Untitled Document If you like your power pop sweet and shiny and more than a little bit silly, the Trolleyvox is the band for you. The Philadelphia-based quartet, whose ranks have swelled and contracted over the group’s decade-long career, delivers hooky, anthemic, mildly eccentric guitar rock dosed with girl-group vocals, nonsensical lyrics, and oddball instrumentation […]
Music
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Bass player Trip
In spite of ridiculous and insidious jokes to the contrary, everyone knows that bass players are the foundation of a music group, allowing interchangeable band members to build fanciful interpretations. But what if the unheard-of happens and the bass player goes it alone, without the thrills and frills of a combo, with no one to […]
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A vagabond’s scrapbook
Amy Annelle, the singer, songwriter, and sole permanent member of the Places, traffics in narcotic dream-folk cut with aleatoric noise. Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a revolving cast of musicians, she makes music both sordid and soothing, deadpan parables and sour lullabies inspired by the haunted places that she passes through between tour stops, forgotten […]
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Change of pace
SINGLES ONLY We’ve stood at the edge of commercial crap with Gwen Stefani before, but with her new single, “Wind It Up,” we have fallen off the cliff. Not only does the Hollaback Girl yodel badly, but she’s also yodeling to the chopped-up “beats” of The Sound of Music’s “The Lonely Goatherd”! A little discretion […]
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Having a classical guitar gas
In central Illinois the name of Russel Brazzel is practically synonymous with classical guitar. Since moving here in 1990, Brazzel has taught hundreds of music students, co-founded the Springfield Classical Guitar Society, brought internationally acclaimed players to town, and given countless performances. Even the license plates on his red Mustang read “CL GTR 1.” Obviously […]
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Lost Boys find themselves
Plenty of local groups learn cover songs straight off the records, content to get gigs and draw crowds on the basis of other people’s music. Once in a while a cover band writes some songs, then feels compelled to expose the listening public to this original music. Usually the audience, conditioned to enjoy those all-too-familiar […]
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The storm before the calm
On its second full-length, Akron/Family delivers more of the transcendentalist free folk that’s made the band famous, or at least famous among all of the right people. Ex-Swan Michael Gira loved these hirsute young Brooklynites so much that he not only signed them to his label but also hired them as his backing band, the […]
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Crock o’ memories
Anybody remember a bar in Springfield’s Southtown called the Cracked Crock? It was popular in the late 1970s and early ’80s as a counterculture hangout for refugees from the repressing (and depressing) world of American middle-class normalcy. There were odd objects and antiques hanging from the walls and ceiling for patrons to admire or purchase. […]
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The bridesmaid turns bride
For most of his career, Kid Congo Powers (né Brian Tristan) was a sideman, performing with some of the most influential bands of the past two decades. He began playing guitar in 1979, when a charismatic weirdo named Jeffrey Lee Pierce taught him a few tricks and inducted him into the Gun Club. By the […]
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Hollow boulders
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 […]
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Nine Czech mates
Nine Czech mates What is so intriguing about the number nine? You’ve got the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” a musical experiment on The White Album, and Old No. 9, the famous steam engine. There are nine Muses, nine players on a baseball team (playoff time, you know), nine justices on the Supreme Court, nine months in […]
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Cruisin’ instead of mixing it up
SINGLES ONLY Sleepy Brown has the 9-to-5 blues. (We’ll play along.) After a long day of the grind, Brown and Big Boi cut out at 4:59 pm — how scandalous! — and make their way over to the club for happy-hour mingling. “Margarita,” the first single from Brown’s new album, Mr. Brown, is a smooth […]
