Endurance is everything in the narrow, masochistic context of young American malehood. How much suffering can you stand before crying or passing out? How long can you grind your board on that rail? How long can you keep that bong smoke in your lungs? Well, gird thy loins: The folks are out of town, the fridge is stocked with Jolt,…
It’s funny what a difference a little verb can make. Jump was known as Jump, Little Children for more than a decade before it decided to abort everything but the verb and get rid of that troublesome comma once and for all. The name change also served as a sort of symbolic cleansing for the band as it left behind…
When cheesed-out hair metal bit the dust, spandexed Los Angelenos like Motley Crüe and Poison survived by refusing to take themselves too seriously. W.A.S.P. went the other way, issuing a string of self-indulgent concept albums that sounded like Stephen King rejects: The Headless Children, The Crimson Idol and so forth. A few faithful fans continued to give a shit, but…
Prehistoric rock? Post-apocalyptic fusion? Instrumental Chicago quintet Tortoise tries carving out both post-rock subgenres on its fifth full-length album. One moment, we’re new-agein’ it astride a pterodactyl in a blood-red sky (“Crest,” “The Lithium Stiffs”). Then it’s March 2118, the human race is long extinct, and grim robots wearing sun visors are sucking hard onstage at South by Southwest (“Dot/Eyes,”…
It takes N*E*R*D three seconds to prove itself capable of creating a groove out of thin air. That’s all the time Chad Hugo and Pharell Williams (aka the Neptunes, who, with rapper Shay, make up N*E*R*D) need to kick off Fly or Die with an unbelievably simple yet irresistible guitar lick on “Don’t Worry About It.” It may be only…
Yoo-hoo, Ruben Studdard. We have a small matter we’d like to call to your attention. It’s the skinny, whiny, dapper white boy — what’s-his-face Aiken — who is, for some reason, still hanging around. What the hell is he doing, Studdard? He didn’t win. Gladys Knight didn’t call him “the Velvet Teddy Bear.” Frankly, you gotta squash this guy…
It’s times like these that we cling to simple music. And all the better for singers like Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Josh Kelly and Marc Broussard , who might have scored little more than a few quarters in a yawning guitar case on a 1992 Westport Saturday night. Now they’re scoring major-label deals with stripped-down tunes intended to provide salve…
It’s doubtful that the Offspring will ever top the 1994 breakthrough Smash and its pair of post-grunge radio staples, “Self Esteem” and “Come Out and Play.” Though the punky SoCal quartet rode the crest of Smash through the rest of the decade, the band never outpaced its numerous critics, who labeled the group corporate sellouts. Too bad, because the Offspring’s…
Cover songs at last month’s Phony Jam III local rock showcase spanned the spectrum from Michael Jackson to Metallica. Landing firmly on the 10-ton-hammer side of that continuum was “Life to Lifeless,” a tune from Boston’s Killswitch Engage. It might be tough for Killswitch to go head-to-head with members of Third World Sin and Everybody’s X, but they deserve at…
Not that long ago, Ramsey Lewis shared a bill with Ray Charles at the Starlight Theatre. There were murmurs of suspicion, whispers of “How’s Ramsey Lewis going to fill Starlight, let alone hold his own?” But as soon as Lewis stormed the stage, the world filled with the sound of his piano, and the doubters were quickly silenced. Lewis’ “The…
Technically speaking, the Detroit Cobras are a cover band. But they’re a purist cover band. The band slithered up from the same roots-revering scene as the White Stripes and the Von Bondies, but the Cobras’ record collection runs a bit deeper. Singer Rachel Nagy and guitarist Maribel Restropo (who, from a Pabst-addled distance, could pass for Heart’s Ann and…
Chris Robinson earned a reputation with the Black Crowes as a shag-coifed throwback to the days when Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott ruled the cock-rock roost. But in the ensuing years, Robinson has become almost as famous for being arm candy to Hollywood heiress Kate Hudson. The singer’s first post-Crowes album, 2002’s New Earth Mud, was lost in the…
Metallica’s members have survived deaths, departures, alcoholism, Napster and each other. But if modern paranoia has taught us anything, it’s that everything we cherish is fleeting. Jurassic nostalgia aside, there’s no valid reason to pay through the nose for Rolling Stones tickets. But you do, just because Mick or Keith could kick off at any moment. Granted, Metallica is…
Oh, Fame, you fickle bitch. Explain yourself. Corey Feldman cops Michael Jackson dance moves and we recoil in horror. Justin Timberlake does the same and we adore him. Sure, Feldman can’t sing, but the jury’s still out on Timberlake, too. What about Bob Schneider? This Austin, Texas, cat was the driving force behind both the Scabs and the Ugly Americans,…
Cursive If you know nothing of Nebraska, indie-rock or penmanship, Cursive is a good place to start. The Omaha quintet has earned plenty of indie-rock accolades behind breakout albums like Domestica and its follow-up, The Ugly Organ. Frontman Tim Kashner’s torturous divorce made for prime, if convenient, fodder for the latter, a remarkable album of sexual and emotional metaphors played…
PD: I hear Ozomatli isn’t popular with Austin police? UB: We always end an Ozo show with a conga line … and we had gone outside with it when we had played in Austin before, so we didn’t know it would be a problem. They said we were violating a noise ordinance … and so we started to go back…
If somebody calls a press conference to protest St. Louis rapper Nelly, does anybody hear it? And if you arrive 5 minutes late, did the protest even happen? More to the point, what the hell ever happened to Captain Murdock from The A-Team? All good questions, to be answered in order of importance. First, it turns out that Dwight Schultz,…
The world remembers the Porky’s movies, if it remembers them at all, as the precursors to the American Pie films, a way station between Animal House and the most recent crop of movies that encourage us to laugh at young people and their genitals. The more savvy film lover may remember Porky’s 2: The Next Day for its genre-defying scenes…
David Bowie is cooler than you. The man formerly known as David Jones is married to Iman, a gorgeous supermodel. He is in possession of a great head of hair for a 57-year-old, has the body-fat percentage of a heroin addict and a regal voice that’s survived — hell, thrived — despite years of huffing coke. The native Brit…
f only Dogville were involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn’t. Sigh again — three increasingly tiresome hours of sigh. By now, of course, Trier (the “von” is…
“We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing. He could also be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, nonstop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue, yet the thrash-and-burn technique flies. This beast is as subtle as a Red…
Safety dance: Regarding Nadia Pflaum’s article ” Calling All Barbies” (April 22), I can already predict a future article titled “Dead Dungeon Barbies.” As a traditional-values, happily married, nonswinging woman, you would think my biggest issue with this article would be the immorality of the entire concept, but rather, it raised a huge concern for me about the safety of…
Alonzo Washington is a funny guy. Just a few months ago, the comic-book artist and black-community activist was burning copies of the Pitch in front of television cameras. He was upset that this newspaper had dared to question the benefit of digging up Precious Doe for yet another artistic rendering of how the unidentified child might have looked before an…
On February 26, Rick Hollon sat chained inside a mesh cage in the back of a van rolling along the snow-dusted roads of Nevada. Clad in an orange jumpsuit, his hands shackled to his waist, Hollon had spent the previous two weeks traversing the country in similar cells-on-wheels. A beefy ex-Army helicopter crewman, Hollon had lost 30 pounds since…
