Jay Babcock

Photo by Wild Don LewisLife in Joshua Tree: You’ll need a cord of wood to stay warm for the winter. In the summer, you’ll avoid daylight/heat, rising at dusk like a vampire. Every day, your home will shake with the rumble of munitions explosions and sonic booms from the nearby......

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water Touching clear sky. —from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan Next Tuesday, German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk will perform in......

A new White Stripes song came on the radio last week. The song itself — a 157-second slice of raw, immediate AC/DC-Queen falsetto disco rawk called “Blue Orchid” — is kinda new, kinda old, kinda weird and pretty great, like White Stripes singles always are. But what may be even......

Photo by J. Bennett "I think there’s something to be said for great volumes," says Ethan Miller. "When the volume is great enough, sound gets inside your body. There’s a connection there that goes a little bit beyond normal music appreciation, when we’re talking about invading the body. You don’t......

Photo by Jay Muhlin BRIGHT EYES, JIM JAMES, M. WARD at the Orpheum, October 14 My Morning Jacket’s Jim James had the gorgeous autumnal songs, the high, soaring vocals and the affable stage manner, but all night long it was Bright Eyes’ 24-year-old singer-guitarist, Conor Oberst, who received the (generally......

ENTRANCE, BRIGHTBLACK, VETIVER at Spaceland, September 1 In the midst of the RNC’s nasty horned fest, this: an anti-Bush refrain of “You gotta vote with a bullet” field-shouted into the November distance by blues-folk singularity Entrance’s guitarist-vocalist Guy Blakeslee, counterpunctuated by the notorious Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, Zwan) on......

Thomas Rabsch Over a recent leisurely afternoon lunch at Silver Lake’s Astro Family restaurant, musician/producer Chris Goss is in muse-aloud mode. “Music usually makes its way into the hands that want it,” he says quietly. “Eventually, if you’re meant to have it, it’ll get to you, through weird channels that......

Photo by Eric Josjo THE HIVES, SAHARA HOTNIGHTS, THE REIGNING SOUND at Henry Fonda Theater, August 3 After opening sets by the Reigning Sound (fervently rendered rockabilly, rock and soul from Memphis — in other words, joy-inducing) and the Sahara Hotnights (bubblegum glam-punk without hooks — in other words, pointless),......

DKT/MC5 at the Echo, June 29 Gotta admit this gig didn’t look good. The MC5 released three all-time-great rock albums in three years, the last in 1971, before the band, only in their 20s, dissolved, with nothing nearly as significant heard from any of them since. Rob Tyner, the group’s......