Brown’s voice conveys a boyish sweetness — a trait reinforced by his declaration, “There’s nothing wrong with dancing”— and “Yo” is refreshing when compared with aggro horndogs such as Pretty Ricky. Hard to believe Juelz Santana was quoting “Wait (The Whisper Song)” on his last single…
With a menacing riff highlighting the unspoken influence of grunge on Julian Casablancas’s slurred vocals, the band sounds more like The Vines than “Last Nite.” It’s doubtful this track will inspire anyone who doesn’t already care about The Strokes, unless alt-nostalgia is stronger than it seems…
George Clinton’s musical career began almost 40 years ago when he literally stepped out of the barbershop with his doo-wop outfit, The Parliaments, and scored big with the 1967 hit “I Wanna Testify.” Not bad for a teen from Jersey. However, not until the P-Funk mothership rocketed from his brain…
Felix da Housecat (a.k.a. Felix Stallings, Jr.) is one of dance music’s most artistically respected and commercially successful figures. His eclectic DJ sets — composed of equal parts house, funk, and New Wave — are immediately accessible and completely unpredictable, appealing to both the hardcore club crowd and the rock…
Spanish-to-English-Dictionary Tereso: n. (1) Literal: Argentine slang for a piece of shit; (2) Modern: an Argentine rock band created in Miami whose hard-driving, retro-grunge rock causes audiences to bang their heads, shake their butts, and flail like entranced Pentecostals tripping into sideways jumping jacks. After eleven years rocking the local…
It has certainly been a long, strange, but beneficial trip for Perpetual Groove since the group began touring in the fall of 2002. Singer/guitarist Brock Butler and bassist Adam Perry met in 1998 as freshmen at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Once they added a drummer and keyboardist…
With his furrowed features, weathered grin, trademark fedora, and hands that scurry across the keyboard, Bob Wilder — better known to local music aficionados as Piano Bob — looks like a man who spends his time in dusty dives and dead-end saloons. Tonight is no exception. Like most Wednesday evenings,…
Ray Raposa is not afraid of abstractions. “Those are the terms I prefer to approach things on,” the twentysomething songwriter says from a tour stop in Arizona. Which is not surprising, given the brazenly diffuse, twilit sound of Castanets. The band’s recently released First Light’s Freeze is a musical scrapbook…
Like capitalism with a bass thump, the spectre of Murk looms large over the Miami dance community. Murk members Oscar G and Ralph Falcon have helped define the “Miami sound” with their dark, ominous take on house music. Separately they’ve had residencies at almost every club that matters (currently you…
The problem with “Nasty Girl” isn’t that there are too many cooks in the kitchen — it’s that they’re all standing around a microwave. The song is entirely warmed-over. Biggie’s verse comes from Life After Death’s superior “Nasty Boy” (thought we wouldn’t notice, Diddy?), while producer Jazze Pha recycles the…
Ashanti is not a girl, not quite a diva, and getting better all the time. With virtually no melodic support — just Irv Gotti’s tinny drums and an electrified bass line — she turns in her strongest vocal yet. Meth barely pays her lip service, while Paul Wall champions only…
Favela freestyler and producer Edu K re-waxes his baile funk classic “Popozuda Rock n’ Roll.” Rather than merely slurp down the Salt-n-Pepa milkshake that originally shaddupped and pushed it on numerous early-Eighties Favela Booty Beats comps, Edu draws from a chunky metal guitar topped with EZ-Whiz breaks. The ex-punk-funker wears…
How many times have you thought, Oh, that India.Arie — she’s nothing but a bunch of hair? None? Don’t tell her that; she’s convinced everybody’s talking all this stuff about her locks. Her latest takes us on a journey through her past ‘dos via sistah-girl clichés and a gently protesting…
Lil’ Wayne is the Al Green of rap: He could recite the phone book and have listeners hanging on each of his curvaceous consonants and smoldering vowels. On The Carter II, Wayne more or less does just that, injecting familiar rap tropes (sample chorus: “Get money, fuck bitches, get money,…
Tod Dockstader, America’s long-lost electronic music grandfather, returns after nearly 40 years of silence. In the early Sixties, Dockstader looped raucous tapes to sine-wave shrapnel by night so that they were as whiplash-fast, whimsical, violent, and surreal as the cartoons he edited by day. Early works like Luna Park and…
“Hello, this is vocalist Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, here to talk about our amazing, fantastic, unbelievable second album, One Way Ticket to Hell … and Back. [pauses] What? You think the album is way more over-the-top than Permission to Land? You’d call it grossly self-indulgent, plodding in many places,…
South Florida, if you boil it down, is chock full of enough surrealist bizarr-o-ness that its inherent charms prove a bit much for outsiders. The kids raised in this subtropical environment are subjected to steady if at times disharmonious doses of hip-hop, disco, punk, metal, and jazz. It’s difficult to…
Modern rap beefs may be played out behind the security of dis tracks and radio interviews, but true-skool enthusiasts know that hip-hop in its rawest and most directly aggressive form can be found only at an MC freestyle battle. If you’ve never seen one in person, they are at turns…
Buju Banton’s evolution as an artist is as evident on his album covers as it is in his music. Mr. Mention features a narrow-eyed gangsta clad in a leopard-print chiffon-sleeved shirt. Til Shiloh shows the first dreadlocks unfurling from his head like a flower’s petals. His most recent album, Friends…
Check this Crescent City six-string slinger’s CV and you’ll find him backing some of the most iconic performers of the past 30 years: the Neville Brothers, Bob Dylan, Dr. John, the Funky Meters, and literally hundreds more. Dylan even gave the man props in his biography: “The other guitar player,…
Groucho Marx once remarked he’d never want to belong to a club that would accept him as a member. Detroit-based brittle-beat artists Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — a duo married not just in the creative sense — have adopted a similar dictum while recording under the name Adult…
For a leading indie-rock miserablist, Jamie Stewart possesses one of the heartiest, most boisterous laughs you’re ever likely to hear. The 33-year-old Xiu Xiu (pronounced shoe-shoe) frontman typically converses quietly, in a polite, thoughtful, self-effacing, and a bit pensive manner, and then — when you least expect it — his…
