Houston Music Blog

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​Rocks Off is about as excited about Sunday's AC/DC show as we were for the Black Ice ballbreakers' show 11 months ago, but for a much different reason. Last time it was because we hadn't seen AC/DC since 1996 at Austin's Frank Erwin Center; this time it's because we're itching to see the band behind our pick for hard-rock album of the year, Everyday Demons. It's not AC/DC, rather openers The Answer.

Formed in Belfast in 2000, the Answer is fueled by the denim-and-diamonds riffs of guitarist Paul Mahon, and although Demons conjures hints of bands like Humble Pie, the Black Crowes and the Cult, it's no retread. Singer Cormac Neeson (how's that for an Irish name?) has a firm grip on that Chris Cornell growl 'n' wail even while tackling some pretty serious subject matter - suicide on "Why'd You Change Your Mind," political disillusionment on "Too Far Gone" and faithless women (several songs, particularly "Walkin' Mat"). Hometown mash note "Dead of the Night" is a worthy successor to no less than Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back In Town."

Two alumni of Houston's fabled folk scene return to Anderson Fair this weekend.

Vince Bell lives in Santa Fe, N.M., these days, but he will always be associated with the heyday of the Houston folk scene and Anderson Fair. Mentored by Townes van Zandt and Guy Clark, Bell had a major influence on Lyle Lovett, who recorded Bell's "I've Had Enough" on his album Step Inside This House. Nanci Griffith, another Anderson Fair regular back in the day, recorded Bell's "Sun & Moon & Stars." Bell is touring behind his new album, One Man's Music.

Photos by Eric Sauseda/ Click here for a slideshow

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Kenny Rogers is now 71 years old. And, as of a few years ago anyway, his boys can still swim.

Aftermath knows this because we were treated to a slideshow of Rogers' twin five-year-old sons - even some shots from the delivery room - as he sang the ballad "To Me" with the Houston Symphony at Jones Hall Thursday night. Cute kids and all, but it made for about five of the most squirm-filled minutes we've experienced at a concert, well, ever.

It was like being trapped in line at the DPS. All you want to do is renew your driver's license (or, in this case, hear "The Gambler"), but the guy in front of you insists on whipping out his wallet and thumbing through umpteen family photos. Thank God the Roaster didn't have any pictures of his pets, or we would have been so out of there.

Luckily, this was about as sappy and maudlin as the evening got - and we're talking about a show that also included "Through the Years," "Lady" and lesser-known but no less sentimental heartstring bullseyes like "The Greatest" and "Buy Me a Rose."

You can think of this weekend's Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin as the indie, metal, and hip-hop little brother of the more staid Austin City Limits Music Festival. The fourth edition of the two-day event held in Waterloo Park in Austin starts tomorrow afternoon. Per our stated life path, Rocks Off will be there covering all the bands, fans and assorted debauchery that all that comes with.

This year's line-up is rife with musical pioneers, unsung heroes, along with the usual "It" bands that you will forget in six months and the one or two bands that will soon be smirking that they were once small enough to play a side stage. In fact, indie duo MGMT played one of those stages back in 2007 and by the next fall were commanding a strong following at ACL. It's amazing what a little label push and a catchy-as-shit song can do within the span of 12 months.

​There's no nice way to say this, so Friday Night Noise will just say it: MySpace is not enough, and if you are at all serious about making music and serious about building an audience of fans/listeners (be it 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 or 5 million) - and by "you," FNN doesn't just mean noisers, we means rapper, rockers, twee-pop imps, dulcimer soloists, 17th-wave punk upstarts, vegan/freegan hardcore nihilists, beardo folkies, classically-trained cellists, scatters, R&B hopefuls, beatboxers and everybody else besides - you've gotta think bigger than MySpace. Launching a MySpace page to rep yourself, your scene or your set should represent a mere component of a larger online promotional strategy - it shouldn't be that strategy's alpha and omega.

Look, FNN totally gets why musicians love MySpace. It's free. (Or "free.") To a degree, you can customize your page. It allows you to keep up with friends and fellow travellers, and you can plug in your upcoming tour dates, stream MP3s and YouTube clips, accrue admirers and allow random strangers to relentlessly plug their wares/shows in the comments. (Which, admittedly, has led yours truly to some significant discoveries.)

Status as Rupert Murdoch's property aside, it's a pretty awesome tool - FNN will give it that.

Alan Ball was known for his masterful use of music in Six Feet Under. He's lost none of his touch when it comes to his current HBO series, True Blood - which happens to be set in the Louisiana swamps, not terribly far from Houston. With Season 2 just completed, Rocks Off is now working our way backwards through the episodes we missed as HBO begins reruns.

Episode 1.5, "Sparks Fly Out"

Country Rap is a lot like Albanian folk dancing... and we're not going to explain that comparison. Just take our word for it. The most famous of the hick-hoppers is Bubba Sparxxx, but this week we focus on one Cowboy Troy. A Longhorn who managed a Foot Locker before achieving success with his first major release Loco Motive, which debuted at Number No. 2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. Since then it's been only up and up for Troy.

The debut single from Loco Motive, and a No. 1 Country download from iTunes, was a track called "I Play Chicken With the Train." Being our introduction to the world of country rap, it's quite an experience to hear, bringing a very pleasant meshing of the best of two genres' strengths. Rappers sell their product with themselves, using their own aura as the main drawing force of the music. Country also has that strut, but its superpower lies more in the ability to turn basic folk melodies into powerful performance pieces. What you are left with upon the mating of these styles is big, brash and, most of all, catchy.

Welcome back to Five Spot. Every Friday, we'll examine a recent bit of music news and list five reasons why it's either brilliant or dumb-assed. Send tips to introducingliston@gmail.com.

We've got this notebook that we carry around pretty much everywhere with us. A few bullets from there before we get into the videos.

• Skippy-dippy do! Jay-Z just announced new tour dates, and guess which major Texas metropolitan area landed a show? Yep. You got it: Dallas! (Oh, yeah, Houston scored a spot, too - February 22 at Toyota Center.)
• ​We've been having some trouble sleeping lately. The world is a different place between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Like, if you stay up late enough, the line-up of movies on the premium channels (Showtime, Starz, Encore, etc) invariably turns to one of two subjects: wacky movies about skiing and soft-core porn. The porn we were expecting, but skiing? Is that the other thing night owls are interested in? Did not see that coming. And what's weirder, you have to watch them both. You can't turn on a movie about skiing at not watch, somehow. It's impossible.
• To that last point, there is no way to buy anything from Wal-Mart at three in the morning without it looking like you're involved in some crazy gay-sex orgy. That's just the way it always looks to the cashiers: "A shower rod? It's 3 a.m., man. You're so going to put this in your butt," their eyes say.
• Right around this time last month we mentioned a then-forthcoming tape from Swishahouse called The Usual Suspects. It's since been released and we've since digested it a few times. While songs from the big names were mostly stuff we'd heard before, there were a few unexpected points on it.

Namely, these five: