Of Note
In the mid-’70s, Peter Case and Paul Collins played together in a San Francisco band called the Nerves. Appropriately enough, they played melodic, guitar-based rock ’n’ roll with a nervous intensity. Before long, the style …
“My brother Josh and I started the Silent Comedy as sort of a side project,” says Jeremiah Zimmerman. “Sort of a lark.” They were both members of an aggressive punk band at the time. “But …
The exhaustingly prolific Ty Segall has been earning a name for himself in San Francisco’s crowded lo-fi/psych/punk scene over the past few years with a string of noisy, mostly scattershot releases with an occasional glimpse …
The Dunwells are the latest players in the emerging West London folk scene to come to America. When they play the Belly Up, it will be for the first time. The latest UK folk invasion …
Veronica Falls is a London band whose debut single is a ghost story called “Found Love in a Graveyard.” On their first full-length release, they also feature songs titled “Misery,” “Bad Feeling,” and “Beachy Head,” …
Richard Terfry is a Canadian hip-hop artist who has performed under half a dozen names over the past 20 years, but he’s best known as Buck 65. His earlier work was the kind of thing …
Petunia won’t give his real name when he calls from British Columbia, where he lives, which may be a self-protective habit grown of living on the streets and having busked his way across Canada and …
The first time I heard the Los Campesinos song “By Your Hand,” I was shocked. I mean, this is a band with a reputation for being twee (all the members go by first names only, …
The Features are indie rockers from Sparta, Tennessee, an eighth-grade startup born of small-town boredom. Coming of age in a cultural backwater of less than 5000 had its limitations, and a lot of the Features’ …
Brother-sister act Fiery Furnaces has spent the past ten years earning a reputation as one of the most prolific and confounding acts in indie rock. Their songs, written mostly by Matthew Friedberger, pair classic-rock instrumentation …
If you played electric guitar in high school during the 1970s, you probably had your Steppenwolf and Bad Company and Deep Purple and Neil Young licks down, but you also knew some James Gang. Their …
“Popular” has been called an accidental alt-rock radio hit by almost every music writer who has tackled the subject of Nada Surf. It was on the radio for what seemed an eternity in 1996, and …
Fujiya & Miyagi’s David Best doesn’t really sing, he hisses in rhythm. In LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy would alternate talking with singing. Even talk-singers such as the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and Art Brut’s Eddie …
Daniel Rodriguez tells this story about the origin of his band’s name, Elephant Revival: “Our bass player busked outside the elephant cage at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago,” he says, where two elephants had …
The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica recently wrote that mainstream rock has become zombified, that even country music has shown more experimentation than rock in recent years. He raises some interesting points, but his article …
The Dirt Daubers came to be because the organizers of the Raindance film festival in London couldn’t afford airfare for the Legendary Shack Shakers. Colonel J.D. Wilkes is a member of both bands. “It started …