Category: Artists

“Being from Maine, we’re kind of naive,” explains Rustic Overtones singer-guitarist Dave Gutter, lying like a fox. Sure, Gutter and his five band-mates do come from Portland, a little seacoast city better known for lobsters and moose than music. But the swelling waves of sound they make are always smart and satisfying, packed with the…

Carl Hancock Rux is a grown man with grown-up views on race, sex and politics that burst out of his lyrics with humor, rage and angst. In a world where the pop success of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Wyclef Jean shows that the mainstream audience won’t reject roots, culture and protest if they can…

Ryan Shupe and the RubberBand are a breathtaking blast of manic musical virtuosity. Sheer joy seems to pour out of the speakers when they start playing, and it may be that they sound that way because the five members of the band–Roger Archibald (guitar, vocals), Colin Botts (bass, vocals), Craig Miner (banjo, bouzouki, guitar, mandolin…

The Ramones are the first punk rock band. Other bands, such as the Stooges and the New York Dolls, came before them and set the stage and aesthetic for punk, and bands that immediately followed, such as the Sex Pistols, made the latent violence of the music more explicit, but the Ramones crystallized the musical…

Matt Sharp vocals Rod Cervera electric and acoustic guitars Jim Richards moog and arp synthesizers Kevin March drums a movement of decadence and celebration drifting loosely in and of short days and long nights in the back of a taxi rolling through scenes of afterhour discos and all night sex shows a quiet house without…

Carrie Akre (vocals) Mike McCready (guitar) Chris Friel (drums) Danny Newcomb (guitar) Rick Friel (bass, vocal) and special guest Nancy Wilson (vocal, “Riverwide”) It’s really quite simple. The five musicians who comprise The Rockfords share twenty years of personal friendship and professional music-making. In 1999, they came together in their home town of Seattle to…

1987. Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, second day of school. A student named Ahmir Thompson walks into the principal’s office seeking a lunch pass. At the same time, a freshman named Tariq Trotter stumbles in, gripped by school guards who caught him engaging in “extracurricular” activities with a ballerina in the…

The title of Remy Zero’s new album, The Golden Hum, could also be interpreted as their state of mind these days. Their 11 song Elektra debut mines both fragile and transcendent territory, breaking provocative new ground that truly places the fivesome in a category of their own. The band is quick to point out that…

“If you listen to the band’s catalog, you might say there are a few recurring themes found in our songs: beer, gin and tonic, whiskey, cocaine, tequila, martinis, marijuana, cigarettes, cars, more beer, pretty women, sermons, cats and dogs, the devil, Texas, and Jimbo. Not to mention steak and dildos. All the good things in…

Louis Elliot and Jonny Bull began their Brit-pop ventures in fall 1991 under the guise of Kinky Machine. With a dedicated, albeit small cult following, they broke into the U.K. Top Ten in 1992 and added a Manic Street Preachers tour to their credentials. 1993 brought a debut album and a 1995 sophomore effort, Bent;…