Jay Babcock

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New World Disorder

Jay Babcock
Photo by Pennie Smith RADIOHEAD Kid A (Capitol) “Hey man, slow down, slow down,” head Radiohead Thom Yorke pleaded in “The Tourist,” the concluding track on 1997’s OK Computer. It wasn’t that Yorke couldn’t keep up, it’s that he resented being pulled in a direction he didn’t want to go......
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Smack My Glitch Up

Jay Babcock
[open doc] 01 : Here he comes now-now: the new breed with the (six-oh-) sixth sense, talking at DSL speed through the analogue phone’s seven soundholes . . . 02 : Miguel Depedro, born 1979, a.k.a. kid606. Lived in San Diego ‘til three months ago; now located in south-of-Market San......
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Radical Cheek

Jay Babcock
Photo by Steve Gullick Hanin Elias is talking about bombs. “Did you hear about the explosion in Düsseldorf yesterday?” she asks. “Something like this happens in Germany more and more.” Elias is a member of Atari Teenage Riot, a Berlin-based aggro-electro band whose alliance with the Anti-Fascist League in Germany......
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Cosmic Cuckoos

Jay Babcock
AMERICAN RECORDINGS Because we have our own aural tradition and need for congregation with like minds . . . because we can’t, not all of us, get our knickers in a twist about the muffler-rock of Testosterostock 2000 (Metallica, Korn and Kid Rock at the Coliseum, July 15, mark your......
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Not Fade Away

Jay Babcock
Photo by Andrew McPhearsonWHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG? WAS THE NEW OASIS album's original title, and they shoulda kept it. It was an especially apt one, because for a while it all went so right: a bedenimed songwriter, Noel Gallagher, with hooks in hand by the seeming dozen; a......

Thieves Like Us

Jay Babcock
THE CHARLATANS UKUs and Us Only (MCA) Over the last decade, the Charlatans have persevered like cursed bluesmen, facing down a host of horrors (desertion, jail time, death and financial disaster) while steadily improving their craft, growing from one-semihit wonders to improbable masters of their genre, a band capable of......
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The Citizens Band

Jay Babcock
We're interested in "phenomena," you know? Of all kinds. And I dunno . . . everything seems to get around the world fast today. We have so much information to mess with our heads . . . --Gruff Rhys THERE'S GRUFF, LEADER OF SUPER Furry Animals, burning the 2 a.m......
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Nerve Action

Jay Babcock
The Flaming LipsFLAMING LIPS The Soft Bulletin (Warner Bros.) "They're just humans/with wife and children," sings Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne on The Soft Bulletin's opening song, and although "Race for the Prize" is ostensibly about two doctors searching for a miracle cure, somehow you suspect Coyne is really talking......
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Dark Angels

Jay Babcock
Photo by Wim Van De HulstLISTENING TO SWANS ALWAYS HURT. THEY PUNISHED you with huge slabs of walloping, slowly churning sound, overcut by Michael Gira's bellows and screams. His lyrics described a brutal world, one reduced to primal power, where the only salient distinction was which side of the equation......
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A Perfect Pop Plan

Jay Babcock
Photo by Autumn DewildeLILYS The 3 Way (Sire) One of the joys of '99's front half has been this unfortunately neglected gem of a '60s-pop-style album. Sure, the stuff is superficially retro -- with those go-go beats, foppish vocals and loads of economical guitar riffs, the East Coast­based Lilys have......