Of Note
If hell has a jukebox, it plays black metal. Taken as a whole, the genre’s anti-Christian, pro-Satan polemic — with distorted guitars, bursts of drumming, and vocals that resemble the howling of a tormented beast …
Jeremy Messersmith has a voice so gentle that it makes Elliott Smith sound like Tom Waits. It’s the kind of voice that’s made for lullabies, and I once saw Messersmith use it to charm a …
Continental is Rick Barton’s newest band. They are presently on the road and would like to crash at your house. It says so on their Facebook page. “We have sleeping bags, will need floor space.” …
A rockumentary about London-born Paul Hudson has been in the works for years. Hudson, 55, better known as H.R. (Human Rights), formed Bad Brains with his brother Earl Hudson, Dr. Know (Gary Miller), and Darryl …
New Orleans is famous for its traditional jazz, funk, and R&B, not its indie pop. So it made some sense a couple of years ago when the city’s indie-pop duo Generationals appeared on the national …
Kelly Crisp and Ivan Howard were married the week they formed the Rosebuds while still at college in North Carolina. Merge Records released their folk-rock debut, The Rosebuds Make Out, in 2003. Two CDs later, …
The gifted Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche is not yet 30 years old, but he has spent most of the past decade trying to make a big breakthrough as a star in America. He’s tried his …
When Merrill Garbus records under the typographically difficult name tUnE-yArDs, she often builds her songs around a little ukulele, her remarkable voice, and looped samples. Loops are everywhere in music these days, of course, but …
Lest we forget: Ted Nugent’s three-chord opening to “Cat Scratch Fever” was schoolin’ for a generation of adolescent guitarists during the late 1970s. You didn’t even have to know how to play the rest of …
A few weeks ago, The New York Times had an interesting article about how white rappers had moved from being outsiders in hip-hop to being the people carrying the torch of the old school — …
Critics called A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out electro-dance and emo and vaudeville, but I heard power pop. In many ways, Panic! at the Disco reminded me of the Nerves, a 1970s pre-new-wave band that …
Young Widows is a band from Louisville, Kentucky, and they play the kind of music that has kept their hometown on the indie-rock map since the days of Slint: moody, atmospheric, guitar-based stuff with vocals …
Lollipop, the Meat Puppets’ new country-rockish CD, isn’t even close to the sun-baked 1990’s desert thrash that defined the trio. If you’re looking for anything akin to 1994’s Too High to Die, you won’t find …
Retro-minded indie rockers have already mined almost every other era of pop history, and so many are now exploring late-’70s soft rock. You know the stuff: melodic, expertly produced, and oddly impersonal — Hall and …
“Some people said they wouldn’t even listen to us because of the band name.” Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. is Josh Epstein and Daniel Zott, a Detroit-based indie-pop duo. Their first EP was called Horse Power, …
You can’t make this stuff up: Acrassicauda, a Saddam-era Iraqi thrash band, survived the war but lost their equipment — and the entire building they practiced in — to a missile strike. They suffered death …