Of Note
In Pikeville, Tennessee, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Earl Thomas is money. It is a small town, explains his friend Michael Kinsman, and aside from a bluegrass performer or two, no one has ever made …
The Dum Dum Girls look cool, like a 1960s Catholic-school girl gang hiding switchblades behind their Danelectro guitars. But let’s talk about how they sound. From their earliest home-recorded singles in 2008, the Dum Dum …
Sounding as free-spirited as Brian Wilson and as tight as anything from the Tom Tom Club, Animal Feelings — the latest from Rafter Roberts — comes off like a white guy’s take on Parliament-Funkadelic, a …
On a recent episode of the radio show Sound Opinions, rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis talked about the brilliance and occasional cheesiness of Cheap Trick. To illustrate the former, they mentioned phenomenal classics …
Euro futurepop duo VNV Nation picks up where New Wave left off, but the VNV approach adds weight and heft to the otherwise limp-wristed dreck that pop radio drowned in back in the ’70s and …
There was a time in the ’80s when British indie bands had a predictable pattern: First become press darlings in the U.K., slowly conquer the hearts of suburban American teenagers, and then hit the big …
What some have called a huge loss for the rock band Chicago is a big gain for fans of an off-and-on-again soul band with its roots in the psychedelic ’60s called the Sons of Champlin. …
If you’ve read anything about Florida’s Surfer Blood — and in its short life so far, the band has amassed a lot of press — you’ve read that they sound a little like indie-rock giants …
Whatever happened to the musicians in all those obscure ’60s garage rock bands documented on Nuggets? Some of them went on to bigger and better bands, but most didn’t. Some of them got drafted and …
It’s a safe bet to assume that nobody plays air guitar to old Stephen Stills records. Better known to the masses as one of the voices of Crosby, Stills & Nash, it might come as …
The Mexican Institute of Sound is not an institute, nor is it much of a band. Rather, it is the side project of one man, a Mexico City–based record company executive named Camilo Lara, whom …
The best funk band working today is not from the U.S., where funk was invented, but from Leeds, England, where funk and soul have been undergoing a revival for some time. On the soul/R&B side, …
Usually, when a band plays one of their classic albums in its entirety, it’s to mark a tenth anniversary or something like that. And usually the question raised is, have they run out of new …