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 […]
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Vinyl Static
SINGLES ONLY By no stretch of the imagination does Yo La Tengo look cool. The Hoboken, N.J., trio doesn’t subscribe to any hipster conventions — nary an ironic mustache or trucker cap to be found. The group sticks to a similar, ever-dependable ethos when making their eclectic, dreamy space-pop, and perhaps that’s why it has […]
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Vinyl Static
The Ditty Bops love to ride bikes. Instead of jamming into a cramped van for their 2006 summer tour, the jazzy duo decided to put shoe to pedal and log some miles on a couple of two-wheelers, and they’ll be cruising into Springfield on their way from St. Louis to play a show at the […]
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Bottle Rockets take off
Our resident jukebox hero, Keith Voegele, former bass player for several Springfield and St. Louis groups and now a member of alt-country icons the Bottle Rockets, recently hit the road again in support of the group’s latest CD, Zoysia. According to the folks at Bloodshot Records, the disk is doing well, and Voegele reports brisk […]
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Focused on the essentials
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 […]
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Building a better Park
The small makeshift rock club overflows with fans. Kids line the walls, standing on ledges and leaning in to cop a view. The lead singer strikes the first chord on his guitar. The crowd moves and breathes as a single organism. Heads nod in time with the beat; earnest faces mouth the emotional lyrics. Springfield […]
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Self-loathing as art
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 […]
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Nuts for these Brazilians
In the music industry, second chances are like flying saucers, so rarely seen that they beg the question “Do they really exist?” And yet, on very rare occasions, a once-promising musician or group, seemingly vanished, will resurface, bigger than ever. Before British folk singer Vashti Bunyan became matriarch to the “New Weird America” musicians, she […]
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Walk this way
Recently I was going through a pile of bar-napkin notes and crumpled business cards, looking for any important lost messages, and I found a note from Jim Wavering, owner/operator of Marly’s Pub. It was from sometime in spring of 2004, I think (yes, I know that’s a long time to keep a bar-napkin note) and […]
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Among the Midwest’s best
My first experience with the Ozarks-based group Big Smith came during our Wednesday-night songwriter circle. I was praising singer/songwriter Mark Bilyeu’s CD, First One Free, when one of the circle members became almost uncontrollably excited. He started stuttering about Big Smith’s being the best band ever and claiming that Bilyeu was a member. I knew […]
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Delighting in happy accidents
When the terminally adorable Canadian quartet Shapes and Sizes signed to indie-rock über-cutie Sufjan Stevens’s record label, Asthmatic Kitty, the sudden surfeit of sweetness must have been overwhelming. Surely molars crumbled in its wake; blood turned to syrup; insulin waved the white flag. Only an army of tap-dancing Japanese toddlers, baby spider monkeys in matching […]
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VINYL STATIC
CD EXCHANGE: With R. Kelly busy basking in the glow of his mesmerizing car wreck of a miniseries, Trapped in the Closet, the R&B world has hit a bit of a drought when it comes to male singers. However, this week an album emerged that may have fans of the soulful sire saying, “TP who?” […]
