Imagine a story where a guy is invited to watch Bob Dylan in the studio one day in 1965. Despite not knowing how to play the instrument, the guy sits down at the organ and …

Political folk-punk band This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb has been around for more than ten years, but it feels weird to be writing about them in a big weekly newspaper. In an age of …

There’s a funk band playing just about every night in some packed club somewhere, and the best or most famous funk bands tour all the time. But funk bands typically don’t sell a lot of …

The Grapes of Wrath, you probably remember from high school, is John Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel of the working poor. The novel exposed some of the nightmares behind the California dream and helped win Steinbeck …

Los Angeles five-piece Darker My Love takes their name from a song by the punk band TSOL, and one of their two vocalists used to be in the hardcore band the Nerve Agents, but that …

The Uglysuit is woefully misnamed. This Oklahoma City band clothes its songs in so much beauty it’s almost embarrassing. “Chicago,” the standout track on the Uglysuit’s self-titled debut album, has got a chorus so uplifting …

Holly Golightly is probably best known as the special guest who shows up at the end of the White Stripes’ 2003 album Elephant in a duet with Jack White on “It’s True That We Love …

The economy is in a shambles, the record industry is in freefall, and, God help us, Celine Dion is back in the top ten. So where can you find a success story in rock ’n’ …

The Vivian Girls were the heroines of a 15,000-page novel by Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor who died in obscurity, only to posthumously become one of the most famous and influential outsider artists in the …

The Black Lips are famous for doing crazy things onstage — such as playing their guitars with their willies — so if you can find a performer who has shocked the Black Lips with his …

If a band is going to release a self-titled album, it’s usually the band’s debut. If it’s the band’s third album, it’s a sign that the band is trying to reinvent itself. Secret Machines did …

Kaki King first started getting attention about five years ago as a short, young woman who could play the guitar like a brilliant maniac. Her style, inspired by the late Michael Hedges, was as much …

Brightblack Morning Light is one of the leading players in the music scene that’s sometimes called freak folk, sometimes called the new, weird Americana, but is probably more accurately called the new hippie. And I’m …

Jolie Holland didn’t come from out of nowhere, she just sounded that way. The Texas-raised singer-songwriter had already been a founding member of the Vancouver, B.C., old-timey band the Be Good Tanyas before she moved …

You get a lot of practice singing when you have a baby. You try to get the little one to sleep by singing all the lullabies you can think of, and quickly you realize you …

In the mid-’90s, when every other musician in the musician-rich city of Portland, Oregon, was cultivating a lo-fi sound and a low-budget look, the Dandy Warhols sounded, dressed, and acted like rock stars. In the …

I leafed through a fashion magazine supplement recently and saw yet another feature on Goth style (fashion magazines love Goth), this one featuring a gallery of style inspirations over the years. And right there was …

There have been a lot of Nick Caves over the years. He’s been the skinny Australian guy clowning around onstage with the chaotic-sounding Birthday Party; the junkie leader of the Bad Seeds, telling tales of …

Someday, someone will write a musical history of the first decade of the 21st Century and come up with definitive answers to these questions: What was with all that grandiose indie pop? The 17-member bands …

The dollar is weak and the euro is strong, and the streets of American cities are humming with the sound of European tourists — often with their arms full of shopping bags from the Apple …

A few years back, rock critic Chuck Klosterman listed Matthew Sweet as one of the most accurately rated (as opposed to over- or underrated) artists in rock history, saying, “Every Matthew Sweet album has only …

Carla Bozulich is probably best known as the leader of 1990s band the Geraldine Fibbers, who played a sprawling, majestic, cathartic kind of music that could hardly be contained by as humble a term as …

Or, the Whale — that’s how they write it — is a seven-piece band from San Francisco with some country and folk instruments (banjo, acoustic guitar, pedal steel) mixed in with distorted guitars, drums, some …

The Hush Sound came together in late 2004 when pianist-singer Greta Salpeter and guitarist-singer Bob Morris, who met as kids, started writing songs in Chicago. The duo became a quartet with the addition of bassist …

It was a few years ago when a friend told me about a band called Comets on Fire. I would hear other descriptions of them later — most labeling them as “heavy psych” — but …

When Earlimart started releasing records eight years ago, the Los Angeles band had quirky song structures and fuzzy guitars and garnered a lot of comparison to the Pixies. Later, the band’s songs slowed down, Aaron …

