Photos

The married half of L.A.’s Moonpools and Caterpillars — singer Kimi and guitarist Jay Jay — are lounging in their label’s Manhattan offices. Fresh from a massive spread of Indian cuisine, the fledgling popsters, whose debut Elektra release “Lucky Dumpling” is moving steadily up Billboard’s Heat Seekers chart, chart the course of their new careers…

With sarcastic stops and stutters, coughs, hoops and hollers, Dinosaur Jr. leader J. Mascis held the would-be moshers at bay, charging haphazardly through an hour’s worth of solo acoustic material at SoHo’s dingy Mercury Lounge Thursday night. Best known for pioneering the garage-rock jet set with the distortion-soaked Bug and Green Mind, Mascis production for…

Heavy skies are falling onto gray concrete outside as members of Ben Folds Five loiter unnoticed in their Midtown Manhattan hotel lobby. Though tired and haggered from their sold-out, industry-packed Irving Plaza performance the previous evening, the Chapel Hill-based trio is heavily caffinated and anxious to move onto their next gig in Philadelphia. Since forming…

Edwin McCain’s whispy blonde hair smothered the singer/ guitarists’ swollen, sleep-stained face. Jarred from a much needed couch-bound slumber, the South Carolinian — whose debut release, Honor Among Thieves, is cruising up the charts on the strength of “Solitude,” his duet with Hootie and the Blowfish’s Darius Rucker — gained consciousness slowly. Speaking in a…

When former-Pogue frontman Shane MacGowan finally yielded to Guiness-soaked pre-show bellowing and lumbered on stage at New York’s Irving Plaza Thursday night, the boozing Celtic crooner did not disappoint. But when introduced as “a man who won’t be around much longer,” expectations are low. Wrapping punk’s rhythmic momentum and Joycean lyrical darkness into a furious…

Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz took a broad stab at his dual Marshal amplifiers, twisting his volume knob past eleven as the Boston trio tore their current single, “Summer,” to post-punk shreads. With eardrum-splitting deftness, the band ripped through nearly twenty songs in just over an hour, drawing heavily from 1993’s Big Red Letter Day…