The New Jersey duo known as Blaze remains the pinnacle of what it likes to call “soulful house music.” Infused with a spiritual quality and grounded in faith without proselytizing, Blaze’s tunes are light-years away from the typical hedonistic clichés driving any given dance floor on a Saturday night. In…
The artists collectively known as the Native Tongues are noted in history as the primary purveyors of “conscious rap” during the Nineties, but New Jersey’s Brand Nubian was also on the frontlines. Brand Nubian, however, despite its ability to make people think as well as move, wasn’t as well received…
Two years ago, the campy New York-based quintet Scissor Sisters took Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” to the dance floor, shoved the prog rock chestnut in a box, and sent it express bound for Bee Gees country. Though fans of the group lumped them into the electroclash scene, they wisely avoided…
Though best known for his collaborations with German electronic jazz outfit Trüby Trio (“High Jazz,” “Bad Luck”), Nigerian/Scottish soul singer Joseph Malik has been recording his own music for ten years now, heading up various projects (as MF Outa’ National and Blacka’nized, among many others) before issuing a proper debut,…
At 30 years old, the prodigious vibraphonist Stefon Harris already has three Grammy nominations and four albums for Blue Note under his belt. For Evolution he has assembled a band called Blackout, with the intent of injecting some of the bump and groove of hip-hop and R&B into the jazz…
Chicago’s John Hughes III has operated Hefty Records for nine years. The independent label has released albums by artists such as Telefon Tel Aviv and the Aluminum Group and has built a following among listeners seeking out music in that catchall category of “postrock,” a tag rooted in the early-Nineties…
Kieran Hebden appears to be a normal 25-year-old living in London’s Camden Town who spends a lot of time at home. He’s a guy who wakes up when he wants to, watches television as long as he likes, and spends most of his pocket money on records, stumbling out to…
Louie Vega’s musical journey to maturity has been an extensive tour of self-discovery through collaboration and experimentation. Vega broke as a teenage DJ in the Bronx Latin freestyle scene of the Eighties (notably remixing the classic 1987 hit “Silent Morning” by Noel) and has been a dominant figure in house…
Record companies love to say that their song did well at the Winter Music Conference. “This was the hit of WMC!” looks great splashed across the sales sheets and press releases. (If I had a nickel for every hype sheet I get with this absurd claim on it, well, I…
Dub soundclashes are a classic technique (traditionally a meeting of Jamaican sound systems in a sparring match) honored here by two prolific musicians who live miles away from its geographical origin. DJ Spooky resides in New York but spends his life traveling around the world, while Twilight Circus’s Ryan Moore…
Recently Joël Virgel’s sexy, throaty voice resonated throughout the house music world on the Latin Project’s “Lei Lo Lai,” which soared to near-anthem status last year thanks to a prescient remix by New York house mainstays Masters at Work. But the debut album for this French-Caribbean artist, who was raised…
On the surface Fiesta Songs covers a diverse selection of popular songs with a Latin flair. In the hands of Señor Coconut and his Orchestra, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” goes merengue, New Age progenitor Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene (Part II)” does the mambo, and Sade’s “Smooth Operator” is performed over a…
This album deserves to be granted an extended shelf life, not just because of its unique qualities, but for the travails the band endured to get it out there. Deep Water Slang is tagged v.2.0 since the original version nearly disappeared with the demise of Zion I’s former label, Ground…
Ursula Rucker has singlehandedly introduced quality poetry and spoken word to the electronic music community through her collaborations with 4 Hero, King Britt, and Jazzanova. Judging by the top performances she coaxes out of these artists as well as the Roots and Little Louie Vega on her new album, Silver…
On Hot Women, infamous comic illustrator Robert Crumb curates a remarkably cohesive collection of early twentieth-century songs from his collection of 78 RPM records handpicked for their obscurity and his subsequent joy in discovering them. For him “torrid” refers to chanteuses from places like Mexico, Brazil, Africa, Greece, and Tahiti,…
Musicians who run their own record labels often fall prey to the trap of shamelessly promoting themselves instead of the artists they have signed; the Neptunes’ recent Clones, for example, was ostensibly released to promote their protégés yet ended up dripping head-to-toe with appearances by Pharrell Williams. But England’s maniacal…
Since their start in the late Eighties as two-thirds of the influential electronic outfit Black Dog, Plaid’s Andy Turner and Ed Handley have been pegged as thinking man’s artists. Unfortunately they’ve also fallen victim to some lazy terminology like IDM, meant to describe an amorphous genre called “intelligent dance music,”…
The Rapture has been floating atop a steamship of media hype; its debut album, Echoes, could sweep this young New York-based band over the top and into an ultra-mainstream echelon (instead of just recognition from pop stars gagging to work with them and their British-born producers, DFA). Though sounding derivative…
Since 1991, and particularly since the 1993 release of The Singles collection, no one has internationally repped Miami house music better than Murk’s Oscar G and Ralph Falcon, from hedonism-inducing anthems like “Dark Beat” to the memorable pseudonyms they use for various projects (Coral Way Chief, Deep South, Liberty City)…
Producer Omid, a well-kept secret in Los Angeles’s fertile hip-hop scene, has aptly named his album Monolith and features a staggering number of guest MCs (Aceyalone, Abstract Rude, 2Mex, Slug, and Murs) on vocal cuts alongside pure instrumentals. There’s so much to digest here in its giant, dense form that…
Peaches has a sense of humor that’s not for everyone. It takes a particularly twisted mind to appreciate an electronic punk chick who likes to appear onstage flaunting a hot pink leather strap-on, yet her upfront, messy take on sexual hedonism has attracted a sizable fan base. She gets away…
Spiritualized’s eleven-year career has been dominated by themes of God, love, and drugs, the latter a stubborn holdover from frontman Jason Pierce’s previous rock band, Spacemen 3. While Pierce has never been very forthcoming to the press about his former battles with heroin, his music has always been rife with…
