Like anyone who listens to all sorts of music in search of various forms of aural stimuli, certain records hit me in different ways and in different places, while others punch the same buttons even if they exist in practically parallel galaxies. Recent examples? Well, there’s Stillupsteypa’s Car Dirty with…

Bow your heads, please, and dress yourself in the ebony hues befitting a funeral — the Miami punk-pop collective known as Fay Wray has belly-upped, bitten the dust, gone the way of eight-tracks and Edsels. The crushing news arrived a couple weeks back from the band’s drummer George Graquitena, who…

Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (Righteous Babe) On “Bridges,” Utah Phillips intones: “I have a friend, a good folksinger and song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, ‘You always sing about the past. You can’t live in the past, you know.’…

How good is the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion? So good that four years after the release of the band’s screeching, wailing debut album from ’92, the Blues Explosion towers over nearly every other punk-blues fusionist shimmying and shrieking on the indie-rock circuit. Over the course of five longplayers and numerous…

Nothing in Jeff Tweedy’s body of work prepares you for Being There, the ambitious and masterful second album by his band Wilco — not the charming, self-effacing songs he brought to Uncle Tupelo, the now-defunct band he co-fronted with Jay Farrar; not the tossed-off nuggets he sprinkled on the pair…

El Vez G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues (Big Pop) The world’s most popular Hispanic Elvis impersonator uses his latest album G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues to attack current anti-immigrant fervor, adding his usual mingling of music cultures and a broad spectrum of rock history that begins with the King. From the resounding…

You don’t have to live in Miami very long to learn that the club scene here is, to put it mildly, kinda weird. Locals no doubt know the litany of shortcomings: too many dance pits and not enough live-music stages; a spot on the national touring circuit that’s practically nonexistent,…

Punk rock’s greatest strength was its ability to crumble the wall separating technically proficient musicians and inspired, caterwauling amateurs — its insistence that anyone could form a band. With advances in technology making multitrack recording both easy to use and relatively affordable, you can broaden the dictum of punk rock…

If the Sex Pistols made cash from chaos, Chicago’s Projekt label is making money from misery. Founded in the early Eighties by Fort Lauderdale native Sam Rosenthal, Projekt has built a hugely successful cottage industry from the dark thoughts and woeful states of a slew of bummed-out bands, including British…

Eddie Palmieri Vortex (TropiJazz) Spike Lee’s new film Get on the Bus is the story of a bus full of men on their way to the Million Man March. But it has another very important character: an African drum that plays a key role as a link between generations living…

Shtick is hard to pull off in rock and roll, whether you’re dressed up in patriot garb a la Paul Revere and the Raiders, stomping around a dry-iced stage in monster boots and makeup (e.g., Kiss), or clad in yellow latex suits and proclaiming in anthemic skronks that you are…

Boxing Gandhis Howard (Atlantic) Rock critics of the early Seventies did our best to banish all thought of eclecticism, since it was usually a key word denoting fraud of the art-rock or jazz-rock sort. No one ever called Bitches Brew eclectic, though it was; that term was reserved for the…

Two benefits of note, both being held tonight, All Hallow’s Eve. Screamfest ’96, hosted by Bitter Crop Productions at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge, features a three-act bill including local funk whiz Raw B Jae (in his last Rose’s gig before he takes off for possibly greener pastures in New…

Rene Alvarez is having fun. Honest. Granted, it might not be obvious when you see the brooding songwriter playing at local clubs, banging out songs of intense frustration and instability with his group Sixo, creating a ragged kind of rock and roll noise that squalls and hollers in the middle…

Every great holiday has a great anthem, and for better or worse Halloween has “Monster Mash,” a catchy little novelty item that made Bobby “Boris” Pickett a one-hit wonder when it reached No. 1 in 1962. As novelties go, Pickett’s hit ain’t bad: In a plot borrowed from countless Halloween…

Nirvana From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (DGC) I’d finally reached a point where I could listen to Nirvana and think only “This is a cool song,” rather than “This guy is dead.” And now, along comes more new “product” — an industry term that Kurt Cobain despised –…

Lots of well-produced, spiffily packaged CDs make up the bulk of this month’s belated local-music roundup. Still, my favorite thing this time out is a low-fi, low-budget tape with a handmade cover. What does that mean? I don’t know, but it sure makes me happy. If you want to send…

How many Grammys do you need to win to hold on to a record contract? If you’re Israel “Cachao” Lopez, the answer is apparently more than one, for that’s how many the mambo innovator and bass-playing genius won for Emilio Estefan’s Sony imprint Crescent Moon since he signed to the…