The first thing one notices about Knoxville’s King Super and the Excellents—winner of the Square Room’s most recent Sound Off battle-of-the-bands contest—is the mustache, that being singer Dave Bowers’ frontispiece facial hair. And a most Excellent cropping of lip plumage ...

The band Ghost is made up of six ghouls from Sweden. Seriously—the five musicians behind lead singer Papa Emeritus are officially credited on the band’s 2010 debut album, Opus Eponymous, as Nameless Ghouls. They’re inspired by classic heavy metal from ...

Travis Gray has a distinctive creative sensibility. Inspired equally by Stephin Meritt, Saturday morning cartoons, and the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Gray’s particular perspective is elegant and absurd, sly and yet still naive, childlike but sometimes heartbreaking.

When the normally prolific Wil Wright went through a songwriting dry spell last summer, he took the opportunity to go out of his element with the help of ostentatious Knoxville DJ Tom Ato; the eventual result was Lil Iffy, a ...

There’s no easy definition for the kind of music played by the Portland, Ore., pop-orchestra Pink Martini. It’s a throwback, but not to any particular style or era. It’s jazzy, but not jazz; poppy, but not pop, at least by ...

When Dan Baird and the Georgia Satellites signed a deal with Elektra Records in 1986, they didn’t expect much. But something weird happened. The first single from the Satellites’ self-titled debut album, “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” turned out to ...

Although she was one of the first country music stars to champion the fight against HIV/AIDS, Kathy Mattea says her interest in social justice was always just something that was just there, not at the forefront of her life. And ...

Over the course of his 30-year career, Rollins has evolved from the sexy, muscle-bound psycho frontman for the incendiary proto-hardcore band Black Flag to today’s slightly more erudite persona.

On their stunning fourth album, Arrow, Austin-by-way-of-Cincinnati hard-rock warriors Heartless Bastards have beefed-up their bluesy sonic palette with rainbows of color, branching out with soulful, psychedelic textures as wide-open as a West Texas sky.

The members of the Mutations may not have illustrious wave-catching pedigrees (“I’ve been to the ocean,” offers bassist Joel Thompson) but they revel in the genre’s sunny imagery.

On Hyfantis, Hyfantis hasn’t completely abandoned the classic pop-rock sensibility that defined the Bishops Band’s 2010 CD, Carnival Authority. The jazzy arrangements have been pulled back, and the touchstones on the new EP seem to be artists whose pop is ...

Nika Danilova hails from rural Wisconsin, where she began making music as a teenager under the intentionally provocative (for rural Wisconsin) name Zola Jesus.

If you’re looking for any more evidence of how the Internet has altered the music business, consider this: Dracula Horse, arguably Knoxville’s most prominent record label, has spent the last two years giving its music away digitally in a pay-what-you-like ...

Dylan Dawkins' tracks may be instrumental, but it’s rare to find electronic music this lyrical: Dawkins’ loose-limbed synthesizers, which stretch and crawl in luxurious waves, rarely sit in idle ambience, recalling at turns both the spacey fog of Animal Collective ...

In performance, Dumb Lunch’s stumbling beats take on a darker aspect, as the music collapses into a vortex of noise, volume, and 21st-century underground shock theater.