René Spencer Saller

Untitled Document Gretsches and gams, gams and Gretsches. That’s the Gore Gore Girls’ bag, and if it’s not yours, well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. The cover of the Detroit quartet’s new CD, Get the Gore, says it all: two curvy lower limbs, set off to pornalicious perfection in stiletto do-me boots, and one […]

Untitled Document In his essay-cum-manifesto “The Fullness of Time,” the composer Carl Nielsen cautioned against the pursuit of novelty for its own sake: “. . . [T]he smaller and slenderer the talent, the more careful must it be to abstain from seeking great originality. Nothing in all art is as painful as unsuccessful originality. It […]

Untitled Document Once you get past the stupid name, the simplistic songwriting, and the almost uniformly abysmal lyrics, Lavender Diamond is a really great band — but isn’t that like saying that George W. Bush would be a really great president if it weren’t for his policies? When does a drawback (or two or three) […]

Untitled Document Starbucks references have become an indie cliché, a form of slackerist shorthand whereby privileged whites rag on the economic class that spawned them. To invoke the Starbucks brand in a record review is to dismiss the music under consideration as yuppie pabulum: It goes down easily enough, but therein lies the problem. Starbucks […]

Untitled Document It seems unimaginable that Joni Mitchell, one of the most influential singer/songwriters of the latter part of the previous century, hasn’t received the tribute-album treatment until now, but it’s true. A victim of label consolidation and executive turnover, the unimaginatively titled A Tribute to Joni Mitchell languished in limbo for nearly a decade, […]

Untitled Document At 67, perennial cult hero Ian Hunter isn’t likely to snag the mainstream fame that has eluded him for 40 years. The former Mott the Hoople frontman has always been something of a late bloomer — he was already in his thirties when he sang his first and biggest hit, a cover of […]

Untitled Document The French, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. They take their dogs to cafés and leave their kids at home with filles au pair. Their television shows pingpong from jiggling bare breasts to jousting philosophes. Is it any wonder that no one seemed the least bit scandalized 23 […]

Untitled Document The backlash has landed: Wilco, the little indie band that could, isn’t getting a free pass from the press anymore. Sky Blue Sky, the Chicago outfit’s sixth album, isn’t being panned, exactly, but the response has been lukewarm. Where once the critics cited Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Radiohead, now they invoke Jackson Browne, the […]

Untitled Document Whether it’s to allay the anxiety of influence, honor important forebears, or simply work through a case of writer’s block, most musicians consider the covers album a necessary rite of passage. Even such songwriting heavies as Bob Dylan and David Bowie have succumbed to the temptation; Bryan Ferry, bless his little Dylan-stalking heart, […]

Untitled Document To call the Detroit Cobras a cover band is not inaccurate, but it misses the point. Although it’s true that the Cobras’ repertoire consists almost entirely of other people’s songs — their fourth and latest full-length, Tied & True, contains not one original track — the Motor City outfit hardly fits the cover-band […]

Untitled Document Are Bianca and Sierra Casady the geniuses that their admirers (John Darnielle, David Byrne, countless blognerds) say they are, or are they simply the newest naked emperors to hypnotize the hipster elite? Artless prodigies or practiced flimflammers? Idiots savants or plain old idiots? These questions are not rhetorical. I honestly can’t decide whether […]