Recent Articles
Stephen Fretwell CD Review
Stephen Fretwell Magpie (Fiction/Interscope) Delicate Brit singer-songwriter sounds more South Jersey than Southampton (or hometown Scunthorpe).
Tresspassers William CD Review
Tresspassers William Having (Nettwerk) SoCal gloompop outfit’s second album steps on your chest . . . two, three . . . releases.
Santana Minus Michelle Branch
Santana Santana III (Columbia/Legacy) Tidy two-disc pack adds three unissued studio recordings and full ’71 set from Fillmore West.
Metal Hearts CD Review
Metal Hearts Socialize (Suicide Squeeze) Adversarial Baltimore duo add a new dimension to the co-ed sweepstakes.
New Heights?
Hawthorne Heights If Only You Were Lonely (Victory) Label’s fastest-selling band gets ducks in a row for sophomore album/professional debut.
Robbie Lee CD Review
Robbie Lee Sleep, Memory (I And Ear) Savant musician’s “mathematically governed” solo debut pulls ideas in with abandon, ends up sounding like an acid casualty.
Cashing In
Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash 16 Biggest Hits (Columbia/Legacy) There is no escape. But among the more thoughtful Cash family reissues coinciding with Walk The Line is one featuring their duets.
Double The ZZ!
ZZ Top Tres Hombres/Fandango! (Warner Bros.) Texas boogie kingpins get re-releases for back-to-back platinum albums.
Cover Story: Neko Case
Neko Case Time Won’t Let Me In order to reach Neko Case via phone, you have to dial the least-populous time zone in the continental United States. You must reprogram yourself and remember your scheduled 3 p.m. Mountain Standard Time interview means not calling at 2 p.m. Chicago time like it would be when calling […]
Queen & Paul Rodgers
Queen Is Dead, Long Live Queen The idea of a legendary band continuing without its original lead singer is by no means new. It’s been adapted by everyone from stadium rockers INXS, Journey, and Chicago’s own Styx to the slightly modified monikers of psychedelic superstars The Doors Of The 21st Century and The Dead. On […]
Shelley Short
Shelley Short O Captain My Captain Coming here was a very intense time,” Shelley Short says about uprooting her life from Portland to Chicago in September 2004. “I moved here with a friend and another close friend lives here that I’ve known since high school, so I wasn’t all alone, but I left a lot […]
Belle And Sebastian
Belle And Sebastian Everybody’s Talkin’ “We’ve been around for 10 years, but I don’t really feel like we’re an old band. At the moment, we feel quite new and current. And I think we are reaching a lot more people. I think, to a lot of people, we are a new group.” — guitarist Stevie […]
Rhett Miller
Rhett Miller Couldn’t Leave If He Tried “If I’m not mistaken, I cannot only do the Old 97’s in the future — y’know, doing shows and albums. Obviously we won’t do an album a year, an album every two years, even, like we did at one point. But I think we’ll be able to continue […]
Low Skies
Low Skies Democracy In Action Chicago’s Low Skies aren’t in line to win any Kid’s Choice awards, nor will they ever with the musical path they’ve chosen. Swirling around Chris Salveter’s tangled-in-the-sheets headgames, the new All The Love I Could Find (Flameshovel) skulks like a fog, limiting vision to a sea of minute reflections forlornly […]
LongShot
Longshot Sure Fire When Chicago’s ever-eager Longshot was getting ready to record his third album last year, this MC/poet (legally known as Chad Heslup) made a decision most hip-hop acts would write off as flat-out ludicrous: He put his own album on the backburner to help out his fellow Chicago hip-hoppers. Even while under contract […]
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