Search Results for: alt-rock

The White Stripes rocker, banged up in a car crash last month, makes this perfectly clear on the band’s Website (www.whitestripes.com), posting actual footage from a surgery that inserted three screws into his broken left index finger. Really, a note from the doctor would have sufficed… But, no, White says he wanted fans who bought tickets to shows either canceled or postponed by the dinged digit to “better understand the complexity of the situation.” “A bone in the index finger of my fretting hand was shattered…making it absolutely impossible to play guitar,” White writes on the Website. “I’ve been instructed… Read more »

Chad Kroeger sings about “a world full of killing and blood spilling” in the hit song “Hero,” and in that kind of world Nickelback’s melodic relationship songs don’t seem to have quite as much impact as they once did. Perhaps that’s why Kroeger boosted the musical heft and lyrical import for the band’s third record, The Long Road, due September 23. Sure, there are still enough love songs and light, lighter-raising moments to make the gals swoon. But even on the slower tunes, the guitars shudder with raw intensity, conveying Kroeger’s aim to shed the mainstream pop image he cultivated… Read more »

Ticket sales are down, and big tours are scaling back to smaller venues. It looks to be a long, hot summer for the touring industry. On the cusp of the industry’s peak period, a number of high-profile tours and festivals have already hit snags, among them highly touted outings from Mariah Carey, the Field Day Music Festival, Lollapalooza, and Beck and Dashboard Confessional. Faced with a crowded tour market combined with high ticket prices, permit hassles, a sluggish economy and poor buzz, these tours and a handful of others have either had to scale back the size of the venues… Read more »

The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple’s iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven’t changed much since the vinyl era – despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though it’s clearly a better deal than they get from piracy. The Site’s Cut – 40% The biggest chunk of your dollar goes to the online music provider. This explains why sites like… Read more »

Dashboard Confessional and Jack Johnson played acoustic, and Beck and Coldplay celebrated Christmas, but otherwise KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas was a two-day, 20-act festival all about rocking. And the sold-out event was certainly crammed with rock and roll moments, particularly the announced live debut of Audioslave (they played a secret club show the night before), and an amusing rendition of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” orchestrated by Beck and the Flaming Lips and featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, Johnson and a horribly off-key Juliette Lewis. (Click here for photos from the show.) Audioslave were the talk… Read more »

Nineties alt-rock lives as a new tour launches this weekend. The New World Disorder Tour features co-headliners The Gin Blossoms and Spin Doctors, with Seven Mary Three and Sponge. Expect to hear all the classic Gin Blossoms hits like “Hey Jealousy” and “Till I Hear It From You,” and watch out for four releases from the band this year, Dusted, (their first pre-A&M Records release that had only been available on cassette until now), New Miserable Experience Collectors Series (an expanded 2-CD version with bonus tracks, demos and outtakes), plus a couple of solo ventures, The Poppin’ Wheelies from singer… Read more »

The man of constant sorrow should have plenty of cause to celebrate, though Brandy might be kind of crabby. After 63 weeks on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack will levitate to #1, beating out the R&B crooner, who seemed headed for a chart-topping debut. Last week, O Brother, which has sold over 4 million copies since its December 2000 release, jumped from #15 to #2 after being graced with a Grammy for Album of the Year. While the album will move up on the chart with sales of 160,000 copies, it sold around… Read more »

When the Eels debuted in the mid-Nineties, being a tortured artist in the slippery world of alternative rock implied some level of ironic distance. God forbid that an alt-rocker directly admit to having feelings – at least not without a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Eels frontman E does his share of winking, but his real-life tragedies – within a two-year period, he lost his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer – have kept the singer and songwriter more honest than your average Nineties moper. In 1998, E dealt head-on with his personal loss on the Eels’ stunning album, Electro-Shock… Read more »

Wind-Up Records, the independent powerhouse that broke multiplatinum rockers Creed, has renewed its U.S. distribution pact with Bertelsmann-owned major label group BMG Entertainment. The two-year deal extends a distribution pact inked when chairman Alan Meltzer launched the label in early 1997. Wind-Up since has grown to become the second-largest indie label behind teen-pop juggernaut Jive Records, thanks in large part to Creed, which has sold more than 21 million records during the past five years. Meltzer hasn’t ruled out cashing in on that success and expanding the company’s reach by doing a larger equity deal with a major, but he… Read more »

The music industry finally received the holiday gift it had been hoping for this week, as the album charts got a formidable one-two punch from alt-rock superstars Creed and the perennially popular “Now That’s What I Call Music” compilation series. “Weathered” (Wind-Up), Creed’s follow-up to the platinum blockbuster “Human Clay,” sold nearly 900,000 copies its first time out, according to SoundScan data for the week ended Nov. 27. Those numbers made “Weathered” the biggest bow since ‘N Sync’s “Celebrity” shifted 1.9 million out of the gate last summer. Nipping at Creed’s heels was the eighth installment of the “Now” series… Read more »