The mindbogglingly prolific John Zorn is the undisputed king of the downtown New York art-music scene, a sonic omnivore who’s absorbed all of the extremes of 20th century music and processed it into “blocks of sound.” Zorn has worked with and influenced uncountable numbers of musicians. As a composer, he’s written pieces for everyone from…
Providence, Rhode Island’s instrumental Amoebic Ensemble is a peculiar beast — a huge group (usually eight people) playing mostly acoustic instruments (except for electric violin and mandolin) and assorted metal detritus to create something of a bizarre old-time Weimar clinkety-clonk. Accordionist and main songwriter Alec K. Redfearn is one of the greatest song-titlers alive (Limbic…
A lot of bands heard Slint’s Spiderland, saw the light and decided to make the same kind of music, but few were as shameless about it as Seattle’s Engine Kid. The five-song debut EP by the trio of Greg Anderson (vocals, guitars), Brian Kraft (bass) and Chris Vandebrooke (drums) pays homage to Slint to the…
A textbook example of how very different musicians can work together — and sometimes can’t — Moonshake (named after a Can song) was built on a tension that briefly made it one of the most exciting bands in England before causing it to splinter. Of the band’s two frontpeople, American expatriate Margaret Fiedler favored tranced-out…
Guided by Voices’ productivity, aesthetic and record-it-then-write-it methodology have inevitably influenced some impressionable youth, and Kleenex Girl Wonder’s Graham Smith is one of them. A young Illinois song-machine, Smith started out as a virtual Robert Pollard clone — tracks on the band’s eight-song debut seven-inch like “Roosevelt Agrees” and “The Other Dark Shaped Pentagon” could…
Formed in Scotland in the mid-’80s, Dog Faced Hermans began as a close cousin to the jittery, semi-atonal Ron Johnson Records sound, with a few curious fillips: vocalist Marion Coutts, a striking onstage figure with trumpet and distinctive gestures, sang curious intellectual-poetic lyrics (“Enzymes do the protein march/Hm baa hm baa hm baa hm baa,”…
This hard-edged Dutch anarcho-punk collective adheres to only the purest ideals in rock music. Starting in 1980, the Ex uncorked an endless stream of do-it-themselves vinyl and tapes on a variety of label names (finally settling on Ex Records in ’88). Following Crass’ example (if not quite that group’s sound; the Ex has a cutting…
Originally known as Fluffy, the New York City trio of Israeli-born bassist/singer Michal Sapir, guitarist Nicolas Vernhes and drummer David Mecionis made one single under that name before realizing how many other bands were also using it. So they switched to one of the song titles on that first single, the even more deceptive Baby…
If Sydney, Australia’s Smudge seems like one big footnote to the Lemonheads, that’s unfortunate: Tom Morgan’s band is a nifty little pop group in its own right. The singer/guitarist is best known for co-writing half the songs on Come on Feel the Lemonheads with Evan Dando. Smudge drummer/occasional singer Alison Galloway is purportedly the subject…
In the course of just a few years, this Dutch quartet underwent a nearly complete transformation of sound, even though its two-man/two-woman lineup (they all lived together) remained fixed. (That Steve Gregory, the mysterious Svengali/auteur behind the Pooh Sticks and Fierce Records, produced the band couldn’t possibly have anything to do with that, now could…
The New York trio of Sue Garner, Amanda Uprichard and Amy McMahon Rigby (then fresh from the Last Roundup with her brother Michael McMahon, who is spending the 21st century in the thoroughly retro-minded Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Company) had some beautiful songs but occasionally sold short their greatest asset: casually spectacular, country-based three-part…
Laura MacFarlane, the original drummer in Sleater-Kinney, had come to the attention of that group’s two other founders, in part, from playing in various bands in Australia. After leaving Sleater-Kinney, she returned to her home base of Melbourne and released 99, her first solo album. It’s a small, charming disc, under a half-hour long, with…
Following the breakup of the Shams, and a subsequent break-up from former dB’s drummer Will Rigby, Amy Rigby became a solo artist. Her debut, the masterfully titled Diary of a Mod Housewife, garnered significant press and a host of awards on the basis of its subject matter: the autobiographical travails of a working single mom…
Shudder to Think is not an easy band to love, but there are rewards for those who do. The Washington DC quartet’s most obvious distinguishing feature is singer/guitarist Craig Wedren’s voice — a huge, mincing, swooping thing that declaims his wildly surreal “poetic” lyrics and beelines for a quasi-operatic vibrato at the slightest opportunity. If…
Some people think chief Fall guy Mark E. Smith does the same thing over and over again, but he’s such an original that observation hardly rings as criticism. Indeed, on the Manchester band’s first single, back in 1978, Smith presented his manifesto: “Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it.” Turning subtle but…
Chris Knox is the godfather of the New Zealand alternative-music scene — if Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Robyn Hitchcock and Lou Reed were all the same person, that’s how important he is to Kiwi pop. The Enemy, Knox’s unrecorded early group, was by all reports New Zealand’s first great punk band; its successor, the coulda-been-a-contender…
With the once-mighty Boston art-noise scene threatening to recede from the world’s consciousness, ex-Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns drummer Peter Prescott launched this fun-spirited ass-biting quartet in which he sings and plays wiry guitar. Kustomized’s drummer, Kurt Davis, sang in Bullet LaVolta (where he was known as Yukki Gipe); guitarist Ed Yazijian and bassist Bob Moses…
On the strength of its legendary live shows, Bikini Kill — the archetypal riot grrrl band — was packing clubs before it even had a record out. Singer Kathleen Hanna, an American incarnation of X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, worked the crowd like a master preacher, singing, speechifying and switching between a little-girl voice and a…
With Beat Happening on hiatus in the mid-’90s, melodica master Calvin Johnson apparently developed a consuming interest in dub. His Dub Narcotic Sound System made its first appearances on a series of “disco plates,” singles that took dub’s idea of on-the-cheap, one-take production-toasting over a prefabricated but funky backing track and a disassembled dub version…
When Huggy Bear’s first EP came out, there was an instant buzz about the English group in the international pop underground-they were “boy/girl revolutionaries” (translation: a credible riot grrrl band with a boy singing most of the time), they covered their record packages with political manifestos that didn’t make very much sense, they refused to…
