Houston Blog

Photos courtesy of iFest

Beoga

Since we're already playing hangman today, here's another riddle: What do America's finest genre-hopping Latino band, Houston's best Guinness-chugging rockers, a daughter of the nation's premiere gospel family, a perennially unsung honky-tonker who sounds like the ghost of Hank Williams, a bayou-born boogie-woogie piano queen, a Grammy-winning Tejano godfather, two of Louisiana's hottest young Cajun groups, more regional zydeco groups than you can shake a Hohner accordion at and the '70s funk lords whose biggest hit supposedly contains the screams of a woman being murdered in the studio next door have in common?

That's an easy one: They're a small fraction of the musical lineup for this year's Houston International Festival, April 18-19 and 25-26 downtown, spread over more stages than the Austin City Limits festival. See who they are, and a whole lot more, after the jump.

The best thing about digging around thrift-store CD bins is discovering someone else's cast-offs. The records that people got sick of, or had absolutely no regard for how awesome it could be. Months back, a wife seemingly threw out her husband's entire punk-rock collection during routine housecleaning, and I found a trove of Sex Pistols bootleg discs and an inordinate amount of mid-'80s TVT Records releases. It was a fun and brooding ride back home.

This past week, I discovered The Move, the late-'60s British mod-rockers who never quite made it here, but whose influence is still interwoven with all who came after. At the Value Village off 19th Street in the Heights, I found a three-disc anthology chronicling the band's early garage singles up to the addition of guitarist and piano man Jeff Lynne, who would take hold of the band and steer them into becoming Electric Light Orchestra. The rest is freaky, operatic, sound-effects laden pop history.

Location: Salvation Army, 3620 Broadway, Pearland

Thrift stores are a museum of random genius. Where else can one find a faded D.A.R.E. t-shirt and a pair of soiled leather pants? Each trip is a chance for magic. Rocks Off spent some time at the Salvation Army out in the badlands of Pearland last week, on a mission for music.

One afternoon he found a vinyl copy of the Nuggets compilation, and his fifth copy of Sgt. Pepper. Increasingly, this location has become a goldmine for compact disc cast-offs. In a time of vinyl resurrection, most of the good stuff is now picked over by zealous teenagers. Compact discs are quickly becoming the new cassettes.

On CD, you can find plenty of discarded copies of any number of C-list boy-band records, generic compilations made for furniture stores, even entire collections of classical music. It just so happens on this trip we found a three-headed monster of weird: Garth Brooks' 1990 breakthrough No Fences, Sonic Youth's 1992 alt-fuzz touchstone Dirty, and Yaz's 1982 New Wave classic Upstairs at Eric's.