Music
Rock musings
From the time I left campus last spring until June 14, I had Radiohead on my mind. Mine was an obsession that verged on downright mania, transforming my usually tepid opinions into axioms and outright platitudes.
Stroke This
Teenagers filled the Electric Factory on Sunday, April 23 to see a band that hipsters would say is so out they might even be considered pastiche.
Five Bands Team Up To Fight Suicide
In 2001, Louis Posen thought up the Take Action! Tour, rounded up some punk rock bands, and sent them across the country to promote suicide prevention.
Artist to Watch
After opening for indie rock sensations the Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, it was only a matter of time before the Atlanta-via-Athens, Georgia group Snowden got picked up by a prominent independent label.
Easy living the hard way
Aw, it must be so hard for pop stars when they become successful. Today, camera phones and weblogs smudge the line between fan and critic, between celebrity and citizen.
The Philly Music Scene
New York's gone totally yuppie and Los Angeles was never that hip anyway, so what's the independent music scene to do?
Kicking it up a notch
Considering the recent success of Brooklyn-based indie rockers the French Kicks, it's hard to believe that only a few years back they were playing a gig to drunk kids at an unnamed Philly frat house.
Flying Coach
In the wake of Ashlee Simpson's lip-synch debacle on SNL nearly two years ago, Kelefa Sanneh wrote a diatribe against its most strident critics in The New York Times. "The Rap Against Rockism" asked "Could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?" (A rockist, of course, being a subscriber to the creed of authenticity and a strict guitars-drums-bass worldview.) In other words, is "alternative rock," in all its monikers, yet another white boys' club defined by its own exclusivity? Coachella, a documentary on the six-year-old Indio, California music festival of the same name, incessantly begs such questions by refusing to play to its strengths.
It's Gettin' Heavy
Much of the hype surrounding the Flaming Lips' long-in-the-works 12th album jumped on frontman Wayne Coyne's murmurs about "more guitars." The Oklahoma City veterans' last two albums, 1999's brilliant The Soft Bulletin and 2002's kinda brilliant Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, eschewed the band's tattered punk threads for heady, orchestrated prog.
Philly's main men
Who: Philadelphia's own Man Man Genre: Experimental melodic mayhem Sounds like: If Frank Zappa and Tom Waits had a child out of wedlock Songs to download: "10 lb.
Starring a Band with an Asterisk
Their music has been dubbed new-wave, pop-punk and various combinations thereof, but stellastarr* just likes to call it "rock." Between watching soft-core porns and touring to promote their album, Harmonies for the Haunted, stellastarr*'s pretty busy these days. Street: How would you define your music?
Putting the Woo Back into Wu-tang
Real thugs never die. Unfortunately, they also have trouble staying creative. Ghostface Killah's newest album, Fishscale, is yet another record to emerge from Wu-Tang's prolific machinery.
MTV BMOC
Dov Kogen began singing and writing songs at the ripe age of three, when he took the tune of Jewish hymn "Adon Olam" and set it to the one-word lyric "guitar." "I didn't actually play guitar back then," the psychology major and music minor says, "so I sort of strummed my aunt's 30-year-old classical guitar," which he would actually learn to play in the fourth grade.
O welcome back, karen O
With the wild success of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs's debut album Fever to Tell, the musical trio from New York set a remarkably high standard for itself.
The Grateful Dead meets Picasso
Originally J. Leto and his brother's side project, 30 Seconds to Mars has recently gained a reputation in its own right.
Indie rock that you can happily gyrate to
It is not often that a band produces something truly unique. Almost every successful indie group today somehow derives its sound from Morrissey or Bowie or even Byrne.
A Penn band you actually want to hear
Penn's very own the Pale Nimbus knows something is missing from this university's campus. And so do their fans.
Turn the stereo up
Since their 1991 debut, Stereolab has functioned as one of the most influential -- if under the radar -- bands of the pseudo-pop electronica circuit.
Philly Rockers Fight for Visibility
"The last time we were out on tour was two or three years ago. We've actually just been recording this album, and watching the children.
