One after another, cars poured out of the Wal-Mart parking lot in the quaint town of Manchester, Tenn. Thursday morning.
"We are young despite the years we are concern/ We are hope despite the times." So sings Michael Stipe on R.E.M.'s classic "These Days," the band's statement of purpose and a tune that had been rattling in my head a full week prior to an early summer gig at the University of California, Berkeley campus. The song rocks, no questions asked, but it's also slightly cringe-inducing, should you picture it played by three middle-aged hipsters - one frumpy (Peter Buck), one bald (Stipe) and one timelessly nerdy (Mike Mills). It also begs the question, are these guys full of it? Twenty years on, are once-ballsy claims now as hollow as one of Buck's signature Rickenbackers? In short, does R.E.M. still matter?
Joe Loffredo leads a double life. By day, he sports a button-down shirt tucked into khaki slacks. By night, he dons a bandana and high-top sneakers.
While you may not run into Soulja Boy on campus, critiquing local musicians can be risky. In the attempt to discover local music and at the suggestion of a fellow writer, below is a local band review.
Not many guitar heroes make it through their high school years without getting slapped with the dropout tag, so it's even more impressive that Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo gets to flaunt a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. A decade-long stint with the Ivy League's finest must afford one all kinds of vital knowledge, and yet Cuomo still can't wrap his horn-rimmed head around the law of diminishing returns.
Rock is not dead. We can thank all of the recent band reunions for attempting to repeat what was once good. A flip through the pages of Rolling Stone magazine reveals more and more bands coming out of retirement.
Collecting dust isn't a CD's purpose. In hopes of finding a worthy album to review, I snagged a stash occupying space in the Alligator office.
British trance-rocker and Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce nearly died in 2005 because of - get this - pneumonia. Go figure. When you've had addiction problems with heroin, landing in the accident and emergency (A&E) ward because of respiratory complications is kind of like tiptoeing through a minefield only to contract tetanus from a rusty nail. Irony aside, the near-death experience yielded "Songs in A&E," a rock 'n' roll record that could very easily be confused for an electric requiem.
His birth name is Shawn Dalton, but even his mother affectionately calls him "Glyph."
The show that revived Paula Abdul's career and hooked audiences for six seasons has lost its grip on American viewers. Though the show still tops the ratings list, the success of "American Idol" is fading.
Goodbyes are tough.
The next few months are the prime time for music lovers to catch a great show. And if you're looking to see one good concert this year, go see Kanye West's Glow in the Dark Tour. This show was surrounded by a halo of hype from the get-go. It received stellar reviews all around, and when Entertainment Weekly gave the show a B+, it got an earful from Kanye who responded on his blog, "What's a B+ mean? I'm an extremist. It's either pass or fail! A+ or F-!"
Matt Pond called me in a whisper aboard his tour bus Saturday afternoon.
For some, summer means no school, endless hours of basking in the sun, and milking your parents for money before you go back to "adult duties" in the fall. For me, though, it means paying absurdly high prices on Ticketmaster to see some of pop music's biggest acts perform extravagant sets in not-ideal-for-live-music venues, like NBA arenas. To help you decide what to check out this summer, here are few of my picks.
It is not every day that you walk into your first period class as an aspiring musician and walk out with a manager, but that is exactly what happened for members of the Florida pop group Mark & James.
Anton Newcombe isn't your run-of-the-mill cult figure.
I'm tired.
You have probably never heard of Estelle, but you will shortly.
Blame it on the blogs. Blame it on the fickle keyboard elitists who promised us that Tapes 'n Tapes was the second coming of Pavement, the perfectly refined seed of Frank Black and Kim Deal, the revolution that would reclaim the Minneapolis post-punk high ground long abandoned by the Replacements.
The mission seemed simple enough: In an age of torrent files and Hype Machine, I set out to see if there was any music left uncorrupted by the ongoing wars between corporate America and 20-something hipsters downloading off or blogs or the "OC" soundtrack series.
Solutions by The State News
