Posts by Brian Gearing

A place like Las Vegas makes forgetting easy, but Widespread Panic, who have planted so many roots in New Orleans, made it a point to remember this Halloween night.

The inaugural Vegoose was not about social consciousness or warm, fuzzy, neo-hippie activism, nor was it about resurrecting some nihilistic hedonism of by-gone summers. Vegoose was all about chance

Like a lot of electronic and instrumental music, Cubik & Origami

After releasing It Still Moves, the most commercially successful record of their band

Chad VanGaalen

Having first butted heads over the respective merits of metal and pop-punk in middle school, King Elementary eventually made up over Strokes and At the Drive-In covers, and Kudzu, the second album from the still adolescent Mississippi quartet, moves them one step closer to the final post-teen realities of manhood. King Elementary still aren

As the opening minutes of Z pass by with nary a crashing cymbal or a ringing chord, impossible doubts seep in through the membrane of denial: Has My Morning Jacket become a keyboard band? Did the departed Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash rip the backbeating heart from My Morning Jacket

After years of mere subsistence on the scraps of electronic, jazz and rock influences, Baltimore

Garage

Peppering their simple, contagious melodies with electronic textures and perfect guitar hooks, Mobius Band is more humble and disaffected than the Strokes and more organic than the Postal Service.

Like many Garcia tributes that are sure to follow this year, Jerry Jams is a mixed bag of diamonds and duds, but the project

Guitar upstart DJ Williams looks like he ought to be serving you fries, not the kind of heavy jazz-tinged funk and soul on his debut, Projekt Management. The surprisingly mature young bandleader relies heavily on his Projekt of Richmond funk all-stars for the record

Widely touted as the best bassist currently walking this earth, Victor Wooten possesses the flexibility and eccentricities of a chameleon and the precision of a laser-guided bomb. Together, Wooten consistently amazes audiences with his virtuosity and vision.

The Breakfast have been painting aural gems on Midwest audiences for years, but their instrumental gifts aren

Merging the shuffling, lead-footed tales of the red-clay south with progressive songwriting and intricate, modern composition, Tony Furtado has joined peers like Kelly Joe Phelps as a new traditionalist genre bender of the finger-picked Delta blues style.

While the occasionally fuzzy guitars and heavy drumming on Earlimart

Mofro

Live at Myrtle Beach offers plenty of the same warm, familiar Southern comfort that keeps Widespread Panic

Frances the Mute is way too big to fit within the semantic confines of rock and roll, but by forcing it, rock and roll itself is expanded, and thank God for that.

Blending acoustic slide guitar with woodsy tales of the everyday, Furtado