The Brand’s members know they are hot shit. They want you to know that. They want you to know that just like you know how to breathe. Brash, unabashed, and in your face, the Hialeah power-pop trio are not ashamed to tout themselves as the new messiahs of rock and…
Surprises often lurk in unlikely locales. That’s what makes them surprises, of course. An Irish band known for reshaping local folk genres suddenly embraces Spanish Gypsy and Balkan sources. A workmanlike disc from a Buena Vista Social Club alumnus explodes into lucid jazz on a single standout cut. And a…
We are the robots: The title Electro Dziska, according to Venezuelan-American director Iris Cegarra, doesn’t really mean anything beyond attempting to define a distinctly Miami experience. “It basically encompasses going to a disco or a club … experiencing electro in all of its forms,” she explains via phone from New…
Sascha Funke Bravo (Bpitch Control) The Chilean-born producer Ricardo Villalobos immigrated early in life to Germany, a locale with a long history of electronic composition. It is impossible to ignore that influence when dissecting the hallmarks of his sound: The stark, angular distortions he creates are a sonic homage to…
As is often the case with dance music, what sounds so great on Saturday night when pumped through a megawatt sound system, surrounded by dancing lights and throbbing bodies, can get a little dull on Tuesday evening in your living room. Repetitious samples, gradual buildups, and wordless mixes don’t translate…
Forget about Robert Plant. Or better yet, thank him for the wide exposure that his presence on Festival in the Desert will give the mainly African musicians who assembled in northeastern Mali in January 2003 for this music fete. Several of these artists turn in sizzling performances, from Ali Farka…
On Hot Women, infamous comic illustrator Robert Crumb curates a remarkably cohesive collection of early twentieth-century songs from his collection of 78 RPM records handpicked for their obscurity and his subsequent joy in discovering them. For him “torrid” refers to chanteuses from places like Mexico, Brazil, Africa, Greece, and Tahiti,…
These days, any band who ventures into postrock territory is bound to get compared with Mogwai, which is akin to every trip-hop/downtempo/chillout act being written off as a DJ Shadow knockoff. Although Canadian quintet Do Make Say Think shares its Scottish predecessors’ knack for stop-start commotion, the details in Winter…
Where have all the jazz singers gone? To the big smoky lounge in the sky — the great ones anyway — leaving fans of the sultry-throated diva to look for the next heir to the throne. Enter René Marie. The 48-year-old veteran’s career is only now picking up steam after…
Everybody bitches about the lack of inexpensive, cool things to do around here. But when something actually happens, complaining natives don’t show up. When Sugar Ray performed for free on November 6, courtesy of Smirnoff Vodka at the Clevelander, the 500 people who turned up were almost all from out…
Across the nation, countless activist groups have designated Miami as a target for direct action, a place to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement scheduled to be negotiated by trade ministers from 34 countries. If all goes according to plan for them, the streets of downtown Miami…
King Bee is a down-home blues band, harmonica player and all. Being based in Miami isn’t easy for it. That’s not the sort of sound hipster kids and new wave punk fans, the ones so often credited with supporting rock around here, pick up on. But last month King Bee…
Ian Bavitz, a.k.a. Aesop Rock, is sitting on a clothes-strewn couch in his Brooklyn apartment. His coffee table is littered with empty Parliament cigarette boxes, and his labelmate, rapper Camu Tao, lurks next to him under a sheet, cursing at a TV screen as he wrestles with video game demons…
On any given night in Miami, you can find a member of the collective known as Deep House Movement www.dhmonline.net spinning records at a restaurant or nightclub. Every night one or more of the group — Edwin Adams, Stephen Flynn, and Omar Suardy — can be found at Touch restaurant…
Musicians who run their own record labels often fall prey to the trap of shamelessly promoting themselves instead of the artists they have signed; the Neptunes’ recent Clones, for example, was ostensibly released to promote their protégés yet ended up dripping head-to-toe with appearances by Pharrell Williams. But England’s maniacal…
Using techno’s minimalist rigidity to slim down the bloated diva that devoured house music, Michigan’s Matthew Dear has proved himself an accomplished producer of microhouse, the most progressive regressive movement in recent memory. With his debut full-length, Leave Luck to Heaven, he beefs up a sound flayed of fat by…
Despite its magnificent harmonic blur of guitar noise, the shoegazer genre took its name from the musicians who passively performed it while studying their footwear. Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Lush were the godheads of this Nineties British scene. Now that their heyday is nearly a decade…
With Uno, Dos: Bandera (One, Two: Flag, continuing their addiction to horrible album names), Monterrey’s hip-hop kings of Control Machete honor their name: the machete attitude (direct but subtler than Molotov’s) coupled with self-control. That’s why the songs never explode and, in another unusual twist, don’t settle into a groove…
After more than a decade of relative silence following the dissolution of the Clash, the iconic singer-guitarist formed a new rock and roll outfit, the Mescaleros, which cooked with more Caribbean, African, and South American flavors than his old globally minded group ever had. Two warmly received albums later, he…
All Mike Errico needs is a little luck for his brand of alternative folk-pop to finally reach the lofty commercial heights of Dave Matthews and John Mayer. Like those two far-from-overnight successes, the New York City singer/songwriter has spent years earning his stripes by slogging it out on the coffeehouse…
Remember that Coyote Ugly flick? I couldn’t sit through it, not even to watch models taking murderous stabs at acting. But I don’t mind a live-action version. The sexy-bartender-doing-a-number-on-top-of-the-bar phenomenon happens at places like Automatic Slim’s, where pop metal lives. It’s wild. At least five Connecticut frat-boy fatalities have occurred…
The world “seminal” is used over and over again in the hefty press kit that accompanies Skull Ring, the latest album from Iggy Pop. And rightfully so: The 56-year-old musician, who formed his groundbreaking group the Stooges in Detroit in 1967, has gone on to define punk rock, postpunk, garage…
