Of Note
The Mother Hips can sound a bit like the Eagles or the Byrds or even as psych-rock as Wilco. There are these nice, occasional arena-rock riffs, scaled way down to club size, and now and …
It’s a great name for a band, We Were Promised Jetpacks. The Glasgow indie quartet is something like a motorcycle — their songs are made for speed. The faster WWPJ plays them, the better and …
The other day I heard the new song “Wide-Eyed, Legless” by singer-songwriter Laura Veirs, and it made me think of Suzanne Vega’s 1986 single “Left of Center.” In the verses of both songs, a female …
The jazz fan may be confused by my statement that Medeski Martin & Wood is a jam band with traditional jazz roots. After all, isn’t jamming, or improvising, the province of traditional jazz? But in …
A few months ago I came across a wonderful new band with a familiar sound. There were jangly and distorted guitars, raggedy drums, aloof female vocals, and singsong melodies and everything cloaked in a haze …
In 1969 Tom Chapin was the sound guy on a film crew that spent several months at sea in search of great white sharks. The footage resulted in the spooky nature thriller Blue Water, White …
Black Lips came out of Atlanta in the early part of the 21st Century as one of the more promising garage-rock-psychedelic-revivalist bands in years. (The band prefers the term “flower-punk.”) If you were one of …
Claire Daly blows the biggest of big saxes, the baritone sax. It is a monster, maybe twice the size of its cousin, the tenor sax. It takes big air to make sound come out of …
The first time you hear White Denim’s “I Start to Run,” it sounds so great you can’t believe it. There’s powerful drumming, a driving bass line, cool stabs of guitar playing, and full-bodied shouting. In …
Like a modern-day John Lee Hooker, Otis Taylor can make an entire song from a single riff. Hooker conjured powerful emotions with little more than a guitar and a somnolent mumble. Taylor, a multi-instrumentalist and …
In 2007 I was lucky enough to see Sonic Youth play their landmark 1988 album Daydream Nation in its entirety. From opener “Teen Age Riot” to the closing “Trilogy: Eliminator Jr.,” it was awesome. For …
It is doubtful that anyone who knows who these guys are would mind my calling them a supergroup. In the classic sense of the term, that is exactly what they are — a traveling supergroup …
JamBase.com says that L.A.’s KROQ aired the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ 1996 single “Hell,” a giddy calypso thing with Sunday-school overtones, as a joke. But “Hell” became a hit. “Now the d and the a and …