Mikael Wood

Of Montreal make some of the happiest music this side of the Wiggles, blending all kinds of vaguely psychedelic pop — late-’60s Beatles, T. Rex, Berlin-era Bowie, Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat — into a tequila sunrise of good vibes. And last Friday night — at the start of a two-week stand......

Just two years after Janet & Justin’s Super Bowl snafu — for which the FCC is still punishing blue-state libertines — we’re lucky to have an act as outré as Big & Rich headlining the Rose Bowl halftime show. On last year’s double-platinum Horse of a Different Color, “Big” Kenny......

Approximately three years ago, Zach Schwartz lost his job at a Bay Area dot-com, split for New York on a one-way ticket, recorded some music with his engineer pal Bill Racine, and ended up forming Rogue Wave — a nifty little indie rock act that’s become a hot commodity among......

Photo by Chris Cuffaro “The pre-production for Blackberry Belle was basically digging myself out of . . .” Greg Dulli stammers, trailing off. “I was really, really, really sad. And it was probably an exploration of my sadness.” The former Afghan Whigs front man is talking about the third sort-of-solo......

As tortured artists go, San Francisco resident Mark Kozelek’s résumé couldn’t be stronger. For nearly a decade, he publicly aired his complicated romantic frustrations as front man of Red House Painters, an early progenitor of what ultimately became known as slowcore: dumpy indie dudes strumming guitars as lethargically as a......

Photo by Michael Muller In a characteristically luminous song on the third album he made with his Seattle-based indie-pop band, Death Cab for Cutie, singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard minced no words in a depiction of Los Angeles that fortunately failed to provoke a bloody PacNorth/SoCal free-for-all: “I’m in Los Angeles today,”......

Storied hard-ass Shelby Lynne has better things to do than talk on the damn telephone long-distance to somebody she’s never met. Like work on her songs, for instance. Lynne, a country singer who spent a season in Nashville making records people (including her) sort of liked, reaped some cash after......

Sean Daley doesn’t seem to exert a lot of energy making other people feel welcome in his world. Or at least me: When I step into the smallish midtown-Manhattan hotel room he’s sleeping in for a few days, he shows me a seat next to a slightly cracked window through......

Female hip-hop trios from New York City may be a rare commodity in the pop marketplace of the moment, but I bet Northern State and FannyPack, probably the two currently highest-profile of those trios, just hate getting lumped together in reviews like this one. Fair enough, since the two outfits......

Photo by Joseph Cultice Though they look about as threatening as Hall & Oates (minus even the menace of Hall’s mullet and Oates’ mustache), Fountains of Wayne songwriters Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger can cause a respectable ruckus. I’m standing with Schlesinger next to the band’s tour bus, which is......