Music

Raised in the Jamaican countryside on a diet of scriptures and regular church visits, Jepther McClymont, better known as Luciano, evolved into an intensely spiritual reggae singer. Hardly surprising, considering that his father was not only a strict Adventist, but a loving dad who made his son his first guitar…

We all we got! “It’s a beautiful thing to see Miami in one room like this,” smiled Pitbull as he accepted an award for Hardest Working Artist at the inaugural Miami Music Awards on Wednesday, August 20. Actually he shouted when he spoke since everyone in the room, a who’s…

With high-profile releases due from both Outkast and Ludacris this fall, the spotlight rests on Atlanta’s potent hip-hop scene. Everyone has had to step up their game in order to compete for the considerable national attention that’s up for grabs. Youngbloodz (J-Bo and Sean Paul) tried to grab some of…

The Nappy Roots’ sophomore release, Wooden Leather, stomps into retail stores with the clap-inducing “Roun’ the Globe,” a midtempo number with twangy guitar chords and snare drums. Inspired by their travels, it’s a celebration of humanity via a good ol’ fashioned country hoedown. Boasting a wide range of producers, Wooden…

As experimental hip-hop producers go, Damian “Req” Harris is pretty abstract. Many of the tracks on his fourth album, Car Paint Scheme, are simply bass and percussion, the latter represented by an 808 kick drum or light, computer-generated noises similar to a reverberating xylophone or a shaking cymbal. The music…

Think of electroclash as the NASDAQ tech sector circa spring 2000, when it crashed and burned once the astounding hype finally subsided. Now think of Client as a dot-com trying to make a buck by rolling out an IPO in the midst of that environment. The hackneyed formula the British…

Sitting in a corner booth at Denny’s on Biscayne Boulevard, Ash Rock — one-half of recording act Hydraulix — attempts to explain why he dropped jungle’s scattered beats from his repertoire in favor of electro-bass’s tighter thump. But before he can get a word out … “It’s cause he met…

Three years ago Chris St. Cavish, better known as DJ MTA, started his own record label. He called it Mass Transit, a name inspired by Miami’s Metro Transit Authority. He pressed up 1200 copies of the first release, Mode 1: Metrorail EP, with money he had been saving since he…

In preparation for their sophomore album, Loses Control, the four members of Hey Mercedes spent a couple of weeks last year at punk-rock summer camp. Not the Vans Warped tour, mind you — we’re talkin’ wilderness, lakes, canoes, bears shitting in the woods, that kinda thing. “We went to this…

In the early Seventies, while the American flower-power movement of the Sixties withered and blew away, hippie culture invaded West Germany. In America, the Woodstock generation had revitalized the still-young rock idiom by infusing it with fresh dollops of blues, gospel, bluegrass, Appalachian music, and other roots-based genres. But dipping…

With Clones, the Neptunes have made another world of glitter and glamour, love as lust and lust as an end unto itself. This is illustrated on the cover of the album, a photo that superimposes Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo over planet Earth rotating in space, a none-too-subtle nod to…

Try to hear this unlikely musical encounter in your head: Shane MacGowan, possessed by the ghost of Joe Strummer and twenty pints of Guinness, staggers into his rehearsal space, only it’s not the Pogues staring at his disheveled ass — it’s Ian MacKaye and the rest of Fugazi. Instead of…

Over the past twenty years Dayton, Ohio, band Guided By Voices has defined the lo-fi, four-track recording aesthetic; opted for glossy production on two major-label albums; and returned to Matador, the label on which it released its best work, after realizing that the mainstream would never truly embrace its quirky…

Album of the year. There. It has been written. Too much hype? Most certainly. But screw it, this record is amazing, a triumph, a sublime schizophrenic sound-self-portrait that tickles and hurts and burns and soothes, all at the same time. If you haven’t already, meet Minneapolis resident Andrew Broder, a.k.a…

On Tuesday, August 5, dozens of stars are gathering at the Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach to participate in the 2003 BMI Urban Awards, presented by the performing rights organization, which represents hundreds of thousands of the record industry’s songwriters, composers, and music publishers. Camera crews barricade the entrance to…

You would be hard-pressed to find a genre besides instrumental surf music that can paint such vivid pictures in the mind’s eye. It doesn’t take much more than those first strains of twangy, heavily reverberated Fender guitar and primal, frenetic drumming to evoke crystal-clear images: fearless wave riders ripping the…

Richard Blair put his trust in the beats and the rewards are self-evident in Sidestepper, his collaboration with Colombian musician/producer Iván Benavides, and their recent album 3 a.m. (In Beats We Trust). But these aren’t just formulaic, bass line-driven downbeats thumping along at 130 beats per minute, club style. They…

In the Nineties space droids implanted computer chips in the eardrums of every English citizen under 30. These compelled the pasty islanders to wind up en masse to techno music and wind down to electronica. The chips also bound the youngsters to insist with straight faces and esoteric jargon that…

Mike West is an anomaly in the South Florida rap game. First of all, he’s not from Miami but Fort Lauderdale, as he’ll proudly tell you. Though born and raised in these parts, he’s spent most of his adult life bouncing between here and Los Angeles, save for brief stops…

Where else in sunny, politically embattled California could you find a loopy delight like CrankCase’s Model Arithmetic? Granted, none of the songs addresses the governor’s recall vote, but there is “The Tale of the Stolen Funk and How We Stole it Back,” one of several twelve-inch singles that helped the…