Music

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]