“We’re the next big thing, see,” Botswanas frontwoman Eileen Ziontz mock-declares from the foot-high stage at Emo’s Jr., where her New York City-based band (by way of New Haven), not long into its 40-minute 1:00 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning set, performs for only a handful of the garage-rock faithful and…
His hands cupped to the sides of his face to block out the late afternoon sun’s glare, Paul George peers through the glass doors of a small mausoleum with the words “Somoza/Portocarrero” cut into the mottled marble just above his head. Inside, a four-foot-wide by eight-foot-long space. Mostly white marble…
Sam McBride takes the telephone receiver from his wife Suzy and grunts a quizzical “Hello.” Slightly out of breath, he’s just walked in the door of the couple’s East Bay duplex, and he explains somewhat apologetically that things have been hectic in the past 24 hours, what with the recent…
Ted Hawkins The Ted Hawkins Suffer No More (Rhino) Ted Hawkins The Final Tour (Evidence) In many ways the late Ted Hawkins, who spent the bulk of his career singing for tips on the Venice Beach boardwalk just outside Los Angeles, embodies the stuff of a blues romantic’s sweetest dreams,…
Groovie Ghoulies Re-Animation Festival (Lookout!) The Donnas American Teenage Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine (Lookout!) Rock shtick has a short radioactive half-life. For example: When was the last time you listened to late-Eighties English dipsticks Gaye Bykers on Acid’s Drill Your Own Hole? Somehow, Sacramento-based schlock-rock trio Groovie Ghoulies (bassist-vocalist Kepi,…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don’t bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist — not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year’s renewal…
Short on irony, long on wit, writer/director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers breaks with the pack of recent thumbsucking U.S. indie productions to fashion a funny and frolicsome feature that scrutinizes the much poked and prodded American family. Working from what seems a slight premise, The Daytrippers, through economic storytelling and…
Guy Clark Keepers: A Live Recording (Sugar Hill) Keepers is exactly right. The title of Guy Clark’s latest disc suggests that what we have is a collection of a legendary songwriter’s best songs, recorded live. And we do. But what makes this one of the year’s best albums is that…
Graham Parker Acid Bubblegum (Razor & Tie) Acid Bubblegum is meant to be a return to form for Graham Parker, a reprise of his classic Seventies days as a bitter, punky pub-rocker. The album is certainly filled with bitterness, and for a while that’s okay. The opening track, “Turn It…
The second half of the fourteenth Miami Film Festival, which concludes this Sunday, February 9, volleys from sweet (Argentina’s Wake Up, Love) to bittersweet (Spain’s Balseros), with most of the entries falling somewhere in between, including new releases from Richard (Slacker) Linklater and Stephen (My Beautiful Laundrette) Frears: subUrbia and…
Sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, the fourteenth Miami Film Festival (January 31 to February 9) corrals thirty-two full-length films and five shorts, including eleven U.S. premieres, from fourteen different nations. The mix, as usual, leans heavily on recent U.S. (six), Spanish (five), and Latin American (five) works, but also features the…
Lonnie Smith Trio Purple Haze: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix (MusicMasters Jazz) The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix, at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1967, he was just what his legend says he is: an exploding orgasm, pulling notes and sounds from places you could not see, leading…
1. Sex Pistols (no future, no integrity, no point) 2. Styx (oh, no, Mr. Reduxo) 3. The Monkees (another Pleasant Valley payday) 4. Kiss (The Elders) 5. Journey (open palms) 6. The Who (will get fooled again — and again) 7. Van Halen (slummin’ with the devil) 8. The [Talking]…
Snoop Doggy Dogg Tha Doggfather (Death Row/Interscope) Various Artists Dr. Dre Presents … The Aftermath (Aftermath/Interscope) Makaveli The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (Death Row/Interscope) In the wake of Tupac Shakur’s death, these three albums have little chance of being heard objectively. Certainly the conventional wisdom about each lacks…
Intrigue Acoustic Soul (Universal) Tony Toni Tone House of Music (Mercury) Think back to the abyss of early Eighties urban thump-thump music. New technology had yet to be mastered by artists like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, black pop music was in assembly-line mode, and it seemed that maybe real…
Not long into the low-key 1994 Chinese murder drama The Day the Sun Turned Cold, writer/ director/producer Yim Ho serves up a defining moment in the marriage of husband Guan Shichang (Ma Jing Wu), the school principal in a rural village, and Pu Fengying (Si Ching Gao Wa), his tofu-making…
George Clinton & the P-Funk Allstars The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Mothership (550 Music/Epic) When funk genius George Clinton is on — when he’s really on — his music summarizes the entire history of R&B at the same time that it shimmies ass-first into the future. On T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M, his…
Los Lobos Colossal Head (Warner Bros.) All artists show their influences in their work. What separates the sublime from the hapless in this regard is the ability to do it without being crass. And there’s certainly nothing crass about Colossal Head, the seventh long player from Los Lobos. Genius is…
thursday july 11 Miccosukee Freedom Festival: Once fervent enemies, cowboys and Indians appear to have made amends, at least for commercial purposes. Accordingly, the Miccosukee Tribe hosts Randy Travis as the headliner for its fourth annual Freedom Festival. Travis gained considerable attention with his 1986 major-label debut Storms of Life,…
Your First, Your Last, Your Everything: Four years ago, before his umpteenth comeback, before his 1994 The Icon Is Love album and its “Practice What You Preach” single both went to number one on the R&B charts, Barry White, the grand pooh-bah of le musique de fuque, lolled in the…
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…
