Music

As everyone from Homer to Oprah can attest, people love comeback stories, the heartwarming testimonials of odds-beaters and fate-cheaters, the inspirational tales of prodigal sons and hard-luck daughters. To call I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise a comeback album might make for a better story, but it wouldn’t be accurate. Bettye LaVette, the 59-year-old singer […]

Gary Puckett and the Union Gap were almost unfathomably popular in the late 1960s. Wearing Civil War regalia (complete with fake military ranks) and pounding out lush, almost bizarrely orchestrated pop, they had a series of enormous hits, beginning with the No. 1 single “Woman, Woman” in 1967. They reportedly sold more records than any […]

Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys Git (Ghostly/Shinkoyo) Stravinsky once opined that Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” is an “absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever,” but the problem with such predictions is that time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future. As soon as we invent a term to distinguish the art of […]

Cold started 2003 on a roll. After a five-year apprenticeship with fellow Florida nü-metalheads Limp Bizkit, the band was turning away from the chest-beating aggressiveness of that waning scene for a more radio-friendly (but no less angst-filled) approach. It worked: They scored a pair of hit singles (“Stupid Girl” and “Suffocate”) off the disc Year […]

Most musicians hate to be categorized, rejecting any attempts to label, contextualize, or otherwise rape their divine muse. Because they are, like, totally unique, they tell anyone who is stupid or polite enough to ask what kind of music they play that it can’t be described. “You just have to listen to it, bro,” they […]

In “Exodus Damage,” one of 14 quietly harrowing tracks on his fifth and finest CD, John Vanderslice sings, “No one ever says a word about/So much that happens in the world.” If this is true, it’s not his fault: Among other subjects, Pixel Revolt addresses the youth of Joan Crawford, the escape of a pet […]

Although no one can define it, most of us know pornography when we see it, and we do not approve. Never mind that we’re consuming it in record quantities; we still freak out at the sight of a wayward nipple. It’s strange that something as ubiquitous as porn has so few champions — and such […]

Flamin’ Groovies Shake Some Action (DBK Works) Was there ever a phrase more redolent of rock than “shake some action”? In the annals of horndog eloquence, it’s up there with “Who put the bomp in the bompalompalomp?” and “Tutti frutti oh rootie” — pure Dionysian nonsense, the urgent articulation of the inarticulate speech of the […]

There’s a fine line between “concept” and “gimmick,” and Sufjan Stevens straddles it admirably on Illinois, his fifth album and the second installment of his Fifty States project. Invoking Carl Sandburg as his muse, Stevens commemorates the Prairie State and a motley assemblage of former residents, including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Frank Lloyd Wright, […]

Lizz Wright isn’t the first jazz singer to embrace gospel, blues, folk, and rock, nor is she the first jazz singer to tell interviewers that she’s not really a jazz singer. In fact, the phenomenal success of Norah Jones’ debut, Come Away With Me, shows thatmild heterodoxy has become, if not conventional, at least lucrative. […]

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 […]

It’s been more than a decade since Brian Henneman first broke onto the national scene with the Bottle Rockets, his alt-country band from Festus, Mo. Through the years the group has survived record-label shuffles, band-member switches, and many other pitfalls of the music business. “We’re the last ones standing of those roots-rock bands from back […]