Last of the Breed

The album name overstates the case a little. Last time I checked the entertainment obituaries, George Jones, Ralph Stanley, and Charlie Louvin were still around (the octogenarian Charlie with a great new album, at that). So Last of the Breed, the title of the new 2-CD collaboration between Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price isn’t entirely accurate. But why quibble? The fact is that these three grizzled amigos represent the best of a brand of country music that hasn’t really been in vogue since the Reagan administration, before Garth Brooks discovered wireless mics and Shania Twain figured out how...  read more

Post-Rock Roundup—Yndi Halda and Six Parts Seven

I am a sucker for post-rock serenity and bombast—the slow, dirge-like buildups, followed by the cathartic payoffs where massed guitars create sonic tsunamis that wash away the winter snows that dominate the landscapes of these morose, deadly serious musicians.  The three best-known bands who work this genre—Mogwai, Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (formerly Godspeed You Black Emperor!; you know the winters are long when you find yourself playing with exclamation marks) have created a handful of masterpieces.  Not surprisingly, they’ve inspired a horde of imitators, some very good (Explosions in the Sky, A Silver Mount Zion, Do Make...  read more

America the Beautiful

I have a theory about bands with geographic names:  there is an inverse relationship between quality of music and geographic expanse. Thus, the bands that are named after insignificant or modest geographic features (Okkervil River) are actually pretty good. But the music gets progressively worse as you move from small towns (Fountains of Wayne) to big cities (Boston), then states (Kansas), then countries (Japan). Eventually you end up with Asia, at which point you declare musical war and unilaterally nuke your iPod. By that logic, the band America should be fairly dismal. Maybe they were named after a country, and...  read more

Graham Parker—Don’t Tell Columbus

Graham Parker hasn’t been an Angry Young Man for a long time now.  Early on in his career he was lumped in with Elvis Costello.  They both had the hipster glasses, the short, spiky hair, and the penchant for creating petulant, supremely literate diatribes against anything and everything.  But sometime in the late ‘80s Graham Parker committed the unpardonable sin of all Angry Young Men: he got happy.  He got married, settled down to domestic bliss, and started writing songs about his kids chasing butterflies. For those of you who may not have paid attention since, oh, 1979’s masterpiece Squeezing...  read more

For Sneaky Pete’s Sake

Pete Kleinow – “Sneaky Pete” to legions of country rock fans – died on January 9th in a California nursing home. He was 72 years old, and for the past two years had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It is painful to contemplate the musical memories that were slowly eroding away. And now they are gone. I grew up hating country music, and for the first two decades of my life considered it the exclusive domain of inbred cretins and rednecks. Sneaky Pete, along with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, changed all that. Pete played the pedal steel guitar as...  read more

Indie Superstars, and Other Conundrums

The morose, black-clad, cappuccino-sipping legions are about to get happy, or as happy as morose, black-clad legions ever get. Three of the biggest indie bands in the world are set to release new albums in the next few weeks. And soon the fiercely independent masses will genuflect in unison and proclaim their everlasting hipness. It’s a public relations dream and a logician’s nightmare: selling mass-marketed music to people who guard each shrink-wrapped disc and downloaded song as their closely guarded secret treasure, along with several hundred thousand other people who fit their demographic niche. There was a time when “indie”...  read more