If the drum ‘n’ bass genre were ever to eat itself, Ed Rush wouldn’t be to blame. In the early Nineties, Rush was just another way-too-serious breakdancer searching for meaning beyond his electro/hip-hop universe. As it happened, the key to his artistic salvation was the rave scene, or one aspect…

Some bands try for crossover hits, and some throw Hail Marys from 60 yards out. Purple Popcorn would fall into the latter category. The Miami-based hard-rock/rap act is headed up by Danny “Styles” Schofield and Winston “Blackout” Thomas, the same pair who produced 10 of the songs on Shawn Mims’s…

Joey Tiger doesn’t mince words. He shoves them into your ears in raw chunks. “We get the best crowd response out of all the bands we play with,” brags Tiger, lead guitarist of Hialeah-based hard rock act Dead Beat Dad. Together for a year, the bandmates have been writing songs…

Rarely does a band’s name fit its music as decorously as with the Birthday Massacre. Similarly the Toronto-based quintet’s sound is color-coordinated with its black-and-purple art scheme. It is Eighties big-rock balladry reupholstered for the goth-rock vampire patrol, like Missing Persons lost in the House of Frankenstein, armed with only…

If it’s Tuesday, there’s another hidden local gem playing at Churchill’s; this time it’s Self Run Will. These four guys are masters of MySpace self-deprecation, littering their page with admissions that they’re “white trash” and that they sound like “the same old shit.” That would be all well and good…

This time of year most superstar DJs are reclaiming their residencies off the coast of Spain, entertaining the beautiful people summering in Ibiza. Fortunately for Miami, Austin Leeds is a travel junkie, and his tireless schedule brings him to Studio A for a set before he heads off to the…

Something snapped inside Icon of Coil’s Andy LaPlegua a few years ago. There he was, putting out well-behaved futurepop albums, when all of a sudden his id engineered a bloody coup and demanded he start yanking loud, evil beats out of his ProTools. The success of his debut EP as…

Of the five bands on the bill this Thursday at Tobacco Road, Window is easily the most hardened road dog. The group’s implicit motto is “We’ll play anywhere,” and that it does, from representing the local color at SXSW to providing a backdrop at divey Italian restaurants in St. Louis…

Death comes to Churchill’s this Saturday in the skinny form of South Florida’s hottest extreme/death/thrash-metal acts. Miami-based headliner Wykked Wytch has been making records for 10 years. Powered by the caterwauling vocals of Kittie-sound-alike Ipek, the band tempers its extreme metal sound with a fetish for theatrics that recalls King…

His thirties might be a threat that’s still five years off, but Marc Broussard’s voice sounds twice its age when in blue-eyed-soul character. Broussard’s third LP, S.O.S.: Save Our Soul, hit stores last month. It’s a leap of faith in image (goodbye, peach fuzz; hello, Brokeback Mountain) and in sound…

Eldar performs Friday and Saturday, June 29 and 30, at
the Arturo Sandoval Jazz Club, 6701 Collins Ave, Miami
Beach. Set times both days are 9:00 and 11:00 p.m.
Tickets cost $35. Call 305-403-7565, or visit
www.arturosandovaljazzclub.com.

Like Hank Williams III, Willie Heath Neal isn’t quite the cow-punk he used to be, at least in the studio. Nowadays it’s an unplugged guitar powering his eighteen-wheeler-load of ‘tude. Today he’s of a mood to talk — about anything. It’s like playing word association with a human Webster’s dictionary…

Miami’s Tiempo Libre won a small victory at this year’s Grammys just by grabbing a nomination for Best Tropical Latin Album. The group’s indie album Lo Que Esperabas (What You’ve Been Waiting For) was pitted against discs by bands armed with Sony and Univision contracts. Tiempo Libre didn’t win, but…

Local psychobilly hero George Van Orsdel won’t go on the record as to what exactly “A Van Orsdel Apparition Occurrence” will consist of at Churchill’s this Saturday. It’ll be either George playing a DJ role, or the entire Van Orsdels band, reformed after a seven-month hiatus, doing a set. “I…

Albumless since The Great Soundclash Swindle in 2004, the Hawaii-raised Keoki needs only his turntable and some candy-chomping dance kids to turn a nice, innocent club into a scene from some Caligula-flavored 28 Days Later. It didn’t always used to be this way for America’s (self-proclaimed) superstar DJ. Okay, that’s…

A new album and a tenuous connection to the Queers bring the Leftovers to Churchill’s on Friday. Nowadays Portland, Maine, is the U.S. capital of DIY when you’re talking north of Boston. Somewhere hidden among the city’s too-fucking-quaint tourist traps and laughably expensive lobster joints dwell the Leftovers, now pushing…

With summer coming and tourist dollars drying up, Igor Bogatov is on the offense, looking for fresh local faces on the dance floor. (Well, fresh local feet, actually; if you find your face is often on the floor, maybe you need to skip it this week.) In this spirit, Bogatov,…

He’s Dolemite writ large and in cartoon, a big mean black guy dressed like a pro wrestler from the Sixties; the self-professed inventor of the Miami sound, writer of tracks for Betty Wright and KC and the Sunshine Band, and he’s in my face. And yours. Ladies and gentlemen, I…

Seal visits Miami during the last leg of a U.S. tour on Thursday, and he arrives in the Magic City at a critical point in his career. He hasn’t released any new studio material since 2003, and since then his sum output has been — shudder — a best-of album…

Let’s face it, none but the hottest Canadian/Portugese MILF could get away with lyrics like “It’s okay, we could do it in the dark/If you got a candle let’s light a spark.” Despite Nelly Furtado’s inherent MILFness, it was a stretch for diehard fans to embrace her latest LP, Loose,…

The funny thing about snobbery is how it’s often in the eye of the beholder. Giselle Brodsky ain’t no snob, despite bearing the title of artistic director for the Miami International Piano Festival. The goal of the festival, she informs me in her rich Bolivian accent, is to lure new…

Raphael, a.k.a. Don Rafael Martos Sánchez, a.k.a. Spain’s answer to Tom Jones, visits Miami this Friday for the first time in more than four years. A child prodigy from Linares, Spain, Raphael burst onto the scene in 1954 when, at nine years of age, he won the “Best Child Singer”…