Earlier this year the Harry and the Potters duo announced on their website that they had broken up: The two members could not agree on how to continue as a band now that J.K. Rowling …

The Retribution Gospel Choir is a side project of the long-running indie outfit Low, but it’s a side project that stretches the meaning of the term. Two of the three members of Low play in …

The Led Zeppelin reunion got all the big headlines last year, but the really good reviews went to singer Robert Plant’s collaboration with bluegrass star Alison Krauss. The resulting album, Raising Sand, produced by T-Bone …

Montreal’s Unicorns had good songs, but they were one of those indie pop acts that gets by mostly on goofy charm. Their cheap-sounding instruments, unpolished playing, and silly onstage puppet shows were part of their …

Here’s how I imagine the recording process went for Times New Viking’s Rip It Off: Guitar, keyboards, drums, and shouted vocals play at maximum volume around a cell phone. Studio receives call, presses sound directly …

Please bear with me for a brief history lesson: In the French Revolution, the sans-culottes were a dangerous element of the Third Estate. They were poor, and they wore long work pants instead of the …

The Black Angels take their name from a Velvet Underground song, use a photo of Nico on their T-shirt designs, and proudly declare their allegiance to the grand tradition of psychedelic music in their home …

The music blog Idolator recently posted an item called “Three Indie Rock Nightmares.” My favorite: “I’m stuck in a world where indie rock has slowly transformed from amateurish, enthusiastic rock with zine-fueled anti-consumerist, small-community leanings …

There’s a song called “Oil Man’s War” on Canadian alt-country singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards’s new album Asking for Flowers, but it’s not about you-know-who or you-know-where. No, it’s the story of a young American couple, Bobby …

“I went to school with 27 Jennifers/ 16 Jenns, 10 Jennies, and then there was her,” sings Mike Doughty in the song “27 Jennifers” from the 2003 album Skittish/Rockity Roll. The song itself is pretty …

It was legendary Motown bassist James Jamerson who proved that the electric bass guitar needn’t simply follow along with the drums in a generic fortification of the bottom end. With Jamerson began a new mode …

Minneapolis madman Mark Mallman was in between songs at a 2006 show when his guitarist started fiddling around with a riff from “When Doves Cry.” According to a reviewer, Mallman became angry and shouted, “Fuck …

If you look at the photos on Scout Niblett’s website, you might not think that all of them picture the same person. In one she’s a pretty blonde riding a bike. In another she’s a …

May Fire’s “You Make It Right” starts off with some fuzzy guitar and singer-guitarist-keyboardist Cat Tasso singing a simple melody through a distorted microphone. She sounds like a drunk and surly Kim Deal, in a …

Jay Reatard is the questionable stage name of prolific Memphis resident Jay Lindsey, who has been recording and releasing music for about ten years as a solo artist and with the Reatards, the Lost Sounds, …

As the millennium turned, Built to Spill was one of the bigger names in indie rock, even if the band wasn’t actually on an indie label anymore. Singer and songwriter Doug Martsch had gone from …

One night I was flipping channels on TV and came across someone interviewing shred-guitar hero Joe Satriani. Satch was talking about how his music expresses his innermost feelings. At that moment the TV editors cut …

Everyone from Morrissey to Mötley Crüe name-checks the New York Dolls as an influence, but no one really sounds like them. Hardly anyone even tries. The Sex Pistols would not have happened without the New …

The Raveonettes are a duo, and their sound is all about dualism and contrast — noisy guitars and careful vocal harmonies, Danish accents and American musical references, modern bluntness and retro song structures. But the …

Last week I interviewed Stan Ridgway of Wall of Voodoo, and something he said has been nagging at me: “The music that I always found to be most valuable to me when I was younger …

“We were not really part of that whole MTV, new wavey thing,” says Stan Ridgway, speaking about his old band, Wall of Voodoo. This comment may come as a surprise to the many poor souls …

A couple of weeks ago I went to a party for an indie rock listserv I’ve belonged to for a long time and found myself listening to DJs spinning ’70s hard rock bands like Starz …

Does this ever happen to you? You’re listening to your iPod on shuffle mode and a song comes on that you just can’t identify. It’s your collection, you put it on the iPod — how …

Los Angeles band Health (or, as the band members like to spell it, HEALTH) has two MySpace pages — one to showcase the band’s noise rock and one to show off electronic remixes of their …