest hip-hop group since Public Enemy — accomplished a great many things in its first decade. OutKast are not merely rap’s best chance for permanent favor with rock fans; they are, on any given day, possibly America’s best band. Unafraid…
