René Spencer Saller

One of the many excruciating aspects of Rock Star: Supernova was watching the female contestants as they wailed and writhed and whipped their hair around in a doomed attempt to prove that hott chixx can be heavy. Be they saucy sexbots in rubber fetish gear, hardened harridans in leather vests, or Courtney clones in tattered […]

One part George Jones, one part John Ashbery, Richard Buckner brings the MFA poetry workshop to the honky-tonk, or vice versa. He’s the kind of lyricist who is typically described as “elliptical,” “gnomic,” and “cryptic” — rockcrit shorthand for “I have no idea what this dude is talking about, but I’m pretty sure he’s totally […]

Joe Thebeau, the mastermind of Finn’s Motel, describes himself as a “40-year-old married-with-children rock guy” — an unglamorous profile for an indie-rock aspirant, maybe, but a refreshingly honest one. Let the bloggers slobber over this week’s wunderkind; when you’re trying to pay a mortgage, feed a couple of kids, and keep the lawn mowed, you […]

Guitar dorks are guys mostly, weird guys with ickily long fingernails who stink of cannabis and complicated tablatures. If they’re not droning on about the awesome tuning that they just discovered, they’re arguing about stupid stuff that no one else cares about, such as whether a particular mode is Dorian or Mixolydian or the exact […]

People love pirates. They prove it by stampeding to see the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, by chomping down on their R’s (arrrrrghs!) on Talk Like a Pirate Day. Piratemania is so widespread, in fact, that a backlash seems inevitable. How much longer before pirates join Pet Rocks, Beanie Babies, and the “You can call […]

New Zealand, a country that’s delivered more than its share of great guitar pop in the last 20-odd years — the Chills, the Clean, the Verlaines, the Bats, Split Enz, and Crowded House, to name a few — has done it again. The Phoenix Foundation, a six-piece from Wellington, deserves to be mentioned in the […]

Last year the Mountain Goats released The Sunset Tree, an aural exorcism inspired by the abusive childhood of the band’s frontman and only permanent member, John Darnielle. Like its predecessor, the speed-freak saga We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree was loosely autobiographical and boasted a professional-studio sheen, especially compared with earlier Mountain Goats […]

Is it dirty art rock or arty dirt rock? Rock music you can dance to or dance music you can rock to? Whatever you want to call Derdang Derdang, the Archie Bronson Outfit’s second full-length, the word “rock” had better be in there somewhere because, whatever its other qualities, rock it most definitely does. Pitched […]

The title of DJ Logic’s new album is a stumper: What does logic, the science of abstract reasoning, have to do with Zen, a Buddhist philosophy that honors direct intuition through meditation? Despite the apparent paradox, Zen of Logic is an excellent title for this release, which skirts the often arbitrary border between instinct and […]

Midlake is from Denton, Texas, the same smallish town that spawned Centro-matic, but you’d never guess it by listening to The Trials of Van Occupanther. With its soft and inviting beds of acoustic guitar, piano, and woodwinds, the quintet’s second album is considerably less blippy than its predecessor, Bamnan and Slivercork, but it remains painfully […]

Ophiuchus Butterfly is guitarist/composer Liberty Ellman’s second full-length for Pi Recordings, which is fast becoming one of the most interesting labels on the independent jazz scene. (Though it might seem as if no one cares about jazz anymore — at least no one in the mainstream, or even so-called alternative, media — the musicians remain […]

Lisa Germano’s publishing company is called Emotional Wench, a name that is, to quote Homer Simpson, funny because it’s true. In the annals of indie dysfunction, few singer/songwriters have plumbed the poetics of self-loathing as rigorously as Germano has. Since 1991, when the former John Mellencamp violinist released her solo debut, she’s been singing about […]