With a tone as clear and strong as a Dexter Gordon saxophone solo — bell-like and vibrant — a virtuoso vocal range, and formidable control of pitch and timbre, Kurt Elling has managed in his short eight-year career to revive the moribund state of male jazz singing while pushing the…
Phaser frontman Siayko Skalsky recently had a daughter. “The first thing I did when I brought her home was put her on the stereo,” he says. “I played her the new Wilco record. I played her some Grandaddy, some David Bowie, some Beatles. A little bit of the new Queens…
For just a few moments near the end of “Boadan Nuppi Bealde,” Mari Boine briefly launches Eight Seasons (NorthSide) into the realm of the eternal, an obscure and not necessarily welcoming abode that few pop albums venture into. The subject of Boine’s “Boadan Nuppi Bealde” — which means “I Come…
Happy feet: Ah, nothing beats the taste of a foot in your mouth. (I guess its better than eating crow.) Last week Basshead maintained that the Slak Lounge had lost two of its clubs, Aquabooty and the Kitchen Club. While that is true — although, technically, the Kitchen Club will…
Though Florida made more of a contribution to the popular funk and disco sound of the Seventies than the state’s most famous export, KC & the Sunshine Band, that group’s commercial success tends to overshadow the musical achievements of others. Miami Sound rectifies that wrong by illuminating a point of…
It’s barely a minute into Mogwai’s fourth LP before we get a breathtaking glimpse of all that makes the group stand out from its postrock brethren. After a plaintive guitar passage kicks off “Hunted by a Freak,” the song suddenly ascends to the heavens on rails of distortion, violins, and…
Whether or not you’re into garage rock there’s one inescapable fact: It’s meant to be encountered live in a seedy and disgusting dive, not on an album played in your comfy little IKEA-furnished apartment. There’s something about that loud, scummy guitar raunch, those teetering rhythms, and every rabid scream and…
Joe Budden’s self-titled debut comes to us courtesy of “Pump It Up,” a seemingly omnipresent club hit on which producer Just Blaze turns a sample from Kool and the Gang’s “Soul Vibration” into a stop-start, high-energy raveup. Not surprisingly, the underground success of “Pump It Up” and its lesser-known predecessor,…
Forget ABBA and forget all the garage bands; Sweden’s greatest contribution to music remains the early-Nineties death-metal sound exemplified by Entombed, Unleashed, and Grave. The latter’s first disc in six years, Back From the Grave, displays an impressive understanding that when you’ve got a good thing, you don’t mess with…
For the unsuspecting yuppies who regularly overrun downtown Fort Lauderdale, a Sunday-night trip to Tavern 213 can be a scary proposition. For starters, patrons must battle for a place at the bar with the legion of drunken punks who make a habit of 213’s free shows. Then they need to…
By now most of us are familiar with DJ Le Spam and the Spam Allstars, one of Miami’s hardest-working and most celebrated music ensembles. Headed by Andrew Yeomanson, the cast includes percussionist Tomas Diaz, alto saxophonist A.J. Hill, guitarist Adam Zimmon, and trombonist John Speck. And now, we have the…
In 1996 a baby-faced Anthony B garnered as much controversy as sales with the hit “Fire Pon Rome.” The driving chant, which called for cultural purification by any means necessary, struck a chord with Jamaican ghetto youth fed up with political corruption and cultural slackness. However, the track was banned…
What a difference a month makes. Just weeks after Street Miami crowned it the new home of Miami’s soul, Slak Lounge is losing two of its tenants. Aquabooty, the long-running house music showcase, is jetting over to I/O in downtown Miami. Meanwhile Kitchen Club is taking the Industrial Ball back…
Make no mistake, Hail to the Thief’s sparse experimentalism is vintage Radiohead: hypnotic, spacy, authentically (not ostentatiously) artsy, and far from commercial (which is a good thing). Cloudy, atmospheric effects on tracks like “Where I End and You Begin” set the mood with floating chimes emanating from Johnny Greenwood’s ondes…
Dean Wareham has been down this road before. Back in 1997, the Luna frontman and his then-wife, filmmaker Claudia Silver, recorded an odd little covers album under the moniker Cagney & Lacee, but their endeavor was definitely more of a miss than a hit. Six years later, Wareham’s giving the…
Like a string of overhead power lines running endlessly across remote, rolling fields and tree-dotted hills, Grandaddy brings a current of New Wave and prog-rock electricity to its lush, bucolic altcountry. Frontman Jason Lytle is cut from the same cloth as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in that he’s not afraid to…
Freddie Foxxx, one of hip-hop’s legendary heavyweights (both physically and lyrically), is a bit of a mystery. Despite a career that began in the mid-Eighties, Foxxx has struggled through the past two decades with less than a handful of releases and few guest appearances. Still the self-proclaimed “Rakim with muscles”…
Longwave’s second album and major-label debut, The Strangest Things, has been steadily building a buzz since it was first released three months ago. It has its charms, thanks to lead guitarist Shannon Ferguson’s icily atmospheric guitar playing and the wall of sound producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) erects…
It’s Memorial Day weekend and Miami is partying. With no alarm clocks set for Monday’s workday world, South Beach sidewalks and nightclubs have turned into a rocking planet hip-hop. But a few miles away and across Biscayne Bay on NE Eleventh Street another huge (if not overlooked) scene is building…
Something magical was in the air back then. Maybe not everyone knew it, but there would be change a-comin’. The year: 1976. Hippies dominated fashion, forcing kids in L.A. and San Francisco to peg their jeans, rip their shirts, and spike their hair as a big middle finger to all…
Metallica needs an image overhaul the way frontman James Hetfield needed to dry out. It has been almost six years since the band bestowed an album of original studio material upon the world, and in the interim, Metallica has dropped dud after dud. Since 1997’s lukewarm Reload, there’s been a…
“I’m a laid-back guy,” remarks Edgar “Push Button Objects” Farinas as he pulls a long drag of his cigarette. He and Basshead are sitting on the patio of his family’s Westchester home, where he’s currently staying while in between apartments: We watch torrents of rain sweep onto the lawn, onto…
