Contrasting the band’s first two albums (Youth & Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak) with their last two (Only by the Night and Come Around Sundown) is like comparing the Rolling Stones to One Direction. Where there used to be cunning bite, there is now mawkish arena rock, and not even the good kind. The “Southern […]
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Heavy cargo
Dean DeLeo — guitarist for veteran alt-rockers Stone Temple Pilots — has played all over the world. But only in the Sooner State can he get pancakes served by a fellow freak rocker and petroleum jelly enthusiast. “I love coming to Oklahoma. I love coming to Oklahoma City. I love when Wayne Coyne cooks […]
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Leaf Hands — Your Imagination
The lazy guitar and the clickity-clack percussion loom like the bastard child of Jandek and Belle and Sebastian, grown up and obsessed with mild folktronica. It’s ominous, comforting and beautifully introspective. This bleeds nicely into “Drift,” which takes that sullen ambiance and swirls it left to right with singer Cooper Whitson’s off-kilter voice acting as […]
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Stone cold country
Stoney LaRue isn’t much of a studio junkie. The Red Dirt pioneer has only produced two studio albums since he began playing bars around Stillwater and Norman more than a decade ago, and there was a six-year gap between his debut The Red Dirt Album and 2011 hit Velvet. Yet the Oklahoma native routinely sells out many of the […]
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Bowlsey — Sleepy Weather
In a weird way, it does. The budding Oklahoma City trio released Sleepy Weather — a five-song demo of sorts — just a month after the band’s conception, each track abstaining from any semblance of formula. With a range of influences spanning from sultry lounge and folk jangles to Adult Swim hip-hop and chilled electronica, […]
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Aisha Eustache — Love & Addiction
Where are the chanteuses who once graced the charts, like Betty Wright, Roberta Flack or The Three Degrees? Where are the beautiful declarations of love and fidelity? The soul-stirring rock-bottoms of heartache and loneliness? A return to honest, resonant emotion? Those questions are answered with the five songs of Love & Addiction, the debut EP […]
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Smith and lesson
Who is Frank Smith? According to Wikipedia, there are dozens of them, ranging from English footballers to daytime soap characters. In musical terms, however, Frank Smith isn’t any one person; he’s five of them. The Austin, Texas-based alt-country project — fronted by Aaron Sinclair — was, in a past life, a band out of Boston […]
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Speedy delivery
Sometimes lyrics are so good, they read like poetry. That’s certainly the case with Massachusetts alt-rock act Speedy Ortiz, although it comes with a simple explanation. When lyricist and front woman Sadie Dupuis isn’t onstage, she can be found studying or in class at Amherst College, where she is finishing her master’s degree in poetry. […]
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Western Residents — Sunlit Nights
Western Residents are an anomaly in that their first release, the earnestly delivered and judiciously crafted Sunlit Nights, sounds like the musical equivalent of a tattered wool blazer. They wear it well. The Oklahoma City outfit has existed in some form or fashion for more than a decade, undergoing a bevy of name changes and […]
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Hello, Darling
Playing music isn’t always the most glamorous existence, as the members of Dallas rock outfit Somebody’s Darling would attest … but that’s a price all five are more than willing to pay. “We’ll do and sacrifice anything to be a part of this band,” lead vocalist Amber Farris said. “We laugh at ourselves, because we […]