His band, Super Etoile, has no rival in the brisk Senegalese rock called mbalax, with jumpy six-beat rhythms and vocal lines that leap out of the off-beats.
Foster the People riffles through various idioms — light 1970s pop-funk, blippy synth-pop, rock marches over brisk double-time drumbeats, disco handclaps, indie-rock guitars — but makes sure each segment holds an insistent little tune.
At fifteen, she was the lead singer of the Ackleys, a proficient and precocious alternative-rock band whose brisk, tuneful songs sometimes seemed to be at war with her knotty lyrics.
For years, the blocks surrounding Madison Square Garden have been strewn with Irish pubs — West Side joints, the old-timers might say — and when the Knicks are doing well, these Blarney Stones and Blarney Rocks do a brisk business.
However, according to musicologist Robert Palmer, he "transformed what had been a brisk country blues into a rocking, heavily amplified shuffle".
Bruce A. Schluderman from Round Rock, Tex., was doing a brisk business in Russian rifles from World War II as well as brand-new AR-15s.
"He's not going to go underground," she said firmly, rocking the baby at a brisk tempo.
This week, at the age of sixty-four, he will release "Cê," a brisk, spare record that sounds more like indie rock than any of the other, highly varied music that he has made in the past forty years.
Martin James's brisk, no-nonsense biography may be short on lurid rock'n'roll stories, but that's only because Grohl isn't really that kind of guy.
That was followed in 1996 by the fascinating but opaque "The Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day," which featured Michael Stipe of the rock band R.E.M. and a pictorial style borrowed from Ansel Adams.
