Month: September 2002

  • Beck, Sea Change

    For a musician who’s changed directions as many times as Beck has, Sea Change is an apt album title. If our Mr. Hansen has a single style, it’s eclecticism, tossing blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, and whatever else happens to be in the room at the time, into the mix. The irony here is that the…

  • Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head

    We were skeptical of Coldplay’s massively huge debut album Parachutes. It seemed like a blatant ripoff of a much better thing—to wit, fellow Scottish navelgazers Travis—and a kind of superbuffed commercial repackaging of Britain’s wave of earnest young acoustic groups. But as the saying goes, you have your whole life to record your first album…

  • Elvis Costello

    You could be forgiven for falling asleep during the last few years of Elvis Costello’s career. Don’t get us wrong, his collaborations with the classical Brodsky Quartet and pop-standards king Burt Bacharach were tasteful and sophisticated proof of his facility in more musical modes than mere rock. But for many of us who discovered him…

  • Bob Mould

    Bob Mould is no stranger to shocking his audience with a radical new direction—after his years in Hüsker Dü, the loudest punk band in all creation, the quiet and folkie Workbook seemed dumbfounding, though now seen as a career high point. But that’s nothing compared to his recent jump into dancefloor techno and electronica, on…

  • The Strokes

    Okay, so they sound just like Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. But at some point, we all grow old enough to realize that pop music is one big lazy susan that keeps spinning in place. (In any case, all roads lead back to the Rolling Stones, right?) And why should we begrudge the kids…

  • Paintings by Chris Mars, James Disney

    Given Chris Mars’ greater fame as the former drummer for the Replacements, you might well think that his career as a fine artist is mere rock-star dilettantism. It’s not. He’s the real thing, a skillful visual artist whose work echoes the semi-apocalyptic grotesque tradition of Hieronymous Bosch and World War I artist George Grosz. To…