Quick, name one of the longest-running bands in the known universe of Jamaican music. A band that started out when calypso still dominated the island; was there when the bright beat of a guitar first cried “ska”; helped slow ska down to rock steady, and then reggae; and today pumps…
In the dark Ricky Martin contemplates his reflection. He stands in front of a giant mirror, his back to the audience. The crossover sensation may or may not hear George Lopez, host of the fourth annual Latin Grammy Awards, introduce him with a crack about his “bon bon.” Doesn’t matter…
Spiritualized’s eleven-year career has been dominated by themes of God, love, and drugs, the latter a stubborn holdover from frontman Jason Pierce’s previous rock band, Spacemen 3. While Pierce has never been very forthcoming to the press about his former battles with heroin, his music has always been rife with…
On its third full-length and first for a major label, Louisville, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket mostly keeps to its formula for country-fried rock, dirty barroom riffs, and leisurely paced acoustic folk. Lead singer Jim James’s reverb-drenched vocals anchor a sound that is rooted in soil long cultivated by Neil Young,…
The club season is upon us and last Labor Day weekend kicked it off spectacularly. Of course I was buzzin’ and made it into the most exclusive engagement in months, the Ocean Drive en Español Latin Grammy afterparty at the Loews Hotel. I estimated about half a million dollars’ worth…
When you are better known for the people who attend your party than for your music, you might be facing a credibility problem. Such is the case with the New York-based “celebrity DJ” Mark Ronson, who has played at the White House Correspondents’ dinner and P. Diddy’s 29th birthday party…
Electronic music has evolved and splintered into about a million subgenres since Karlheinz Stockhausen started messing around with wires and primitive tone generators in the Fifties. Style Encoding, the debut album from Seattle-based producer Tom “Codebase” Butcher, traces a chart that flows from Stockhausen through Kraftwerk, Bambaataa-esque electro, Detroit house,…
When two commercial airplanes hit the World Trade Center’s towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was fast asleep. I woke up that day and e-mailed a question to publicist Kathryn Frazier about the new Aesop Rock album, Labor Days. She responded that I please try back later…
Whatever happened to that glorious era when rockeros everywhere turned their backs on Anglo influences and began doing their own native shit? Nowadays everyone seems to be going electric, and even icons like the Grammy Award-winning Café Tacuba (who became the most respected Mexican rock band ever with an unusual…
Argentineans weren’t always as active in Miami’s music scene as they are now. But bands like Tereso www.tereso.com, Prole and the Gardis have been playing around for a while now, getting themselves mixed up in jams with visiting Argentine rock celebrities like Los Piojos or simply trying to make a…
In the netherworld of the South Beach dance music scene there are many characters: pimps and hoes, fast-talking hucksters and dolled-up nymphs, drag queens and closet queens, musicians, DJs, artists, photographers, strippers, and many other saints and sinners. It’s a weird kind of purgatory that opens its gates between the…
Soviet founder/ringleader/ singer Keith Ruggiero yearns wistfully for the music from the early Eighties. Never mind the fact that he was all of five years old in 1983 when idols Talk Talk and Yaz were at the peak of their popularity. While all of his peers at Syracuse University, where…
The Cure Trilogy (Eagle Vision DVD) New Order 316: New York 81/Reading Festival 98/ and in conversation 511: Finsbury Park 9th June 02 (Rhino DVD) When the Cure completed its last album, 2000’s Bloodflowers, bandleader Robert Smith knew it lacked focus. Eager to give the troubled project some cachet, he…
Basshead has met many elitists during his travels. (Hell, I am an elitist.) I have argued over the merits of shoegazer-lite quartet Lush with Brit-pop fanatics; I have championed the artistic strengths of old-school trance producers like Future Sound of London to house aficionados; I have wrestled with East Coast…
Outside of the despicable Aqua’s repulsive “Barbie Girl,” Denmark has not been known for producing any notable music. That is, until now: Enter the Raveonettes, who are among the new school of Danish musicians (along with Junior Senior) creatively reinterpreting familiar musical archetypes. These clever Danes — Sune Rose Wagner…
In his notes that accompany Lágrimas Negras, Angel González admits that the recording in question is unusual. He does not exaggerate. This newly released collection features two outstanding exponents of markedly dissimilar traditions in a candid and fruitful dialogue of musical expression. The result is strangely attractive and for the…
If you feel that your neighbors are in need of a wake-up call via your home stereo, California’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has the goods you are looking for. Take Them On, On Your Own sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain playing inside a Harrier Jet engine, and damn…
Some of you may know Dave Derby as the voice of the criminally underappreciated Nineties altrockers Dambuilders. After that Boston quartet split in 1998, the singer/multi-instrumentalist spent a couple of years pursuing his solo muse under the moniker Brilliantine — a loose collective of musicians that included Lloyd Cole, Ivy’s…
There’s a reassuring familiarity about the way Leona Naess sings lyrics like “Roll up the carpet and pour out the wine/Treat me like I’m your valentine” on “Calling,” the opening track from her self-titled album. Who hasn’t gone through a spell of embracing melancholy, lovestruck folk-pop singers like Joni Mitchell…
High above the freeways in Los Angeles, hovering over the causeways to Miami Beach, and deep within the bowels of the New York City subway system hang sultry portraits of hot, ripped, copper-colored babes making love to musical instruments. A man gropes a guitar. A woman, conga wedged between her…
If the fourth annual edition of the until-now fairly successful Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) had taken place in New York as it had before, chances are it would’ve been lost in the blackout. But things in sunny L.A. weren’t much better. Held at the Beverly Hilton from August 14-16,…
The three members of Proyecto Uno — Nelson Zapata, Juan Salgado, and José “Spagga” Medina — are calling Miami from their home in New York as the sounds of the city streets play in the background. It’s a fitting soundtrack to the conversation since the Big Apple has always had…
