STEVE RILEY & THE MAMOU PLAYBOYS 7/10, FITZGERALD’s Those square folkies who booed Dylan for plugging in at Newport were wrong in the specific, but not unjustified in their fear of the impending ubiquity of rock music. While traditional regional music still hasn’t been wiped out by a long shot, going electric sure isn’t the answer for everybody. Thankfully Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Cajuns who wanna rock, amp up with a little more taste and sensibility than a lot of their peers–their take on rock is unpretentious and straightforward and they got their trad chops down first, the result being that the tunes on their new Bayou Ruler (Rounder) are still too down-home to sound at home in the faceless suburban sprawl.
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EMPTY BOTTLE Over the past half decade, Windy Webber and Carl Hultgren of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, have quietly released close to a dozen albums, singles, and EPs on almost as many small labels, touring extensively and picking up a loyal cult following. Their spiraling, loopy, hearts-of-space music, with its entrancing, slow-building grooves, may not sound like much to the casual listener, but it’s pure rocket fuel to the new breed of psychonauts, who’ve heard a million times if they’ve heard once that the trips were better back in the day.
MIKE LANE 7/12, BARNES & NOBLE IN SKOKIE, BEAT KITCHEN; 7/14, SCHUBAS Lane, the former leader of Sunday Cannons (“Baltimore’s premier post-punk band,” or so he claims), recorded his solo debut, Good Luck With Electricity (Dutch Maniac), in Minneapolis, where he scraped together enough cobwebs from the Replacements’ glory days to make it the note-perfect mid-80s college rock album.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo of Danielson by Tim Owen.
