Some bands are easy to qualify. On the very first listen to their very first record, any listener can have the band in question figured out – where they’ve been, where they’re going, how they’re going to get there and, in some cases, each stop that they’re going to make along the way – and said group will simply live out the predestined act precisely to expectation. That isn’t a slight necessarily, such was the case with musical institutions including...

I think we've reached a point where Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan can be referred to in the context of "Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan," without having to mention their respective former bands to make the average indie-informed reader think "Oh yeah, those guys." Having said that, I feel the need to keep latecomers in the loop by naming them anyway (Belle & Sebastian; Screaming Trees, et al), and in doing so destroy my whole hypothesis. But oh well. That...

Anjulie, the latest signing to Hear Music, is set to release her debut album in the Spring but as a little teaser, she’s releasing “The Boom EP” and a free mp3 single, “Boom,” simply to let everyone know she ain’t no joke. Sounds coming from this song alone evoke late-90s down tempo like Lamb and Laika, soulful vibes of Erykah Badu, swanky 60s-era Nancy Sinatra, all while taking off where Ms. Crackhead herself, Amy Winehouse, left off. “Boom” will soon...

Anjulie, the latest signing to Hear Music, is set to release her debut album in the Spring, but as a little teaser, she’s releasing “The Boom EP” and a free mp3 single, “Boom,” simply to let everyone know she ain’t no joke. Sounds coming from this song alone evoke late-90s down tempo like Lamb and Laika, swanky 60s-era Nancy Sinatra, all while taking off where Ms. Crackhead herself, Amy Winehouse, left off. “Boom” will soon saturate the blogs and provide...

Some bands are easy to qualify. On the very first listen to their very first record, any listener can have the band in question figured out – where they’ve been, where they’re going, how they’re going to get there and, in some cases, each stop that they’re going to make along the way – and said group will simply live out the predestined act precisely to expectation. That isn’t a slight necessarily, such was the case with musical institutions including...

On paper, adapting The Beatles' songbook for a theatrical production sounds like the easiest thing in the world because, on a purely superficial level, it has already been done; at moments during the runtime of the recently produced Beatles-esque feature film, Across The Universe, there are very surrealist scenes that express – by turns – a very literal or very impressionist representation of The Beatles’ music and because of that a bit of creative license had to be taken (in...

Anyone that has become familiar with Sloan since they first appeared seventeen years ago can tell you that they are a rare sort of band. When the Peppermint EP and the following full-length Smeared erupted in 1992, they revived the precedent previously upheld by such classic rock bands as The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones that a band needn’t have only one chosen face or voice; while groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden had Kurt Cobain, Eddie...

If one were to chart the trajectory of AC/DC’s career path to date, it would suddenly become noticeable that it flows together about like a gear-head’s Cinderella story. Beginning in Australia, the brothers Young, along with Phil Rudd on drums and Mark Evans on bass turned over the ignition and immediately got the engine firing on all cylinders (High Voltage, T.N.T.) before dropping into gear and cruising to the line (the North American release of High Voltage was actually a...

The terms “classic” and “timeless,” as defined by Webster’s dictionary, are “A creation of the highest excellence” and “unaffected by time” respectively and, particularly in the context of pop music in general and the work of Jimi Hendrix in specific, get thrown around an awful lot. Because of that fact, both terms have been devalued (because they’re so over used – not necessarily because they’re used in the case of Hendrix’ catalog) so much that their meaning should...

By the time Mountain Goats front man John Darnielle put pen to paper and inked a deal with indie-rock institution 4AD in 2002, the band had already made a significant impression on the underground. Formed in 1991, Mountain Goats (though the only consistent member in all that time has been Darnielle) had already released no less than thirteen full-length albums since 1995 (numbers vary, of course, because of the vortex around which the indie-verse revolves; eventually records fade into obscurity...