Franklin Bruno

On “Far Away,” the second song on their new album, Sleater-Kinney vocalistguitarist Corin Tucker gets The News while nursing her new son. (Marshall, now 16 months old, is one of the better reasons for the two-year gap since their last release.) “Watch the world explode in flames,” she sings from......

JEAN SMITH/CARLA BOZULICH, MECCA NORMAL, LUCID NATION at the Smell, September 14 Here's how deep Mecca Normal singer Jean Smith's faith in collaboration runs: Tonight's opening salvo was set up without advance meeting, much less rehearsal, between Smith and ex-Geraldine Fibber Carla Bozulich. (Lucid Nation's drummer sat in as well.)......

Ask guitarist Roger Miller of the recently reactivated Mission of Burma why the band suddenly folded in March of 1983, and you‘ll get a simple answer: volume. After four years of live shows, Miller required not only earplugs but firing-range headphones to soften the aural assault. ”That was the reason......

“We stayed in the Garden of Eden/We can’t pay the bill so we’re leaving,” sings Graeme Downes on “Mastercontrol,” the closing cut on his solo debut, Hammers and Anvils. Downes knows whereof he speaks: The song is named for the L.A. studio at which the Verlaines — the New Zealand–based......

Writing about a subculture for a mass audience is, almost inevitably, a lose-lose proposition. Whatever the topic, insiders will be quick to nitpick, while outsiders may wonder why anyone cares at all. When it comes to the notoriously self-protective world of American underground rock, the pitfalls increase geometrically. So the......

Post-punk, DIY, new wave: Whatever you call the fallout from punk rock‘s rapid rise and fall, it’s hard to deny that something happened to not-exactly-popular music in the late ‘70s that didn’t stop cold just because Johnny Rotten felt cheated. Between the year punk died and the year it broke......

THE EXDizzy Spells (Touch and Go) If I were suddenly appointed Minister of Improving Music, my inaugural act would involve sending shock troops to ransack the CD racks of every would-be cookie-cutter punk in, say, Orange County, replacing all recordings by Social D. and Suicidal T. with copies of Dizzy......

Two songs into the Free Design’s just-released Cosmic Peekaboo, its first album in 29 years, “Younger Son” finds principal songwriter-arranger-producer Chris Dedrick addressing himself circa 1967, when the group was making its first recordings. Before offering some darkly metaphysical advice (“All that’s born must surely die/You know there’s more than......

MIA DOI TODD Zeroone (Cityzen) L.A. spellbinder Mia Doi Todd’s previous album, ’99’s Come Out of Your Mine, was committed to tape in a cathedral at Yale University in a single late-night session. This time, she’s traded sacred space for cyberspace; Zeroone was recorded, according to a prominently placed liner......

BLACK BOX RECORDERThe Facts of Life (Nude) For all its digitized gloss, the title track of Black Box Recorder’s second album is essentially an update of the Waitresses‘ pricktease classic “I Know What Boys Like,” as anti-diva Sarah Nixey, whose icy speaking voice could make de Sade’s Justine sound like......