René Spencer Saller

Dwight Yoakam is a purist and a reactionary, but that doesn’t make him any less of a rebel. Despite his old-school Bakersfield twang and unabashed reverence for golden-era honky-tonkers Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Yoakam has never been a retro act, nor has he ever stooped to hokey parody or knee-jerk stylistic detours. When he […]

According to the press release for The World Is Saved, Stina Nordenstam’s sixth CD, “This is some of the most hopeful music Stina Nordenstam has ever recorded.” In a breathtaking feat of pretentiousness, the flackery is formatted as free verse, concluding with these cringe-inducing, grammar-flouting lines: “Listening to her music, reading her lyrics/Stina Nordenstam dares to […]

For the past decade, Joe Pernice has practiced the art of pop chiaroscuro, crafting sunny songs with sudden shadows and dark songs that dazzle. With its buoyant hooks, chiming riffs, and major chords, his sad-sack soft pop goes down easy, but make no mistake: it’s not easy-listening pabulum. These creamy confections are steeped in bile, […]

The first new Son Volt full-length in seven years, Okemah and the Melody of Riot boasts exactly one original member: Jay Farrar, the band’s founder, frontman, and songwriter. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After contributing a track to an Alejandro Escovedo tribute compilation, Farrar, Mike Heidorn, and Jim and Dave Boquist planned to […]

It’s hard to hate the Ying Yang Twins as much as I should, but it’s equally hard to defend them. In the interest of full disclosure, I was ushered into puberty by the Rolling Stones — no amount of Germaine Greer could repair the damage those crafty über-misogynists wrought upon my tender psyche with “Backstreet […]

Writing about Gertrude Stein’s long and difficult The Making of Americans, literary critic Richard Bridgman likened the author’s technique to that of a novice driver: “Periodically there are smooth stretches, but these are interrupted by bumps, lurches, wild wrenchings of the wheel, and sudden brakings. All the while the driver can be heard muttering reminders and […]

On De Nova, their second album (and major-label debut), the Redwalls deliver ’60s-era blues-based Brit rock with an audacity peculiar to the very young and the not-so-terribly bright. The quartet’s fetching mop tops, mod-inspired duds, and shameless pilfering of the classics suggest one of the following possibilities: (1) It never occurred to them that they’re from […]

At first blush, the pairing seems odd: abrasive American indie-rock idol and whimsical French soundtrack doyen. Like horseradish and marzipan, they’re two great tastes, but do they taste good together? To the few thousand people out there who know her work with Crowsdell and her devastating solo CDs, Shannon Wright is the quintessence of the […]

Being a feminist rock fan is a lot like being a gay Republican — theoretically possible but, in practice, often demeaning. If you insist on living out the oxymoron, be prepared to embrace contradiction, if not outright abuse. Rock & roll, after all, is rooted in the ritualistic celebration of male sexuality: Elvis’ pelvis; Chuck’s […]

No singer/songwriter bums out more beautifully than Aimee Mann. Since her early days fronting ’Til Tuesday, she’s lanced every painful carbuncle on the dark side of romance while administering megadoses of pop narcotic. With each new batch of transcendent downers, she manages to become more and more herself, an unabashed classicist and classic depressive who […]

For a band that hasn’t existed as long as the Dubya administration, Head of Femur has carved out quite a dominion. The founding members, vocalist/guitarist Matt Focht, keyboardist/drummer Ben Armstrong, and guitarist/bassist Mike Elsener — all Nebraskans who relocated to Chicago — formed the prog-pop outfit in late 2001, while their previous group, Pablo’s Triangle, […]

Few things in life are certain, but it’s safe to say that the Kronos Quartet will never put out a bad album. It’s equally likely that you’d never hear about it one way or the other, though, because you, poor, patronized reader/consumer, aren’t supposed to care about contemporary string quartets. Never mind that Kronos has […]