Music

On the 2000 album The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse opens with “3rd Planet,” one of the great songs in recent American rock. Opening with a few solitary chords plucked by guest musician and lap steel guitarist Ben Blankenship, “3rd Planet” thrusts the listener into a melancholy world of self-doubt…

Apparently there’s a standing offer of one million dollars from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Boston to anyone who can solve the Poincaré Conjecture, a geometrical problem that has baffled the world’s brightest minds for a century. There should probably be a similar reward for anyone who can figure out…

In the streets of Barcelona, Spain, the word barí means “gem.” Barí was the name alternative combo Ojos de Brujo (Eyes of the Wizard) gave to its second album before critics all over Europe began using the same word to describe the songs on it. Shiny and pure like a…

For too many years, it seemed as if the only references to Peruvian music in this country were Andean sounds (like Simon & Garfunkel’s rendition of “El Condor Pasa” and New Age musicians’ love affair with the pan flute) or Inca kitsch queen Yma Sumac (a whole genre unto herself)…

99 Jamz (WEDR-FM 99.1) likes to present itself as the ultimate party, a nonstop hip-hop and R&B throwdown. But the reality is quite different. Up in Hollywood at the Cox Communications building on a recent Friday, the small studio that is the nerve center for the top-rated urban music station…

Like many Mexicans who are thriving against the odds in the United States, Francisco Gomez cannot believe his good luck. Akwid, the rap duo featuring him and his older brother Sergio, has been in the top twenty of the Billboard Latin album chart for the past 30 weeks, and Proyecto…

Since it was established in 1998, the Grammy Awards category for Latin Rock Alternative Album of the Year has been a litmus test, deciding which of the genre’s hottest artists is ready to break into the bigger and juicier U.S. market. Mexican rockers Maná won the award twice for its…

When did smoking weed with smelly hippies and Rastafarians become more expensive than locking yourself up in a South Beach nightclub with an eightball of blow and some hookers? If we had to guess — 1999. That was around the time Lauryn Hill blew up. It was also the year…

Jamaica’s hottest producer didn’t exactly set New York on fire during his last visit. After sharing some studio time with Wayne Wonder, Donovan “Don Vendetta” Bennett found himself lost when he drove through Brooklyn during a record-setting cold snap and there wasn’t a helpful pedestrian in sight. “Is it possible…

The saga of the Flatlanders is peppered with irony. A genuine supergroup if ever there was one, this West Texas trio released a debut album in 1972 and then waited a full 30 years for a followup. Blame it on lack of motivation; their debut disc was virtually ignored the…

The Walkmen deserve praise for painting their influences with something that is both a few shades weirder and more charged and electrifying. On the hell-raising “The Rat” from its second full-length, Bows and Arrows, the group sounds like it’s updating a lost U2 track circa ’83 (when Bono, the Edge,…

One from the Heart stands as one of Hollywood’s most famous disasters. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola as an “antidote” to his Apocalypse Now, it was his only musical and was almost universally panned upon its release in 1982. It vanished from theaters in less than two weeks,…

Oh, where art hipper-than-thou Chromeo? Servicing a talk box with Bambi Woods-like smoothness, this Canadian couplet stars Vice magazine’s rap editor Dave 1 (he’s A-Trak’s older sibling) as a Casanova MC wannabe and his gold-grilled associate, Pee Thug, who chimes in with enough synths to power a Third World country…

When I heard Fritz “e” Romeus was taking over a billiards bar, I was afraid to ask what role pool cues and balls would serve in his endeavor. See, Fritz, a tall, dark, Calvin Klein model-type of Euro-Caribbean descent, is the P.I.M.P. behind those famous Skin parties. You know, the…

Lounging on a leather couch in Miami’s Circle House recording studio, Marcello Valenzano and Andre Lyon — better known as Cool & Dre — are dressed in crisp white T-shirts and sagging blue jeans. Dre is the talkative one, his tall, slim frame draped over the couch and long limbs…

You won’t be seeing Roosevelt Franklin on MTV anytime soon. You probably won’t read about them in music magazines such as Spin, CMJ, or even XLR8R, although you may catch a perfunctory review of their album Something’s Gotta Give in URB. As for radio? Forget it: Your best bet is…

To find evidence of Jay-Z’s far-reaching influence in club culture, all you need to do is look toward South Beach on a weekend night. Visit any hip-hop club on the Washington Avenue strip, or Opium Garden on Collins Avenue, and you’ll find people acting out one of the rapper’s videos:…

Shuffling between pseudonyms like Delarosa and Asora (currently retired), Prefuse 73 (most popular), and Savath & Savalas (now receiving the lion’s share of recognition), Scott Herren has created a steady string of productions ranging from digitally flecked folk to frayed hip-hop. Yet he has simultaneously seemed to suffer from an…

With Map of What Is Effortless, Telefon Tel Aviv marks a radical departure from the opaque ambience of its 2001 debut, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, toward a rich brew of soul and IDM electronics. Much of it, in fact, features the Loyola University Chamber Orchestra, which lends the proceedings a regal,…

Since emerging in 1996 as Air, the prolific duo of Jean-Benoit “JB” Dunckel and Nicolas Godin has tended to veer in a slightly different direction with each release, going from loungey sounds (Moon Safari) to psychedelic musings (The Virgin Suicides soundtrack) to crackling experiments (City Reading: Tre Storie Western with…

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…