Chatham County Line won last year’s Rockygrass band contest in part due to singer/guitarist Dave Wilson’s ability to change a guitar string mid-song without missing a lyric. The ovation after that song made the judge’s job easy. None of us that they were already signed to the excellent indie label Yep Roc Records. […]
I’m a sucker for a good musical scream. So when I heard some honest yelling in the sound clips on the Avett Brothers website, I knew I’d found something. The Avetts, banjo/guitar-playing brothers Scott and Seth and upright bassist Bob Crawford, are an aggressive folk trio. Like a lot of these bands, […]
What better summer reading than a history of the Beach Boys and the Southern California experience. Or so I thought. Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience is a laborious history of everything distantly related to the title. I read music biographies to […]
With all the talk about “indie rock” in the past year, Michael Azerrad’s excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life should be required reading. Over the course of 500+ pages, Azerrad covers the birth of the American indie underground of the 1980s - a time when “indie” meant Do-It-Yourself independence rather than the […]
I always wonder how the occasional bluegrass band gets the attention of the indie press when there are about a hundred other comparable bands vying for the spot. It would be nice to think the band is just plain awesome. But it’s more likely a matter of label connections, personal connections, and, well, […]
Gang of Four are back. Rhino’s expanded edition of Entertainment! comes out on Tuesday, their current reunion tour is garnering nothing but love, and the current crop of disciples have re-inspired some great rock language.
In a description of their upcoming stand at the Irving Plaza, The New Yorker writes “The Gang’s danceable […]
Rolling Stone’s David Fricke recently gave Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming Devils & Dust CD a whopping 4.5 stars. Gasp. I have not heard the CD, but given what I’ve read about it this seems a bit generous. (Maybe they were just turned on by “Reno” in which the Boss explicitly recounts an […]