WIKIPEDIA: The Afghan Whigs are an American rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio, originally active from 1986 to 2001. They have since reformed. At their peak, the group – with core members Greg Dulli (vocals, rhythm guitar), Rick McCollum (lead guitar), and John Curley (bass), as well as various drummers (including Steve Earle and Michael Horrigan) – evolved into one of the leading groups of ‘90s alternative rock, rising up around the grunge movement but ultimately transcending it. Evolving from a garage punk band in the vein of the Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., and Mudhoney to a literate, soul-inflected post-punk quartet, […]

  BY CAMERON CROWE Nearing 30, Neil Young is the most enigmatic of all the superstars to emerge from Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. His often cryptic studies of lonely desperation and shaky-voiced antiheroics have led many to brand him a loner and a recluse. Harvest was the last time that he struck the delicate balance between critical and commercial acceptance, and his subsequent albums have grown increasingly inaccessible to a mass audience. Young’s first comprehensive interview comes at a seeming turning point in his life and career. After an amicable breakup with actress Carrie Snodgrass, he’s […]

Photo by SHAWN BRACKBILL What’s that you say? Never heard of Wild Nothing? Oh, buddy. Via Captured Tracks: Ask Jack Tatum what ‘Wild Nothing’ means and he’ll answer: ‘a contradiction’. In 2010, 21 year old Tatum released one of the finest cult pop records of the summer whilst ensconced in his senior year of college in Blacksburg, VA, a small mid-atlantic town better known for producing football fans and engineers than musicians. Tatum lives in contradictions. You’ll often hear Wild Nothing referred to as a ‘one man pop band’. Jack creates in the studio, alone. On the road, he’s with […]

The good news about the new Cat Power album being such a distinct break from the old Cat Power is that Wye Oak is now free to be the Old Cat Power — witchy, supernatural Appalachian indie-rock narrated by a post-modern Ophelia backstroking across the river of madness — but with more incendiary guitar firepower. I mean that as a compliment. We have a pair of tickets to see them at Union Transfer on Saturday giveaway to the seventh lucky Phawker reader to sign up for our email list (SEE RIGHT, bottom of the mashtead). Good luck and godspeed.

Bon Iver mainman Justin Vernon is in full possession of the most heartbreakingly beautiful falsetto to emanate from a hairy guy in blue jeans and flannel since Neil Young woke up in a burned-out basement with a full moon in his eyes. At the risk of sounding like the 21st century equivalent of the guy who booed Dylan at Newport for going electric, I should disclose up front that I am not a fan of the super-dense seven-layer cake of sound of Bon Iver’s self-titled second album, though not for lack of trying. For me, the beatific, naked-bulb bedroom folk […]

Artwork by NICK KULP If you’ve not seen Dig, stop reading and go watch it. We’ll wait. [two hour pause while the reader watches Dig and learns everything he/she needs to know about The Brian Jonestown Massacre and probably more than he/she needs to know about The Dandy Warhols] I know, right? Told ya. Anyway, Brian Jonestown Massacre are coming to Union Transfer tonight support of Aufheben, their 12th LP.  We have a pair of tickets to give away to the 10th lucky reader to sign up for our mailing list [below, right, at the bottom of the masthead]. Good […]

  Tenth lucky reader to sign up for our email mailing list (at the bottom of the black box to the right that says FOLLOW US at the top) wins a pair of tickets to see My Morning Jacket and Band Of Horses at the Mann tonight (Friday, 8/18). Good luck and godspeed. PREVIOUSLY: Which is not to say that those seats weren’t completely filled with stubbly, red-eyed young men, and the women who go to concerts with them, by the time My Morning Jacket took the stage and kick-started a sweaty, fist-pumping, three hour hoedown of southern-fried beard-rock, soul […]

  It may be hard to remember now but there was a time when Jane’s Addiction was the Guns N’ Roses of alt-rock, or maybe Guns N’ Roses were the Jane’s Addiction of metal. Either way, the Berlin wall between alternative and metal came tumbling down and there was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Jane’s made it safe to wed soulful weirdness with total heaviosity and for a time — let’s say 1987, the year Nothing’s Shocking came out, to 1994, the year Kurt Cobain crucified himself with a shotgun — all seemed somehow right in the world. […]

The xx, Music Hall @ Snug Harbor Cultural Center, last night by JONATHAN VALANIA