“Galang,” the debut single from the London-based Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam), exploded like a bomb in the marketplace in 2004. A politically aware mix of sassy vocals, wheezing and blipping synths and samples, and a defiant, self-confident stance, “Galang” was completely irresistible. Arular, her full-length debut, lives up to the single’s promise —…
The son of gifted singer-songwriters Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright (who, as an infant, inspired his father to write and sing “Rufus Is a Tit Man”) inherited his parents’ eye for telling details and wry sense of humor, but the theatrical flair is all his own. His artfully constructed songs owe more…
When Radiohead abandoned the lush Britpop of The Bends to go diving in more esoteric seas, they left a perfectly good style to be claimed by any band ready to step up and claim it, and an extraordinarily polite and well-mannered tussle broke out amongst the various claimants for the title of Baby Radiohead. After…
Finland’s Husky Rescue resides comfortably alongside the likes of the Cardigans, Goldfrapp, Portishead and Violet Indiana: tastefully atmospheric down-tempo pop with a female singer. Reeta-Leena Korhola has a pleasant voice but so far lacks the personality of Nina Persson or Alison Goldfrapp, while the band — led by songwriter/bassist Marko Nyberg — creates moody, reasonably…
Kate Bush’s literate, masterful, enchanting records have won her enormous popularity, even if she can be overbearingly coy and preciously self-indulgent. Over the years, she has become increasingly — if far less frequently — ambitious, turning what might have been a career dominated by others into a fascinating singleminded pursuit of her own muse. From…
Outside his native Canada, where he’s pretty much worshipped as a deity, singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn is most commonly viewed as something of a reliable workhorse. In a lengthy and productive career, he’s never broken through to mass success nor attained the kind of obsessive cult following of such similar artists as Nick Drake, Jimmy Spheeris…
It’s probably a critical no-no to encourage devotion to slavishly re-creating a predecessor’s sound, but the Emerald Down does such an uncanny impersonation of Slowdive’s early years that complaint seems futile. The Columbus, Ohio quartet excels at creating the same majestic towers of cumulonimbus guitar noise, light and airy enough to drift through the stratosphere…
For the greater part of its history, there has been nothing quite as unhip as Christian rock — taking one’s own grandmother to spring break might come close, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine anything else as off-putting as contemporary Christian music (cCm) and its usually laughable combination of outdated musical styles and shallow, simplistic…
LA duo Giant Drag puts a new spin on shoegazing simply by moving guitarist Annie Hardy’s spitfire vocals out in front of the wall of distortion rather than concealed behind it. Given that Hardy and drummer/keyboardist Micah Calabrese churn out some amazingly memorable pop tunes, the result is a band with lots of in-your-face personality.…
If Kraftwerk was the Christopher Columbus of synth-pop, New York’s Silver Apples was Leif Erickson — the duo actually laid down the basics of the style in the ’60s, prefiguring that branch of krautrock by several years, but few noticed they had done so until the ’90s. Consisting of vocalist Simeon Coxe’s primitive, home-built synthesizer…
The edict that distinguishes clearly between Judy Collins and My Bloody Valentine apparently never reached the Irish village of Ballyporeen, where songwriter Gemma Hayes spent her formative years. On Hayes’ debut album, Night on My Side, the music runs from gentle folk to amplifier-shredding shoegazer noise and hits most of the intervening points. It shouldn’t…
The story goes that when Baxter Dury played Radiohead’s OK Computer for his old man, the late and greatly lamented Ian, the elder Dury had to be forcibly restrained from seizing the offending disc and hurling it out a window. For that one reason, then, it was lucky the great man didn’t live to hear…
After three albums as the band’s lead vocalist, John Foxx (Dennis Leigh) left Ultravox to pursue a solo career. A prime factor in the group’s original sound, Foxx was, by extension, a major influence on the new romantic movement that followed in its wake. Fortunately, both Ultravox and Foxx solo continued to make music of…
The bio of Charissa Saverio (DJ Rap) reads like the wet dream of a lonely music geek. The pulchritudinous Singapore- born daughter of globetrotting Italian and Irish-Malaysian parents boasts a résumé few other artists can touch and fewer novelists would dare to dream up (other than maybe Ian Fleming — she’d be an ideal Bond…
Despite rumors of exploding music scenes (there’s reportedly a pretty wild Russian psychedelic underground, exemplified by the exceedingly strange but enjoyable Roricat), worthy 21st-century music has been emerging only in a trickle from the world no longer behind the Iron Curtain. Estonia’s endearing Pia Fraus raises hopes that situation will remedied soon. Based in Talinn,…
The early ’90s shoegazing sound was primarily a British bandwagon. The few Americans who took part, such bands as Velocity Girl, the Lilys and Lenola, did so relatively late in the game. When Orange County, California’s Starflyer 59 came along in 1994, that train had almost completely departed the station. Yet SF59 managed to extend…
On the pecking order of likely prospects to make the worst vanity-project album imaginable, waifish teenage fashion models (on their way to becoming grown-up actresses) fall somewhere between stars’ drug dealers and relatives of Bill Gates. Kiev native Milla Jovovich’s desire to make a record is a mild surprise; that she had the nerve to…
Criticized for their uncanny resemblance to R.E.M., Connecticut’s Miracle Legion cannot be so easily dismissed as rote imitators. There’s no denying the obvious similarities (vocals and guitar); thanks to musical creativity, however, Miracle Legion manages to stake out their own territory. Savvy production techniques and aggressive playing make The Backyard a landmark. Mark Mulcahy’s vocals…
Plenty of bands advocate anarchy, but few have practiced it with the single-minded determination of Mercury Rev, a psychedelically inclined sextet given over to every-man-for-himself excursions as open-ended as “pop” music has seen in many a year. While analogous in some ways to the Flaming Lips (a band that guitarist Jonathan “Dingus” Donahue played with…
Joy Zipper, a duo from Long Island, New York, makes the musical equivalent of candy-coated cyanide capsules. Band- and life-mates Vincent Cafiso and Tabitha Tindale’s music is a breezy mix of the Mamas & Papas and Stereolab, full of sunny, intricate male/female harmonies but glazed with a sheen of Teutonic cool. But their lyrics offer…
