Australia’s Boxcar was a lot of fun while they lasted. It was easy to ignore them because they sounded so much like New Order. There were many bands finding their sound in the nineties and exploring with keyboards. I guess the dour, depressing lyrics and vocalist David Smith really, really, really, REALLY sounded like Bernard [...]
In my experience people either love or hate the Dandy Warhols. Their forays into TV soundtracks attract some folks but they wind up at odds with the early indie fans. The band members themselves don’t always make friends wherever they go (the lead singer of I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House wrote a [...]
I lucked into a copy of Prose Combat in ‘96 or ‘97. I didn’t understand much, if any, of the lyrics but I loved the beats, the flow and the sound of MC Solaar’s voice. I lost track of what his new stuff sounded like but year after year I would dig up that album [...]
These folks were part of my latest batch of discs for Pop Culture Press and they won me over after a few listens. The sixties influenced psychedelic sound to many of the tracks didn’t do it for me but deeper down in the album are two absolute gems. “Wishful Thinking” and “Subject of the Kill” [...]
Shonen knife were one of those bands that you had to get turned on to by a friend or a review in a music mag. They were as radio ready as any other band in the early nineties but only college radio was playing them (and even then the DJ had to have inside [...]
When you talk about jazz singers Jeri Southern inhabits a strange place. All my jazzbo friends hate her lack of improv skills and the absence of the dark, smoky feel of Ella, Billie or Nina. The pop kids hated her lack of hooky delivery or crazy arrangements. I fully acknowledge almost everyone from Julie London [...]
“Sick, Sober and Sorry” is one of those songs that I always imagine in the background when I see a bar fight in Western film. You know the one where the fists are flying, the bottles broken and the piano player lifts his mug of beer as a body slides by on the way [...]