For more than a decade, Elvis Costello has been toiling away in the gap that separates blind ambition and tedious experimentation — a willing slave to the concepts and conceits of high art, a poster boy for creative indulgence, able to rock out only with other people’s songs. In the…
Los Lobos Colossal Head (Warner Bros.) All artists show their influences in their work. What separates the sublime from the hapless in this regard is the ability to do it without being crass. And there’s certainly nothing crass about Colossal Head, the seventh long player from Los Lobos. Genius is…
“The blues is alright” goes the refrain of the anthem of the same name, a regional Southern hit back in the mid-Eighties for its writer, vocalist/guitarist Little Milton Campbell, a 40-year veteran of the blues club circuit. The song has become Milton’s signature track and is already something of a…
This is going to be difficult for me — for all of us, I expect — because this isn’t going to be some misty recollection, but rather the dredging up of a very specific and humiliating sliver of the past. Which means what we’re dealing with is, in essence, disclosure…
Michael Timmins readily acknowledges the irony surrounding the biggest hit to date by the Cowboy Junkies, the Canadian group for which he serves as guitarist and songwriter. Said hit — a mournful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” — came in 1994, a full six years after it was…
The Specials Today’s Specials (Virgin/Kuff) You can’t say the time isn’t right for the triumphant return of the Specials, the English group that way back in the late Seventies combined punk’s rant-and-roll dynamics with the slippery grooves of Jamaican ska. Close to fifteen years after the Specials broke up, their…
Your First, Your Last, Your Everything: Four years ago, before his umpteenth comeback, before his 1994 The Icon Is Love album and its “Practice What You Preach” single both went to number one on the R&B charts, Barry White, the grand pooh-bah of le musique de fuque, lolled in the…
A lot of things seem weird to Amanda Green. The 24-year-old singer/songwriter uses the word a lot to describe, in general, her personal life and, in particular, the confluence of professional events ranging from her first club gig last August (a solo date on the patio of Churchill’s Hideaway) to…
Guided by Voices Under the Bushes Under the Stars (Matador) Three albums after the rock press discovered them in 1993 (and nine since the band formed about ten years ago), Guided by Voices remains the rarest of indie-rock rarities — a critically hoohahed outfit that actually deserves the hosannas. Robert…
“It’s kinda hectic, man,” says Wyclef “Clef” Jean, rapper, songwriter, and sonic engineer for the Fugees. “A lot of things are going on.” And, Jean should have added, those things are pretty damn nice A the kinds of things that happen only to a band experiencing a commercial breakthrough. The…
Love and Rockets has achieved an almost unheard-of feat with its new album Sweet F.A.: The three-man band has created a near-perfect alternative makeout record. Sweet F.A. boasts sensual, shimmery soundscapes punctuated by twangy, languid guitar lines and ultra-sultry rhythms. Listening to the hourlong set is like taking a swim…
Scattered throughout the songs of Archers of Loaf are moments when you’d swear everything will explode in a discordant burst — when the tension builds to a point where it threatens to rend the quartet into a thousand pieces of bone and flesh, spraying shrapnel of guitar wood, drumheads, and…
The instrument seems such a natural fit in his large, graceful hands that it’s hard to imagine a time when Buddy Guy wasn’t playing the guitar. Truth is, the 59-year-old blues legend had no idea what a guitar was as a child. “I grew up on a farm near Simmesport,…
Mike Boudet doesn’t like talking about Enjoy the Cancer, the EP he has self-released under the name Lounge Act. He says it makes him uncomfortable, and on a recent afternoon at Tapeworm, the Miami studio Boudet co-owns, he’s clearly ill at ease. The 21-year-old singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist squirms nervously…
More than any other group that emerged during the Amerindie boom of the early Eighties, the Replacements summarized everything that I had ever loved about rock and roll. R.E.M. was great, but I always found Michael Stipe to be an infuriatingly obtuse songwriter and I always wanted guitarist Peter Buck…
Brother J.T. and Vibrolux Music for the Other Head (Siltbreeze) John “J.T.” Terlesky has more extracurricular music projects than anyone this side of George Clinton. In addition to his regular gig as frontman for garage rockers Original Sins, Terlesky has released a slew of savagely bent albums and singles over…
The Grifters Ain’t My Lookout (Sub Pop) For the past six years, the Grifters have made some beautifully fractured and schizophrenic music — loose yet deceptively complex, chaotic and noisy but susceptible to moments of majestic pop splendor. Over the course of three albums, an EP, and a slew of…
In a cockfighting-arena-turned-nightclub perched on a sheer cliff, high on a mountain overlooking Port-au-Prince, the eleven members of Kanpech crowd on-stage on a warm Sunday night in late March. Frederic “Fredo” Pierre Louis, the band’s cherub-faced leader, sporting short braids and a blue print dashiki, throws his hands in the…
Steve Earle I Feel Alright (Warner Bros.) Alejandro Escovedo With These Hands (Rykodisc) Survivors are nothing new in rock and roll. Survivors with something interesting to say, however, don’t come rolling out of rehab or obscurity every day. Alejandro Escovedo and Steve Earle are survivors. Escovedo has logged time in…
They chose their name as a joke, but the trio of rock and roll goofballs known as the Presidents of the United States of America has been the object of intense media questioning about their intentions in Campaign ’96. Therefore the band has released the following statement through press secretary…
The artistic demise of Rod Stewart is a cataclysmic event in rock and roll history, a betrayal of his abilities and potential that has been written about many times by many esteemed rock scribes. No piece of criticism, however, better illustrates the husky-voiced singer’s mid-Seventies nosedive than a comparison of…
When you flip through the CD racks and see compilations of who-cares Eighties bands such as Wire Train and Translator, it’s tempting to think that nearly every sound and aural nuance ever committed to Edison cylinder or magnetic tape is now available on digital plastic. You’d be wrong. Some very…
