If no one will do it for you, you have to do it yourself. That’s the thinking behind Peep Diss Videos, a weekly cable-TV program whipped up by the marketing heads at Street Street Music, a rap and hip-hop label based in Boca Raton. Mark St. Juste, CEO and sales…
The Specials Today’s Specials (Virgin/Kuff) You can’t say the time isn’t right for the triumphant return of the Specials, the English group that way back in the late Seventies combined punk’s rant-and-roll dynamics with the slippery grooves of Jamaican ska. Close to fifteen years after the Specials broke up, their…
Michael Timmins readily acknowledges the irony surrounding the biggest hit to date by the Cowboy Junkies, the Canadian group for which he serves as guitarist and songwriter. Said hit — a mournful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” — came in 1994, a full six years after it was…
Jose Tillan and Ruben Leyva already have their hands in the South Florida music business. Tillan, former bassist for Forget the Name, is managing Latin rocker Nil Lara. Leyva, erstwhile manager for local groups Erotic Exotic, Penguin, and Forget the Name, among others, is director of marketing for ANS Records,…
Despite the nature of my chosen profession, I sometimes have a hard time with words — both writing them and making them out clearly when I hear them in songs. Maybe that’s why I like instrumentals so much. There’s certainly no misinterpreting the raunchy sax blowing of Big Jay McNeely…
Guided by Voices Under the Bushes Under the Stars (Matador) Three albums after the rock press discovered them in 1993 (and nine since the band formed about ten years ago), Guided by Voices remains the rarest of indie-rock rarities — a critically hoohahed outfit that actually deserves the hosannas. Robert…
In its continuing (and mostly successful) efforts to shed its image as an old fart’s version of MTV, VH1 is introducing a so-called hip, fast-moving, road-trekking show called Route 96, which for eleven consecutive days will focus on eleven different American cities, including Boston, Chicago, and Las Vegas. The 96…
Scattered throughout the songs of Archers of Loaf are moments when you’d swear everything will explode in a discordant burst — when the tension builds to a point where it threatens to rend the quartet into a thousand pieces of bone and flesh, spraying shrapnel of guitar wood, drumheads, and…
Mike Boudet doesn’t like talking about Enjoy the Cancer, the EP he has self-released under the name Lounge Act. He says it makes him uncomfortable, and on a recent afternoon at Tapeworm, the Miami studio Boudet co-owns, he’s clearly ill at ease. The 21-year-old singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist squirms nervously…
His major-label debut has been out for a bit more than two months now, inspiring numerous hosannas in places such as Billboard and the New York Times, and yet Nil Lara has hardly entered the realm of the comfy rock star. Even before his self-titled album on Metro Blue was…
Jesus Alemany Cubanismo! (Hannibal/Rykodisc) Various Artists The Montuno Sessions — Live from Studio “A” (Mr. Bongo) There is little in life that can top the excitement and exhilaration of hearing a group of musicians taking off on an impassioned flight of inspired innovation, soaring atop wandering chord progressions, navigating solos…
Brother J.T. and Vibrolux Music for the Other Head (Siltbreeze) John “J.T.” Terlesky has more extracurricular music projects than anyone this side of George Clinton. In addition to his regular gig as frontman for garage rockers Original Sins, Terlesky has released a slew of savagely bent albums and singles over…
More than any other group that emerged during the Amerindie boom of the early Eighties, the Replacements summarized everything that I had ever loved about rock and roll. R.E.M. was great, but I always found Michael Stipe to be an infuriatingly obtuse songwriter and I always wanted guitarist Peter Buck…
Chuck Loose likes to talk about punk rock. Already a fast talker by nature, when the subject comes up, the words fly even faster, delivered with the kind of enthusiasm born of passion and conviction. He was only four years old when the first punk records were released in 1976,…
The Grifters Ain’t My Lookout (Sub Pop) For the past six years, the Grifters have made some beautifully fractured and schizophrenic music — loose yet deceptively complex, chaotic and noisy but susceptible to moments of majestic pop splendor. Over the course of three albums, an EP, and a slew of…
Miami singer/songwriter Arlan Feiles says he’s made an album he believes in — one that accurately represents the tough and gritty new sound of the former Natural Causes frontman. Problem is, his label doesn’t want it. More than a year after he inked a deal with Island Records, Feiles fears…
When you flip through the CD racks and see compilations of who-cares Eighties bands such as Wire Train and Translator, it’s tempting to think that nearly every sound and aural nuance ever committed to Edison cylinder or magnetic tape is now available on digital plastic. You’d be wrong. Some very…
The artistic demise of Rod Stewart is a cataclysmic event in rock and roll history, a betrayal of his abilities and potential that has been written about many times by many esteemed rock scribes. No piece of criticism, however, better illustrates the husky-voiced singer’s mid-Seventies nosedive than a comparison of…
Steve Earle I Feel Alright (Warner Bros.) Alejandro Escovedo With These Hands (Rykodisc) Survivors are nothing new in rock and roll. Survivors with something interesting to say, however, don’t come rolling out of rehab or obscurity every day. Alejandro Escovedo and Steve Earle are survivors. Escovedo has logged time in…
Iggy Pop Naughty Little Doggie (Virgin) Wayne Kramer Dangerous Madness (Epitaph) As punk rock’s generational cycle spins ever onward, with last week’s angry young thing replaced by this week’s rabble-rousing shaver, it’s reassuring to know that two of the music’s fortysomething architects are still around spewing bile and caustic protest…
Go figure: A techno band has a hard time getting a gig in South Beach, one of the nation’s musical meccas for all things that go beep, blip, and boing to a rapid-fire drumbeat. Strange, indeed, but as Soul Oddity cofounder Joshua Kay will tell you, it’s also true. “Doing…
Some songwriters spend their entire careers hunkered over a keyboard or a guitar, scribbling words and fiddling with melodies in hopes of obtaining that most elusive of songwriting trophies — the standard, the kind of song that worms itself so deeply into the fiber of the pop-cultural subconscious that it…
