Ambient music is made for make-believe movies. Brian Eno emphasized this through his Music For Films series. Susumu Yokota claims Hayao Miyazaki’s anime fairy tale Princess Mononoke as an inspiration for his 2002 album The Boy and the Tree. The basic idea behind ambience references the all-encompassing art form of…
Since forming in Munich in 1997, Chicks on Speed has evolved from a proto-electroclash pastiche to a boutique busker of buzzing electro. The multinational assembly of German Kiki Moorse, New Yorker Melissa Logan, and Australian Alex Murray-Leslie originated as art academy feminists, designing clothing that doubled as collages. Following suit,…
The late, great Shel Silverstein was celebrated for his children’s books (The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic), but he also created plenty of challenging work for adults, from his provocative and satirical illustrations for Playboy magazine to his cutting-edge songwriting for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. The…
Chasing down Alejandro Ferllen. That’s what I was doing as the ball dropped on the New Year. It wasn’t for an interview or to say hello. I needed tickets to get my friend in and my license back from the doorman. After a day when Ferllen Productions’ Private Mansion party…
However you want to measure success, 2003 belongs to Juan Esteban Aristizabal. Juanes’s album Un Día Normal moved more copies than any other disc in Spanish this year, spending the entire year on Billboard’s Top Ten Latin album chart (after parking there for eight months in 2002) and spawning five…
If there was a Dow Jones average for reggae, last year’s numbers would have gone through the roof. “Boom! Boom! Boom! year” couldn’t begin to describe the surge. International demand, especially for dancehall, grew exponentially. Somehow, the supply side kept up: Artists with cross-cultural star power turned out enthralling, authentically…
You’ve seen that familiar New Year’s greeting card. A baby in diapers crawls into the spotlight as a symbol of the year to come, while a white-bearded great-grandfather with a cane hobbles away. But in 2003, the card should have been different. The world music old-timer hogged the stage while…
Drive-By Truckers, Decoration Day (New West) You wondered what they were gonna do after their 2001 opus Southern Rock Opera, and they deliver a lyrically jolting, musically overpowering masterpiece. Decoration Day often wades through the same dark Deep South kudzu but never generates dreaded Dixie Gothic clichés, even if it…
Irony will eventually destroy us. Of course, I don’t really mean that. In these media-saturated, hopelessly self-aware end-times, we’ve developed a deep suspicion of sincerity. We dislike rock stars who mean what they say, which explains why most hipsters wouldn’t piss on that Dashboard Confessional guy if he were on…
It was like a searing fever dream. That’s the best way I can describe how Cat Power turned her performance at I/O last December 20 into sheer chaos. A large contingent of followers sat down in the middle of the floor, eager to hear every word, while everyone else milled…
Here is a list of the year’s best music as chosen by our contributors to New Times. The numbers in parentheses reflect the number of votes each album received. Albums Radiohead, Hail to the Thief (Capitol) (8) White Stripes, Elephant (V2) (5) Four Tet, Rounds (Domino) (4) Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love…
The first question that pops into mind when considering the inaugural Jam Cruise: Why book fifteen jam band acts? Despite the presence of Disco Biscuits, Umphrey’s McGee, and members of the String Cheese Incident, this isn’t entirely a Phish-ing expedition; there’s also the jazz-funk of Galactic, manic drum and bass…
There was something fun to do every week in 2003. Although there were still things to fret about, much more went right. Aside from the Eighties revivals (where the girls looked as if they had walked out of a Patrick Nagel illustration), fresh ideas and diversity at venues serving up…
Believe it or not there was a time when Phish was not one of the most successful concert acts ever. Of course one wouldn’t know that, judging by the Phishmania surrounding the band’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, which include four shows at the American Airlines Arena in Miami at the end…
For most bands, embracing the jazz category usually means settling for a career of playing Sunday brunches, sundry festivals, and trendy bars. But Boston’s Soulive has managed to steer clear of these pitfalls, carving out a growing audience among the mainstream masses. Since first forming in 1999, Soulive (drummer Alan…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. While rap music all but dominated the pop charts in 2003, it also yielded one of the lamest record crops (barring Outkast, God bless them) in recent memory. Even the ever-lovable Snoop Dogg was cranking out hip-pop bullshit…
It has been an anxious year for the Latin music industry, as it has for the music industry in general. The good news: In a time of crisis the crassest pop acts fade away; the acts that survive are fired up by a personal vision. While some of the best…
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…
There’s an immediate urge to say something snarky such as, “Oh, look, it’s the second coming” when first introduced to Liquid Chris H., the Scottish electrocoustic composer known singularly as Christ. But on Metamorphic Reproduction Miracle, Christ’s debut full-length (following the 2002 Pylonesque EP), clichés can’t describe this murky, cavernous…
Identifying a jazz singer as the heir to Billie Holiday is almost always an act of hyperbole. In Abbey Lincoln’s case, doing so is merely imprecise. Born of the same straight-ahead approach as Holiday, with a similar range and a melancholy patina, she is often compared to the tragic chanteuse…
“Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” In the space between John Mellencamp’s existentialist “Jack and Diane” and the yearning truck-commercial twang of Bob Seger’s “Like A Rock” lies the broken heart of classic Midwestern rock. It’s territory well-known to Jason Molina, the Ohio-born leader of…
If there’s any rapper that has been appointed the New South’s thug poet, it’s David Banner, a finance graduate from Southern University who used his major- label debut Mississippi: The Album to expound on everything from strip club politics to the plight of black people in one of the most…
