You’d think after 20 years, a nightspot would acquire ambience. Not Poor David’s Pub: The day it opened at 1924 Greenville, it looked like storage space for broken restaurant furniture, and it still looks that way. There is no jukebox, no pool table, no “decor.” When the Pub is open,…
Mothers of re-invention Pop U2 Island Records They probably never thought of themselves as an ordinary outfit, but ever since 1990 and Achtung Baby, it’s been obvious that U2 have aspirations (far) beyond that of your standard rawkenroll band, pushing themselves toward something more reflective of the life around them,…
This is country music? An institution so distanced from its past that it won’t allow living legends such as Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings airplay and ignores the heritage of past masters like the Carter Family? An industry that paves over its roots, the better to make way for the…
Hit and mess Come And Get It — A Tribute To Badfinger Various Artists Copper Records Do Me Baby! Austin Does Prince Various Artists Fume Records Forget, for a moment, that artist-based compilation albums are very much a disease foisted upon the listening public for a variety of generally greedy…
Sound and color Marisa Monte A Great Noise Metro Blue Records With A Great Noise, Brazil’s Marisa Monte announces herself as queen of MPB, or Musica Popular Brasileira. The album, half live and half studio, is a condensation of a much more elaborate two-disc package from her home. It’s not…
R.O.C.K. in the Americas If you ever wax nostalgic for rock the way it used to be–concerts as major events, music that isn’t afraid to act like it’s willing to assume a major role in your life, passion rather than posing–you should look to the nascent rock en espanol or…
What a difference a year makes. Last June 13, when Cake played the Galaxy Club, there were perhaps two dozen people in the audience–if you count each person who came and went and came back again twice. Local act UFOFU played an absolutely ragged set right before the Sacramento quintet…
Ever since The Concert for Bangladesh, albums aimed at benefiting worthy causes have been suspect, either as collections of inferior live versions of songs you already have or material adjudged not good enough for purely commercial purposes. If a Tree Falls–a collection of tunes abundant in chlorophyll and message from…
Attack of the killer indies They come in all colors: purple, yellow, blue, orange, even black vinyl. An assortment of moods and aspirations, these five 7″ singles paint a big part of the local music picture as it expands within the here and now while drawing influences from there and…
“Let me tell you a Dallas story,” says Jon Ginoli, lead singer and guitarist of the San Francisco-based trio Pansy Division. This follows a rather randy observation he called his “San Francisco story” that I promised not to print. “Right now, I’m dating a guy who moved out here from…
I was lucky enough to first see Bill Hicks in a comedy club in Austin in the early ’80s; he was a fresh voice in a medium already going stale and self-indulgent. Nobody else so perfectly captured the rage that came with having a brain during the Reagan years, that…
Slouching toward distinction Equus Plebeian Monarchs Carpe Diem Records Like another band on the local Carpe Diem label, Cafe Noir, Plebeian Monarch’s music is a reconstitution of familiar melodies. But Plebian Monarch’s Equus lacks what Cafe Noir–through its distinctly Old-World sound–presents: a truly new experience. Throughout most of the nine…
The company you keep Few artists move between genres–let alone worlds–with the ease of John Cale. Who else has been featured in a 1963 New York Times article on the performance of an 18-hour-long John Cage avant-classical composition and then, 16 years later, fronted a punk band at CBGB’s, down…
He is the king of non-flash guitar, the guitar man on an estimated 2,500 pop and R&B records of the sort where you don’t necessarily recall the guitar parts. Cornell Dupree himself can’t recall most of his discography, save for some obvious credits: Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night In Georgia,” Aretha’s…
Slacker’s paradise subUrbia Original Soundtrack DGC Records Soundtracks are like Christmas albums: ephemeral, sloppy, overrated. A complete waste of time–plastic and nasty–whereon unknown bands play for unsuspecting moviegoers or established acts unload their leftovers for extra royalty checks. Soundtracks are for the zealous consumer who wants the complete shopping experience:…
We think long and hard about our culture’s infatuation with retro- (both -grade and -spective); it beats thinking about the VISA bill. How much is too much? When does our constant reworking of the past cease to be funny or cute and begin to be genuinely hateful? Where to draw…
“Classical music for the next millennium,” said The New York Times upon the release of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II in the spring of 1994–a hefty label for a young lad from Cornwall who was only 22 at the time. Richard James–aka Aphex Twin–has gotten used to this…
Shed your skin For Those With Contempt Strap Medina Records Word on the street has it that the bright and talented Lone Star Trio committed artistic and commercial suicide by abandoning its roots. Its sudden shift from a bona fide rockabilly band–heir apparent to cat daddy Horton Heat–to a nondescript…
I Got That Feeling Debbie Davies Blind Pig Records Davies’ three-year stint playing guitar for Albert Collins won her blues credibility her otherwise thin gifts would not have gained her. She’s a feisty instrumentalist, but her weak voice and bland material bar her from any measure of greatness. Here she…
“Hey; kids, let’s put on a show!” has been a hallowed pop catchphrase since Mickey Rooney played Judge Hardy’s sincere but trouble-prone son Andy. Rock ‘n’ roll reduced the prerequisites to a few instruments, drums, and electrical outlets, and youngsters across the globe have been cleaving the night with their…
Fifty miles of elbow room The movie Tender Mercies is about as evocative a movie about a place (in this case, Texas) as has yet been made; not so much for the acting or story (both of which are excellent), but for the cinematography–particularly the shots in which the sky…
Last year I did a phone interview with Scott Thompson, the openly gay co-star of The Larry Sanders Show and founding member of the defunct, much-lamented Kids in the Hall. We’d hooked up to discuss the Kids’ celluloid swan song, Brain Candy, but spent more time kvetching about the state…
