Jay Babcock

Photo by Andy Catlin HOPE SANDOVAL & THE WARM INVENTIONS Bavarian Fruit Bread (Rough Trade) No one who’s ever heard Mazzy Star singer Hope Sandoval in action with that blue-lit group would expect her to break out a Bollywood showgirl strut on her first “solo group” album. Still, even by......

Jason Pierce, Spiritualized’s prime mover, has always been a study in creative ambition. Even the band‘s formative work, recorded in the early ’90s on the most modest of budgets and then fastidiously mixed by Pierce to THX-headphone perfection, offered a depth of sound and a span of references that few......

The video for Mercury Rev’s “Nite and Fog” scans like a malignant triangulation among The Blair Witch Project, Excalibur and Begotten: An asp glides through the brush, black-hatted pilgrims and chain-mailed knights gather in a forest’s clearing, a wooden model of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life rests against a tree......

“Royal Trux only worked when it was all opposites, when people thought it was one thing and the truth was the opposite,” says former Royal Trux guitarist-singer Neil Hagerty, explaining the band’s demise by phone from a recording studio back East. “That was the only way it ever worked. Royal......

Photo by Ken Schles I wouldn’t say anything “good” happened to you in New York. — Big Edie tsk-tsking Little Edie in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens Rufus Wainwright materializes mid-afternoon in a Sunset hotel lobby. He’s wearing a tank-top undershirt, loud floral-fatigue print pants, sandals and a pair of......

PUFFY AMIYUMISpike (Sony) With America’s native pop-culture system lately displaying all the classic symptoms of creative exhaustion -- i.e., rampant irony, crap nostalgia (Behind the Music), pee-pee infantilism (Tom Green, Jackass) and big-budget remakes (Planet of the Apes, George Bush II) -- perhaps it was inevitable that cultural imports like......

PRINCE at the Hollywood Palladium, May 4 You don’t have to be rich . . . to see the post-squiggle Prince . . . but when you’re shelling out 75 bucks for a general-admission ticket, it might help. Still, the line for the sold-out-in-210-seconds show rectangles all the way around......