Rollerskate Skinny, formed in Dublin in 1992 and named for a line in Catcher in the Rye, recorded its first album as a quartet, with Jimi Shields (brother of My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields) adding guitar, voice and drums to the manifold abilities of unrelated founders Ken Griffin (vocals/guitar/keyboards), Ger Griffin (guitar) and Stephen Murray…
Com Plex, the first album from Portland’s Helio Sequence, is an impressive affair, a swirling, heavily layered slice of space rock which draws on the entire history of psychedelia, from the Beatles through krautrock to shoegazing and ambient techno. That the sounds on Com Plex were generated entirely by relative youngsters Brandon Summers and Benjamin…
“Alternative” seems a strange description for a pop superstar who has achieved the status and global name recognition of a demi-god. But that particular shoe has continued to fit Madonna, not least because the fashions she’s worn have varied so spectacularly. Since releasing her first single in 1983, the Michigander has dodged the conventional industry…
Ronnie Martin has always marched to the beat of a different drum machine. At the time of his debut with the Dance House Children, nothing could have been more out of fashion than an unabashedly ’80s style synth-pop band on an obscure Christian label. Yet the Orange County auteur stuck to his guns, seeming to…
Girl groups have always been more subversive than they appear, from the Phil Spector-produced efforts of the early ’60s boosting African-American teens from housing projects into Top 40 radio to the double-agents in Bananarama bringing post-punk flavor to the masses while forcing new wavers to confront mainstream pop. Brighton, England’s Pipettes, who are associates of…
Even taking into account the cyclical nature of pop music, which dictates that each generation’s dreck is sure to become its offsprings’ camp prize, the ascent of harpist Joanna Newsom to goddess of the Pitchfork-addled indie-rock nation is nothing short of astonishing. Exactly how a performer who embraces many of the early-’70s musical values that…
After years of session work and part-time employment with Lene Lovich, Bruce Woolley & the Camera Club, Thompson Twins, Foreigner and Joan Armatrading, Thomas Dolby helped revitalize a largely moribund and redundant synth-pop scene with his own recordings. The Golden Age of Wireless avoids the usual tactical error and gives the songs prominence over the…
Blend the B-52’s with the Fleshtones and multiply the resulting lunacy by a factor of ten and you’ll come up with something close to the Cosmopolitans, a short-lived, little-remembered combo which flashed through the New York City club scene at the dawn of the ’80s. Formed at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill…
Self-billed as “The Emotional Wench,” Indiana native Lisa Germano first surfaced as the fiddler with John Cougar Mellencamp’s band, but her own work is light years away from the heartland swagger of her erstwhile employer. The self-released On the Way Down From the Moon Palace showcases country-tinged folk-pop with mandolin and accordion augmenting guitars and…
The Stockholm duo Ak-Momo creates music that soothes the soul even as it troubles the mind. Mattias Olsson uses antique electronic instruments such as the optigan, orchestron and mellotron to craft gorgeously melodic but vaguely disturbing backing for Ak von Malmborg’s pixieish vocals, which suggest Joanna Newsom and (by extension) the young teenage Kate Bush,…
Michigan’s Original Brothers and Sisters of Love’s anachronistic blend of modern sensibilities with such traditional forms of music as heroic ballads and sea chanteys predated the similar Decemberists by a few years, but the Brothers and Sisters never approached the Portland band’s level of popularity. If the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy sometimes comes across as a…
Luke Steele, the mastermind of Perth, Australia’s the Sleepy Jackson, has a serious George Harrison jones. The quiet Beatle’s influence, which colors much of his band’s work, is not a bad thing at all. Lovers abounds in Harrisonesque guitar and melodic country-tinged pop, with dashes of Robyn Hitchcock, the Flaming Lips and Perth legends the…
Moving from electronic tape experiments to highly polished synthesizer pop and beyond, Liverpudlians Andy McCluskey (bass/vocals/keyboards) and synthesist Paul Humphreys (with other fulltime members, including — very significantly — a corporeal acoustic drummer) were among the most successful practitioners of electro-pop, as first demonstrated by a delightful string of singles. They proved early on that…
Leicester, England’s prolific Cornershop launched its career with the buzzy In the Days of Ford Cortina, a four-song EP, at the beginning of 1993 and hasn’t bothered to look back. (Or, judging by the deluge of singles and EPs the group released that same year, for the studio exit door, either.) Led by brothers Tjinder…
Just as Stereolab’s melding of American and French space-age pop styles with krautrock in large part ignited the lounge music resurgence of the 1990s in the Anglo-American music scene, it also rekindled an interest amongst Gallic youth in their own retro-pop. Backward-looking young musicians, from electronic craftsmen Air to singer-songwriters Keren Ann and Benjamin Biolay,…
Formed in Hershey, Pennsylvania by high school friends who shared a fondness for new wave and post-punk, the Ocean Blue fused their influences — the Smiths, the Teardrop Explodes, R.E.M. — into a likable debut. The college radio hit “Between Something and Nothing” (which smacks of “Lips Like Sugar”-era Echo and the Bunnymen) sets the…
Despite nearly everything said about them in the press, Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sound very little like Talking Heads. Vocalist Alec Ounsworth does possess a yelp in the vicinity of David Byrne’s, but that’s where any resemblance ends. (And Ounsworth sounds more like Tom Verlaine than Byrne half the time anyway.) Musically, the…
Least likely to what? Sleep in pajamas without feet? Go to bed without his cocoa? Be able to beat up Stuart Murdoch? Jof, the lyricist and singer for The Boy Least Likely To, a UK band not quite tough enough to be considered twee, is seriously wimpy — one can easily picture him fainting at…
In the early 1980s, Frank Black had a drunken one-night stand with the Divinyls’ Christina Amphlett who, nine months later, gave birth to Chantel Claret. Okay, that didn’t actually happen, but judging from the sound of Claret’s band, Morningwood, it might as well have. On their self-titled debut, the rudely named New York quartet —…
Like their pesky namesakes, the Bunnymen just can’t stop breeding. While Joy Division and Gang of Four are the icons most often namechecked by 21st century post-punk revivalists, it’s the (unfairly) less critically revered McCulloch and Co. who are the most echoed. Supposed Joy Division clones Interpol really sound very little like Unknown Pleasures but…
