By Leigh Novak

I am incapable of listening to music casually. There is no such thing as “background” music to me. This has consequences.

More Head: Thom Yorke: Smudgeless

For example, a couple months ago I was riding my Schwinn Cruiser, “Ruby,” down a busy suburban road when, suddenly, through the dense trees of someone’s backyard, I heard the caramelly sweetness of “Unchained Melody.” I smiled at this random opportunity to hear a classic tune, but kept biking, purely for traffic flow and safety reasons (that’s right, I roll Ruby helmet-less, tempting death and fate at every turn of suburbia). I felt a tinge of sadness as I rode out of range just when the song was about to climax. This would not do. I whipped my bike around and made it back just in time to hear the Righteous Brothers take it to the hizz-ouse (I-I-I neeheeheed your lu-huv!). I managed to flatten a tire somewhere in the whipping around and the hizz-ouse, but dammit, I got to hear the song. I chuckled to myself as I walked my wounded Ruby home. Something like this would surely happen to me.
I consider music to be my, uhhh, vehicle of spirituality. By which I mean, some people sit through church sermons or read bibles, whereas I immerse myself in an album and believe my spirit feels just as enriched for the experience.
Even more specifically, Radiohead is my religion; their albums constitute the books of my Bible. I try not to use that statement lightly, although I am afraid most people do not grasp the seriousness with which I present it. The permanent inkings on my body pay homage to Yorke & Co. in the same way that a devout Christian needles a crucifix on his body to honor the Jeebster.

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Posted on September 30, 2006

By Leigh Novak

You know how most pencils have those little rose-colored erasers at the end? Every once in a while, I come across one of those erasers, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t erase for shit. These erasers are rigid and almost waxy; they smear my errors into leaden skid marks around the page, snickering as my mistakes are highlighted, somehow bolder and more permanent than they were before the futile rubbing.

More Head: Confessions Of A Radiohead-Head

A good eraser maintains a backbone, never crumbles and remains flexible to your pressure changes. A good eraser jigs playfully over your writing, happily and cleanly removing any proof that you are less than perfect. John Rose knows what I’m talking about.
Thom Yorke’s first “solo” effort, The Eraser, is a jigging album; its charm is its simplicity, and the cleanliness of Yorke’s hauntingly sublime voice (a crispness that is sometimes smudged on Radiohead albums, due to the equal talents of each band member). Yorke’s hesitation to label The Eraser as a solo album is understandable. Like a television spin-off series, a solo career can imply the failure of a larger work, often marked by bitterness from remaining members of another venture. In this case, though, Radiohead strongly supported Yorke’s solo pursuit (guitarist Johnny Greenwood even provides piano for The Eraser’s title track), and moreover, the release of Yorke’s album coincides with the promising buzz of a seventh Radiohead album.

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Posted on September 30, 2006

By Don Jacobson

Ever since I told people I was going to see a Tommy Keene show, I’ve found it suprisingly hard to explain to these folks (mostly 20-somethings) just what “power pop” is. I always knew it was a niche, but I also always thought it was quite a substantial one. Now realize I was so far into it during its heyday in the 1980s – which in turn made me ultra-aware of how it was influencing vast swaths of the rock kingdom – that I just assumed most music fans, even the younger ones, knew what it was.
Apparently not.

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Posted on September 29, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

On Bravo’s fashion design competition Project Runway, host and supermodel Heidi Klum always greets the contestants with the tagline, “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.” That is the nature of fashion. In the short documentary, The World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band – a 27-minute valentine – really-first-time director Sonya “Sonny” Tormoen shows that operating outside of fashion can sometimes guarantee the kind of staying power money and fame can’t buy.

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Posted on September 27, 2006

By Don Jacobson

When Manitoba, Milwaukee, and the rest of the world aren’t treating you right, you wanna go North, South, or just plain Home to Chicago. In this edition of Chicago In Song – Chicago as escape hatch to mend your broken heart.

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Posted on September 24, 2006

By Mick Dumke

Jimmy Smith was a master of pulling soul out of the cheesiest organ lines. On “T-Bone Steak,” the flip side of this single, he and his band create one of these classic grooves, made up of funky guitar licks, a propulsive beat and bass line, and Smith’s oozing organ. But they sound even better on Side A: “Mickey Mouse.”

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Posted on September 23, 2006

By Mick Dumke

Coherence is overrated. Sure, there are moments when you know all the answers, and that’s when you play the first Ramones album, a persuasive argument in favor of two-minute, three-chord rumbles, wrecking shit just because you can, and getting stoned; or the early and mid-60s Motown singles like “The Tracks of My Tears” and “Nowhere to Run,” where the pain of loss is clear and cutting and you can’t think of anything else and don’t want to . . . though you still may want to get stoned.

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Posted on September 18, 2006

By Don Jacobson

This time in Don’s Root Cellar, the Hoyle Brothers hold ’em in down in Texas, Jon Christopher Davis makes me laugh in my beer and Lee Rocker shows why he’s still an O.C. (Original Cat).

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Posted on September 16, 2006

By Scott Gordon

You can hear that music play,
any time of every day,
every rhythm, every way!

– The Kinks, “Denmark Street,” Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One
One of the advantages of my current job as a local editor for The Onion‘s A.V. Club is I get so much crappy music in the mail. It’s not the most opulent of fringe benefits, and it rarely actually helps me in my work, but I’m not complaining because you never know in just which ways crappy music has the power to entertain. For example, a few weeks ago I received a pair of sophomore albums from The Gurus and The Winnerys.

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Posted on September 12, 2006

By Mick Dumke

Right now, it doesn’t look like Johnny Cash will ever go away, and that’s the way it should be. His latest/posthumous record, American V: A Hundred Highways, has been a huge hit, and for good reason: the songs are a mix of originals and covers, but that voice makes each one into a detailed, personal experience we all can drink and weep and pray our way through.
Part of the Cash voice, of course, is, literally, his voice – that amazing baritone that many of us have tried and failed to imitate when we played the records and imagined ourselves performing from the stage of our own Folsom Prisons. Frankly, it doesn’t seem that hard to sing like Johnny Cash, until you find out you can’t do it. And that’s because the most essential part of his voice is really the way it’s used: not only is his baritone a lot deeper and cooler than ours, it’s a lot wiser, too.
It’s also deeper, cooler, and wiser than his brother Tommy Cash’s.

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Posted on September 10, 2006