Saturday Looks Good to Me wants to kidnap you and your stereo and take you on a skip through a field of lavender, stuff you full of chocolates, and pump you full of goody-goody feelings until you’re ready to burst. Or at least that’s the impression you’ll get listening to…
Months after relocating to the Windy City and finalizing the details on her forthcoming EP, A Hot Hooray, local electro-pop/indie diva Oly, is returning in full force for a one-night stand in the city that bred her punkish, whimsical take on synth music. Her bright, deliciously vocalized landscapes are sure…
The genesis of the South Florida duo Timewellspent is love — love for Sixties psych, Seventies soft rock, and a man named Burt. Vocalist Casey Fundaro (the nephew of Three Dog Night’s Danny Hutton) and guitarist/pianist Christopher Moll (formerly of locals See Venus) have cut their teeth on these influences…
Thursdays, Oxygen Lounge Armand Pena’s tribal house single Watching Me has held in the top ten most downloaded songs on beatport.com since it dropped October 7. Plus, he’s got more cuts in the hatch from his new label Rhythm Freak, which he named after the moniker he uses for occasional…
Named for the act of two lesbians sitting, legs outstretched and interlocked, to rub their pussies together, New York’s Scissor Sisters may be just what the “red states” fear most about the coastal “blue states.” After all, as multi-instrumentalist/ bassist/group epicenter Scott “Babydaddy” Hoffman remarks, “It would only take a…
Recently, I went on vacation. It was a spontaneous trip. My best friend, Kevin, was about to head off to England for a year, and so on a Friday morning I decided to hop a plane from San Francisco to Southern California, take the following week off, and go climb…
Time, distance, and the slow dawn of reason have finally enlightened us: All That You Can’t Leave Behind sucked. U2’s last record saddled the megaton-transcendent single “Beautiful Day” with ten awkward, flailing whiffs at the piñata of beauty, poignancy, and cultural relevance. But then 9/11 raised an urgent need for…
On the surface, much of Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? is an album of electro-pop covers of punk songs from Drew Daniel — ex-punk rocker, current Björk collaborator and Matmos member, and button-pusher behind The Soft Pink Truth — that’s perfect for…
Visitors logging on to Kraftwerk’s Website are greeted by Unicode green text announcing the band’s name and a line drawing of a frequency-emitting radio tower, à la the old RKO Pictures logo. Another click generates a menu of some of Kraftwerk’s best-known works, including “Boing Boom Tschak” and “Radioactivity,” which…
If you’re an MTV-watching, Internet-surfing, beef-consuming fan of Eminem, you won’t learn nothing new by listening to his fifth album, Encore. Many of its revelations have already passed through the echo chamber of media-fueled public discourse. Like his last album, the horrendously overwrought The Eminem Show, Encore purveys a surreal…
Chingy, the St. Louis rapper with the Nelly-esque drawl, regresses into Jackpot’s double-platinum formula on his follow-up, Powerballin. In the beat sector, he recruits the Trak Starz to craft “Don’t Worry,” a duet with Janet Jackson that’s a “One Call Away” clone, while R. Kelly lends his pied-piping prowess on…
Grant Marshall, a.k.a. Daddy G, was the strong silent type in the original lineup of Massive Attack (now the sole domain of Robert “3-D” Del Naja). Marshall seeks to establish a career apart from the UK group, yet as a DJ he can’t stray from using their songs and remixes…
On the surface, Massive Attack’s inaugural soundtrack effort, written for a Jet Li thriller scheduled to be released next April, sounds rather atypical. Orchestral strings swell and heave, only to be undercut by tense excursions into electronic rock. There is even a repeating motif, a melancholy suite that floats through…
Cologne, Germany’s Kompakt imprint has set the gold standard for cutting edge techno for nearly a decade. So, hopes were high for the release of label cofounder Michael Mayer’s first long-player, Touch. Unfortunately, the album comes off as a routine exercise. The title track, while beginning with a huge flourish,…
Four albums on, Rufus Wainwright’s skewered ruminations reflect an inward, soul-baring gaze that quickly defuses any possibility of instant connection. His last outing, the multihued Want One, upped the ante, with its ambitious arrangements supporting his trademark croon, a nonchalance that warbles midway between Morrissey and Elliott Smith. Want Two,…
Pianist and composer Manuel Valera is not interested in the usual Latin licks over post-bop beats, but in the shape of cubano jazz to come. On his new CD, Forma Nueva, he’s joined by the adventuresome John Patitucci on bass and rim shot master Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez on drums,…
Genre-defying. You’ve heard it too many times. Perhaps it’s our own laziness that makes us draw comparisons between similar bands, or maybe we are just truly impressed by our own ability to style-hop. Either way, we often like to come up with new tags that generally roll off the tongue…
With a more polished sound than fellow youngblood Don Omar’s, and a fresher, more chiseled face than the genre’s godfather, Tego Calderon, Daddy Yankee is reggaeton’s newly crowned prince. While his tight, tropical opus, Barrio Fino, sits comfortably atop the Billboard Latin album charts, another hit collaboration with N.O.R.E., “Oye…
With George W. Bush in office for another four years and Castro recovering from his fall, it seems most gringos may never know the apolitical pleasure of riding with a lover, two to a bike, along Havana’s Malecón as the waves lap against the seawall and a seductive son resounds…
Back in 1995 an unknown singer named Richie Spice hit the Jamaican charts with the funky reggae tune “Living Ain’t Easy.” Over the next few years his lover’s rock ditty “Grooving My Girl” and the spirited keyboard-and-bass-driven “Earth A Run Red,” which emphasized the plight of suffering ghetto youths, also…
It was about one year ago when Lance O’Brien explained his mission to me. He had rescued me from the Shell station on the corner of Douglas and Bird, where a mechanic was working out the kinks on my car’s cracked cooling fan. Driving through the South Grove looking for…
With the release of Survivor in 2001, Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Knowles proved once and for all that despite the roster changes, the bad press, and the drama, they are the world’s best packaged R&B supergroup, a perfect triumvirate of strength, talent, and beauty. Three years later, and…
