Long recognized as one of America’s best country-blues fingerpickers and a scholar of acoustic blues, Paul Geremia has a very clear memory of when music first captured his attention. “My father had an old jazz recording of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, which was one of my favorite records when I was a teenager,” […]
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Garbage – Absolute Garbage
Geffen You can’t sum up popular Nineties music any better than with Scottish/American alt-rockers Garbage. A new compilation album, set to be released on July 17, features the “best of” Garbage, as well as a bonus disc of remixes. All of the band’s major hits’ “Stupid Girl,” “Only Happy When It Rains,” […]
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Jimmy Webb prefers intimate venues
Jimmy Webb, an Oklahoma native best known for his continuing career as one of America’s most highly regarded and prolific popular songwriters, is accustomed to performing in venues of all sizes. However, he said he has a special regard for performing in the intimate surroundings of small spaces that place him close to the audience. […]
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No singers wanted in Maserati
The members of Athens, Ga., four-piece Maserati forego vocals in favor of bringing their expansive melodies and muscular, yet intuitive percussion to the spotlight. They blend ambient rhythms and modern dance rock with a Seventies groove to create highly emotive tracks on its latest release, “Inventions for the New Season.” “When we have an idea […]
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Countrybilly’ band Two Tons of Steel drops into Oklahoma
For 11 years, San Antonio-based Two Tons of Steel has held down the fort at the legendary, un-air-conditioned Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas, for its annual Tuesday-night summer concert series, averaging 12,000 fans each year. Yet despite trips to Europe and Cuba, they’ve never played in Oklahoma. “We go east and south, but we […]
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Fountains of Wayne
Traffic and Weather Virgin In the fourth and latest offering from the Fountains of Wayne, the band doles out more of the amusing storytelling and blimp-sized hooks that have made them America’s reigning deities of power-pop. And yet the approach is starting to wear thin. It starts out promising enough. “Someone to […]
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The Hold Steady gets personal in lyrics
With little to no love from radio or television, Hold Steady cracked the charts at 124 with its latest album, “Boys and Girls in America.” On this third disc, the self-described bar band rambles and soars through 11 tracks about drugs, infatuation and the complexities of young love. “One thing I love about Craig (Finn)’s […]
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Rocky Votolato
yle=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt”>Track three, “Before You Were Born,” is more upbeat, with a country shuffle, fast guitar picking and a reverby vintage Telecaster twang. The last song on the CD, “Silver Trees,” is beautiful and lonesome, with a crying harmonica punching and piercing through acoustic guitars. At least half the songs on the disc […]
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David Bowie
The Best of David Bowie 1980/1987: Sight & Sound Virgin By now, the amount of hits compilations released by David Bowie must outnumber his various personas in his long, storied career. But each successive one seems to up the ante, if not in terms of track selection, then certainly in the crispness of […]
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Touring makes The Gunship homesick for Norman
Norman’s The Gunship set out to play 50 shows in two months, and that’s just what they did. From one coast to the next, the Okie rockers have been firing off round after round of its own brand of post-punk vintage rock and finding out just how special home is. “We didn’t realize just how […]