Music

When you realize that South San Gabriel’s new album involves a song cycle about Will Johnson’s cat, it’s easy to get that sinking feeling that record executives must have had when Stevie Wonder delivered a concept album about talking to houseplants. Thankfully, Johnson, who also leads the gruff pack of…

Refused, although one of the most important punk groups of the ’90s, was far from original. The Swedish quintet swiped caterwauls from Fugazi, posture from Rage Against the Machine, rhetoric from Nation of Ulysses and song titles from Born Against. Still, the resultant clusterfuck turned out to be vital and…

Moz is the current poster child for career resurrection, ’80s rock-star division — and if issuing Live less than a year after the release of 2004’s You Are the Quarry, his studio comeback, seems ill-advised, the set’s quality more than justifies its existence. The album is both a satisfying musical…

Independence: Some die for it. Others just rap about it. Living Legends fall into the latter category — though the longstanding Bay-Area crew would have you believe that its staunchly indie ideal is noble enough to boast about in every other verse. Classic continues the tradition of sparse beats and…

If American Idol is any indication, rock is really dead this time. Luckily for us, it looks like someone forgot to send RPG, aka Rocket Propelled Grenade, the obit. On its Arclight Records debut, the Richmond, Virginia, foursome unleash enough raw power and Motor City swagger to make Lester Bangs…

On Adaptation, Analog Suspect and Selecta Roswell, who oversee the Dojo collective’s inner sanctum, have invited some of Denver’s up-and-coming sound manipulators into their temple to re-envision tracks culled from the act’s debut, Subliminal Teachings, and the instrumental offering Everything Flows. The result is a meditative poem that traffics in…

Despite the glaring lack of an evil, fire-snorting frontman, instrumental thrash trio GasHead avoids the kind of cliches that plague most aggressive-metal acts — everything from overemphasizing Satan to celebrating global annihilation. Instead, the Fort Collins-based outfit injects its headbanging with humor and occasional Latin-flavored inflections. “Benediction,” the album’s opener,…

After dropping out of Juilliard’s renowned art school, actor Dimitri Coats and dancer Melanie Campbell moved to Philadelphia, sharpened their skills on guitar and bass, respectively, and formed Burning Brides with drummer Mike Ambs. A melodically sludgy affair, the power trio earned post-grunge plaudits for 2000’s Fall of the Plastic…

Veiled allusion, subtle metaphorŠ. Fine for Joni Mitchell, not so much for Ms. Led. The coed Seattle quintet recently unleashed its sophomore full-length, These Things We Say, an utterly straightforward and plainspoken post-riot-grrrl statement that draws from Team Dresch and Sleater-Kinney even as it pares song and sentiment down to…

Trance music’s massive popularity within the club scene can be largely attributed to the efforts of Miami’s George Acosta. With the release of his first mix CD, 2000’s Awake, both trance music and Acosta experienced a huge surge in popularity within the U.S. dance scene. Suddenly Acosta found himself rubbing…

Colorado is seldom mentioned in blues histories, but perhaps it will be in the future. After all, the state serves as the home base for Otis Taylor and Eddie Turner, who have made some of the genre’s best music in recent years, and nurtured Corey Harris, a performer who manages…

For any old coot who survived the days of coke spoons and feathered hair, disco’s crowning achievement boils down to either Donna Summers’s Love to Love You Baby or the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever. Even though both records make for fine camping soundtracks, you’ve got to give the nod…

As rock slips further into the realm of the academic, its past becomes subject less to visceral renaissance and more to analysis via cool dispassion. It’s hard to tell which side of the chalkboard Black Mountain is marked on; the Canadian group’s eponymous debut is a test tube boiling over…

The letters used as a name by this Japanese quartet stand for “Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet,” and the handle’s pretty damn accurate, all things considered. Although DMBQ was founded during the late ’80s, The Essential Sounds From the Far East, just unleashed by Estrus Records, is only the group’s fourth…

According to Shane Ewegen — a highly sarcastic source if there ever was one — bandmate Nick Moses is a theoretical physicist who has “dedicated the last fifteen years to research into the possibility of building a perpetual-motion machine.” And although that’s total bullshit, the members of The Fifth Utility…

Looking like the bastard son of Keith Richards behind the decks, Danny Howells more closely resembles a glammed-out rock star than a superstar house DJ. Howells, a native of Hastings, England, got his start more than twelve years ago and spent his formative years warming up crowds for John Digweed…

Bad blood ran as thick as Jägermeister that night at the Lion’s Lair. After an infinitely long session by some crappy bar band from Pennsylvania — culminating in an eight-minute, dual-guitar lead that succeeded in putting everyone to sleep, even as it blew the speakers — Denver’s d.biddle took the…

At the Austin airport a couple of weeks ago, heading home from South by Southwest, I ran into my buddy Iron Mike — who looked like fifty miles of bad road. I’d last seen him a few nights earlier in the midst of an epic bender, when he was pleading…

Sea Change, Beck’s previous release, was the sort of album rock journos love: an ambitious song cycle whose thoughtful lyrics could be quoted in reviews to demonstrate the tunesmith’s blossoming artistic maturity. As a result, the disc received rapturous notices, even though the music on it was so drearily monochromatic…

Mercifully, very little has changed since Radar Bros. gave us And the Surrounding Mountains, a majestic Barrett-meets-Beatles slab of dreamy pop. On The Fallen Leaf Pages, head moper Jim Putnam still pens opulent, melancholic waltzes that would fit right in on Pink Floyd’s Meddle. And he still spends countless hours…

The Locust makes shitty albums. The anarchic San Diego quartet just can’t sustain interest for any prolonged period of time; its most compelling stuff has always been found crammed onto one side of split seven-inch singles. 2003’s disastrously dull Plague Soundscapes was the perfect example of the group’s full-length entropy…