Music

It was 1990. I was 9 and on the TV I watched as Mike Patton, the lead singer in Faith No More, was flopping on the stage like a fish as his band finished playing “Epic” behind him. He seized and convulsed and stared dead-eyed at the ceiling.
Who would have guessed that guy would not only become one of the most respected figures in alternative music, but someone who would release an album like Mondo Cane, a classical record that debuted at number 2 on Billboard's Classical charts? A 65-person orchestra backs Patton's unmistakable pipes here as he covers 1950s and '60s Italian pop songs. He embodies the spirit of these original songs, lending an operatic force that is, at times, beautiful and chilling. These are songs he was meant to sing.

Alex Toth, the trumpet player and bandleader of Rubblebucket, is riding in a van somewhere in Iowa on his way to Nevada while the rest of his Brooklyn-based octet is in Vermont – the band's other home – playing at a hot air balloon festival. It's one of the only times Toth has ever missed a show, but with big booking opportunities arising, like the High Sierra Music Festival this summer, some tough choices had to me made. And that's essentially why Toth found himself accompanied only by a sound engineer, cruising across the country to get things in order for the band's West Coast tour.
It's hard keeping this many people in order, which is why Toth is explaining the reason he keeps eight (or sometimes as many as ten) people in this band.
“When I first started this band, I wanted a medium to express the wildest ideas of my imagination while rocking the shit out of dance clubs,” says Toth.

It probably comes as no great surprise to the fans of Shelton Hank Williams, aka Hank III, that the artist who confounds country music conventions and tours on a split personality country-metal bill, does things his own way.
Whether it's sticking up his middle finger at Nashville and its most hallowed grounds, the Grand Ole Opry, or feuding with his own record label, Hank III does more to earn his outlaw image in a day than most so-called alt-country acts do in their entire career. That can make it tough on people like, you know, fans and journalists. So when we got word that Hank wasn't sending any advance copies of his new album, Rebel Within, to the local press, it came as no great surprise. And when Hank's in-house publicist informed us that the enigmatic stepchild of country music's first familywould be available for a 20-minute interview from the road, I was only cautiously optimistic. True to his word, the call eventually came – two hours before our press deadline on Tuesday, roughly half a week after it was scheduled.

Nonesuch Records
What gets me about these two-person bands – the White Stripes, Jucifer, Juanita & the Rabbit – is how big they can sound. And on their new album (the band's sixth), the Black Keys don't just sound big. They sound like a goddamn orchestra.

If Neil Young were the godfather of grunge, then Tim Cridland, aka Zamora the Torture King, might just be the godfather of the modern circus sideshow. But the comparison might be a little more accurate if Neil Young had played lead guitar in Soundgarden, which is the equivalent of what Zamora has been doing in the alternative circus business since the early 1990s when he helped form the infamous Jim Rose Circus with a small group of throwback performers.
Cridland, who grew up in a small university town in eastern Washington, became fascinated with sideshow acts and plied the college's library for literature about vaudeville and circus shows. Before long, he was hanging around the fringes of traveling acts, coaxing performers to show him the finer points of fire swallowing and other sideshow staples. Working in the fertile Seattle scene of the late '80s and early '90s, Cridland and few other performers started sharpening their own modern sideshow act, holding court weekly at the famed Crocodile Café. Cridland got his break in 1991 when organizers of the inaugural Lollapalooza, the model for most modern music festivals, tapped Cridland and the Jim Rose Circus to take its act on the road to perform for massive audiences.

LCD Soundsystem
This is Happening
DFA Records

Coming on the heels of the universally acclaimed Sound of Silver, This is Happening had mighty big shoes to fill. But rather than filling them, James Murphy (the producer/musician/vocalist behind LCD Soundsystem) decided to trade them in for some black Chuck Taylors or whatever those post-punk kids were wearing in the late '70s and early '80s. I'm about 12 listens into the album, and the post-punk/art-rock/new-wavy influences have become impossible to ignore. The album is packed with Brian Eno/Frippertronic guitar solos (“Drunk Girls”), early Talking Heads percussion, driving disco beat and African-sounding guitars (“Home”), massive Gary Numan-esque synth strings (“I Can Change”) and Bowie-like (really, Eno again) guitar hooks (“All I Want”).

He's a big dude. He's massively bearded. And when he sings, he sings about drinking and fighting and losing his mind and everyone in the joint listens because it's impossible not to. Add the fact that he goes by the name The White Buffalo and you've got a recipe for an imposing, if not slightly terrifying, figure.
But if you call The White Buffalo on his cell phone, he'll respond to his given name, Jake Smith, and he'll probably be driving through Los Angeles traffic near his home, where he lives with his family. Smith doesn't look much like a stereotypical dad, but more like someone who, if 25 years older, could have battled Jeff Bridges for the lead in Crazy Heart. Smith is, indeed, a dad, but that hasn't stopped the songwriting powerhouse from continuing to pen powerfully dark, boozy tunes that he's been booming through bars and clubs over the past few years.

“We both like the Beach Boys a lot,” writes M. Ward, answering e-mail questions about She & Him, the bubbly pop duo of which he makes up half.
This isn't shocking. One doesn't have to listen much past the first track of the band's newest album, Volume Two, to guess that Ward and the act's songwriter and singer, Zooey Deschanel, enjoy the work of Brian Wilson and company. She & Him has made a name for themselves in the past two years by reviving the sunshiny radio pop of years past, but doing so with an innovative edge that has attracted fans who've probably never had much interest in the Beach Boys.