Music

Little Feat may be best remembered, if it’s remembered much at all, as a kind of proto-jam band, a bunch of competent West Coast session players combining smooth, laid-back New Orleans-style R&B and light funk with Southern rock. There’s a good case for this version of history: The band has spent more time as a […]

In 1990, two average groups from the Boulder, Colo., area joined forces, and ended up creating one of the most popular jam bands to fill the void left by the decomposition of the Grateful Dead. That band, Leftover Salmon, last year gave six shows at Boulder’s Fox Theatre, then went on hiatus — perhaps permanently. […]

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 […]

What makes for a great death-metal band? The vocals — guttural roars and growls — are savage. The lyrics are painfully dark. The tempo is abrupt, the guitar-play fast and complex. And the guy on the drums is a human battering ram. Springfield gets a rare opportunity to sample some of the region’s best death-metal […]

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 […]

Victor Wooten picked up the bass at the age of 3 and never looked back. “Back then, it was a chance to be like my brothers,” Wooten says. “All my brothers were playing, and this was an opportunity for me to do what they were doing. Here was my chance to belong.” Wooten’s four brothers […]

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 […]