Berkeley, California’s Lyrics Born, a member of the Quannum collective with DJ Shadow and Blackalicious, has been ignoring hip-hop formulas for more than a decade. Now, finally, comes his solo debut. Worth the wait? Yup. Musically Lyrics Born and his crew bring it from the P-Funk side. Funk plunks; Donald…
Midwest Product’s new album, the Ann Arbor-based trio’s followup to last year’s decidedly more blue-collar gem, Specifics, finds them exchanging glitch for an airy pop sensibility. Not exactly a surprise when it’s titled World Series of Love and a thick stream of rainbow graces its white cover. But after a…
Mexican duo Plastilina Mosh have had it easier than most Latin alternative rock acts. Instead of throwing Latin folk music elements into a rock melting pot — as many of their colleagues did only to fail to build an Anglo audience because of their Spanish lyrics — PM slipped into…
Q and Not U specializes in the kind of ultra-funky, super-abrasive rock (or, as Spin magazine would erroneously label it, “emo”) that every self-respecting postpunk loves. First forming in Washington, D.C., in 1998, the trio has released two albums for the legendary Dischord Records. Their most recent, Different Damage, bristles…
Secret Society on Monday nights at B.E.D. www.bedmiami.com isn’t so secret. High-end ballers from Run’s boy DMC to Jermaine Dupri and actual (foot) ballers like O.J. McDuffie and Andre Johnson make their way through the gauntlet of less-than-subtly-dressed females every week. Those ladies, by the way, get free dinners on…
Handclaps cross the ocean over a cell phone call from Madrid to Miami. Manic fingers pick an acoustic guitar. Palms slap a conga like machine gun fire. Luis Alberto Barberia scats, imitating the drum with an explosion of lips and tongue, then sings: “I know that it’s hard to attain…
It’s 2:00 p.m. in Milwaukee and Captain Sean-Doe, vocalist for a band of Southern California troublemakers called Throw Rag, has stumbled out of bed to share road wisdom via cellular phone. “Most people don’t want to commit to being poor,” he rasps. “It’s not as romantic as people might think,…
“Artistic creativity is a wonderful gift, but unless it is properly channeled and marketed, it does not put food on the table,” writes Michael de Koningh during the foreword for his compelling paean to capitalism as culture driver, Young, Gifted and Black: The Story of Trojan Records. Nor does it…
On a balmy June evening, Duece Poppi opens the door to his Hollywood apartment dressed in a college-patterned Kangol fisherman’s hat, white T-shirt, jean shorts, and tennis shoes with no socks. More important than his casual clothes is the way he wears them; he looks cool and relaxed, luxuriating in…
There is a crucial turning point in a musician’s career that comes after the first rush of critical acclaim, commercial success, and being dubbed the “next big thing.” This is usually followed by material that is just as good, if not better, than the early offerings but gets a slightly…
Considering the uneven and, occasionally, unintentionally hilarious results of conceptualism, one should expect Matmos to choke on flatulent gusts of pretension every time it cranks out an LP. But Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have gleefully managed to counterbalance sonic experimentalism with congenial eclecticism and a relatively straightforward musical tradition…
Producer Omid, a well-kept secret in Los Angeles’s fertile hip-hop scene, has aptly named his album Monolith and features a staggering number of guest MCs (Aceyalone, Abstract Rude, 2Mex, Slug, and Murs) on vocal cuts alongside pure instrumentals. There’s so much to digest here in its giant, dense form that…
The San Francisco-based label Om Records may be best known for its slickly packaged house and neosoul acts like Mark Farina and Soulstice, but it has always checked the pulse of hip-hop’s underground, too. Since 1998 its Deep Concentration comps have been among its most critically successful projects, blending heady…
When Meat Beat Manifesto released its seminal debut album Storm the Studio in 1989, both politics and dance pop looked bleak. Conservatives ran the show, and the mind-numbing post-disco thump of house and techno ruled the dance floor. But Storm put everyone on notice: Simplistic hedonism was dead. MBM’s sample…
Gang Starr is something of an institution, the last remaining link to the glorious, so-called “golden age of hip-hop” in the late Eighties. Unlike their peers who have been forced to record for independents and chase after a gradually shrinking audience, Guru (Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal) and DJ Premier are…
The Grand Prix Americas roared into town last weekend for a Sunday-afternoon race through Miami’s city streets. But anyhoo about the cars — the bevy of shindigs soaking with celebrities that followed were my main concern. And there were plenty. Motorock, a block party and concert series centered around major…
“It’s always something,” Poison the Well guitarist Derek Miller laughs through his dying cell phone from Cleveland. “Every time we release a record, it’s always, ‘What the fuck happened?'” Such is life for the world’s most beloved and hated hardcore band. If you listen only to the first 40 seconds…
Patterson Hood embraced “the Southern thing” in his early thirties. He had ignored it as a teen in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “I grew up more being into punk rock. I loved the Clash. I loved the Replacements. I was into songs with strong songwriting,” says the singer and guitarist for…
Countless historians and critics have tried to write the consummate definition of blues music, but B.B. King may have put it best in his 1996 autobiography, Blues All Around Me: “I could see that the blues was about survival.” Rooted as it is in the hearts of despairing souls –…
Outkast’s new album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is a perplexing work. At times it is sloppy and appealing; elsewhere it is masterful and programmatic. There’s a circuslike atmosphere that infects it, a disease contracted from Prince’s overwhelmingly diverse Sign O’ the Times and shared by other overachieving acts like the Roots…
Ever since Atmosphere’s Ford One and Ford Two EPs were released in 2000, rapper Sean “Slug” Daley has enjoyed a surprisingly large female following in sharp contrast to the droll, poorly dressed twentysomething youth at most indie rap shows. The presence of so many women around him has changed his…
Two years to the month after the release of Labor Days, the virile verbalist known as Aesop Rock returns with his fourth album, Bazooka Tooth. If fellow collegiate icons R.E.M. hadn’t already taken the name, Bazooka Tooth’s alternative title could be Fables of the Reconstruction. Like Fables, Bazooka Tooth is…
