Thanks to a series of dance hits culminating in last year’s smash “Which Way You’re Going,” Robbie Rivera is one of Miami’s signature producers, sharing the spotlight alongside George Morel, Murk, and a handful of others. He has released countless recordings on his own imprint, Juicy Music, as well as…
Thursdays, Pawn Shop Lounge If you’ve ever partied in Fort Lauderdale, you may recognize DJ Midas’s name: he plays on Fridays at Pangaea in Hollywood and on Saturdays at Art Bar. Slowly but surely he’s beginning to earn gigs here, and currently holds down a residency at the Pawn Shop…
Why would some 30 bands from exotic places such as Gainesville; Bloomington and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Richmond, North Carolina; and Brooklyn come to the dynamic Allapattah/Wynwood district? 305 Fest, bitch! Not as glamorous as WMC, the second installment of this punk/hardcore/indie rock confab promises to be a classic (anyone remember…
Cotton Candy The hype around 50 Cent’s new album, The Massacre, began sometime last fall when “Disco Inferno” began percolating on radio stations around the nation. The left-footed logjam wasn’t as fresh as The Game’s first single, “How We Do,” which found the West Coast thug and 50 Cent pass…
It’s a breezy Friday night on Lincoln Road as two girls in miniskirts are sitting at a dinner table outside Tropical Cigars. There’s the short, twentysomething Cuban lady chasing down a dollar bill after it slips off the table, while the middle-age Colombian hard body can’t stop complaining about the…
The catchall term for this stuff is “jam band” music, but that cliché hardly describes the tuneful smorgasbord offered at this weekend’s Langerado Music Festival. For the third straight year, Langerado brings the nation’s top touring bands to Broward County. And the festival has grown: The lineup (25 bands total)…
Finally Andrea Echeverri will have her self-titled debut issued in the U.S., eight months after its original release in Colombia. Its arrival will certainly be welcome by those who remember her group Aterciopelados as mid-Nineties representatives of a bigger, underground, Latin alternative rock movement in their country. It is peculiar…
Thanks to “Al Otro Lado del Río” (“The Other Side of the River”), the Oscar-winning song from The Motorcycle Diaries soundtrack, the domestic release of Uruguayan pop poet Jorge Drexler’s seventh album (which was released overseas last year) couldn’t have come at a better moment. Drexler is a superb singer-songwriter…
Internationally revered as “the Philosopher of Rap,” Vico C constantly feels the need to get things off his chest. On Desahogo (Purging), a mélange of island-inspired instrumentation (salsa, reggaeton), the boricua with a complex soul, who became an evangelical Christian after suffering a near-fatal car accident in the mid-Nineties, contemplates…
Jane’s Addiction fans reached for the Zeppelin, and Strokes fans uncovered the Velvet Underground. All’s well in geekdom. But now El Paso, Texas outfit the Mars Volta returns with a second full-length, challenging indie rawkers to reference their … King Crimson and Yes albums?!? Frances the Mute is all about…
Much like Weezer did in the U.S., Ash found success in Britain by plumbing the depths of the geek psyche. On its fourth album, Ash has replaced an endearingly awkward obsession with Star Wars mythology and Jackie Chan films with a possibly geekier obsession with the leather-clad dark ages of…
On Kasabian’s eponymous debut, there is a line that declares, “Music is my world.” This echoes throughout “I.D.,” in which singer Tom Meighan’s voice emulates Primal Scream’s vocalist Bobby Gillespie circa Screamadelica. With Kasabian’s handle on rhythm, you can believe that statement wholeheartedly. Filled with positive anger, the revolutionary chants…
On Some Cities, Doves’s self-produced soundscapes have evolved into more defined sound bites. Produced by Ben Hiller (Blur, Elbow), it is far less experimental and imaginative than previous works, which touched the senses with the band’s melancholic yet positive combination of swirling guitars and moody vocals, and much more conventional…
Enon, a New York electro-pop trio, is all about getting your mind twisted on nerve-twitching and completely disparate tracks that quiver through your eardrums in fuzzy, whacked-out waves of sound. You don’t know what to expect next. Not that the songs are necessarily glitchy or strident, but the group knows…
Though much has been said about Helmet’s founding member and principle songwriter Page Hamilton and his influence on nü-metal, his real impact has been way more far-reaching — remember, when Helmet first appeared, it didn’t fall neatly into metal or hardcore, and acts as distinctive as Primus, Tool, Failure, Barkmarket,…
Alongside his Planet of the Drums accomplices Dieselboy and AK1200, DJ Dara is one of the preeminent figureheads in American drum and bass … though he’s not American. Transplanted from Ireland in 1994, Darragh Guilfoyle quickly delved into jungle music’s splintered forms, from dark-step to tech-step, to create his lauded…
Ivano Bellini is one of the most popular DJs in the city, as well as an occasional producer and remixer for South Beach imprint SFP Records, a label he runs with Marc Sacheli and another local DJ, Pierre Zonzon. Miami Afterhours is a good example of the sets he spins…
Tommy Ryk Saturdays, Skybar; Mondays, Sofi Lounge Hey now, this is just the dude Miami needs to bridge the gap between the downtown hipster-tropolis and a Guido-thronged, cologne-scented South Beach. A down-to-earth 28-year-old spinja who relocated from New York City two years ago, Tommy Ryk now holds down residency within…
Puerto Rican reggaeton star Daddy Yankee and I are about to finish the interview, but right after he thanks God for the blessings he has received, his publicist can’t help herself. Excitedly Lourdes Perez describes the growing hype in America over Daddy Yankee with plain statistics. “We’re 42 in Billboard’s…
I don’t know how well you know my songs,” says Elvis Costello over a cell phone that occasionally cuts out as he drives towards Buxton Opera House in Devonshire, England, where he is scheduled to play at the Four Four Time festival. Such knowledge is near-impossible to acquire. Since debuting…
By now, everybody knows the story: On Friday, February 11, Clear Channel, the multimedia corporation that owns several hundred radio stations across the United States, decided to switch its call letters from the rock-oriented ZETA (WZTA-FM 94.9) to the reggaeton-oriented MEGA (WMGE-FM 94.9), leaving West Palm Beach’s The Buzz (WPBZ-FM…
King Tubby has been dead for fifteen years, the victim of a still-unsolved murder in Jamaica, yet he remains among the most respected figures in reggae, credited with the innovations that gave modern-day trance, techno, and hip-hop a sonic heft and deep-bass grooves. Still, he was always a behind-the-scenes string-puller…
