Search Results for "Douglas Wolk"

By the time Louisville, Kentucky’s Bastro disbanded in the early ’90s, singer/guitarist/pianist David Grubbs (a veteran of that town’s seminal Squirrel Bait) was much less interested in being in a conventional rock band than in creating and manipulating complex tone patterns. (For evidence of the transition, track down Bastro’s side of its 1991 split single…

The Lilys’ first single, 1991’s “February 14th,” channels My Bloody Valentine pretty intensely, although there’s a touch of Dinosaur Jr in Kurt Heasley’s croak as well. The next year’s In the Presence of Nothing (a jab at Velvet Crush), on which the lineup included members of Velocity Girl and Suddenly, Tammy!, is even more a…

Sometimes, Jan Burnett of Dundee, Scotland is Spare Snare all by himself. Sometimes, he records (and plays live) with multi-instrumentalists Alan Cormack, Paul Esposito and Barry James Gibson. The band’s discography includes a flurry of singles, flexi-discs and variant editions, but it’s all worthwhile and ultra-hooky. The home-recorded songs have a uniquely sour drone-pop mood…

Australia’s Ben Lee made his recording debut at fourteen with a startlingly great home-recorded three-chord single, “I Wish I Was Him,” about envying Evan Dando (“He’s got six different flannel shirts, Airwalks not thongs/He even understands the words to Pavement songs”). The song was discovered by Thurston Moore and Mike D. of the Beastie Boys…

Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Frogs are about as important as an alternative band could be. The duo’s insane 1989 faux- gay-power-folk album It’s Only Right and Natural became something of a cult classic. Nirvana and Pearl Jam had it played over PA systems before performances; the Blake Babies named their EP Rosy Jack World after a song…

An Arizona native who wound up in Olympia, Washington as a result of attending nearby Evergreen State College, singer/songwriter Lois Maffeo had been a scene fixture there before starting the band that bears her name. (It really is a band — she’s been known to refer to it as “The Lois.”) She’d sung on the…

New York voice-and-keyboards duo Cibo Matto (the name is Italian for “food madness”) began as a side project of the legendary short-lived Laito Lychee. The two Japanese expatriates in that group, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, started writing songs inspired by the tremendous variety of comestibles available in NYC. They quickly evolved into an unconventional…

The voice is inhuman, reminiscent of nothing so much as Sesame Street‘s Grover with electrodes affixed to his genitals; over a mindbogglingly fast skittering racket, it’s yelling “In my life/I was disappointed,” then letting loose with something that sounds like a Tourette’s sufferer speaking in tongues: BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLDZUUUUUHHHH! The band is Glasgow, Scotland’s Stretchheads, the weirdest,…

Ian Crause’s Disco Inferno started out in the late ’80s, blending 4AD-style atmospherics with the side of New Order that wasn’t dance music, taking as its starting point Crause’s meticulous, chiming, echoing guitar sound. As the East London band grew, it discovered sequencing, electronic triggers and MIDI devices, and found its voice making almost-conventional guitar-pop…

When Raleigh, North Carolina’s Picasso Trigger broke up in 1995, everyone wondered what had taken them so long — fronted by a walking tantrum named Kathy Poindexter, they’d always been a volatile crew, seemingly devoted to pissing off and confusing as many people as possible. The musical core of the band (which was named after…

The Swirlies have never quite settled on an identity, and that suits them just fine — they’ve got one foot squarely in My Bloody Valentine territory, another in the region of home-recording tape-weirdness and a third in la-la pop land. Despite a turbulent lineup and inconsistent output, they’ve produced some very interesting records, though never…

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 emigrated from Iowa in the mid-’80s and set up shop in San Francisco. Since then, they’ve become one of the most original, interesting collaborative groups of musicians in rock, locating and exploring the common ground between Can, Captain Beefheart and the Carpenters. The core group of Brian Hageman (guitar, mandolin,…

Detroit’s Majesty Crush specialized in lush, dreamy guitar rock of the Galaxie 500/shoegaze variety, but gave it a nasty twist: a fascination with pornography and stalkers. The four-piece band (with inaudible connections to the city’s techno scene) suffered from singer David Stroughter’s habit of restraining melodies to one or two notes, but the rhythm section…

Barbara Manning is far from a prolific writer of songs, but she’s a great one, with subtle, unforgettable melodies and lyrics that cut to the heart of personalities and relationships. She’s also got a gift for interpreting other people’s songs (many of which have been written specifically for her clear Californian twang) and an intriguing…

California’s Heavy Vegetable was a close group of friends — the Encinitas addresses listed in Frisbie locate guitarist/singer/songwriter Rob Crow and singer Eléa Tenuta living together, bass player Travis Nelson in the apartment next door and drummer Manuel Turner a stone’s throw away. The band’s first recorded appearance, a split single with Powerdresser, sounds very…

Somehow, the Raincoats’ old records have gotten better since they were made. After Kurt Cobain repeatedly cited the neglected English post-punk band as an inspiration (and other bands, from Sonic Youth to the Voodoo Queens, chimed in), his band’s record label reissued the London quartet’s three studio albums with nice liner notes. The vinyl-only Fairytales…