Music

Dave Bazan may have graduated from the Doug Martsch School of DIY musicianship, but he still plays well with other kids. Since he released Winners Never Quit as a one-man band in 1999, he’s added Casey Foubert on bass/keyboards and Trey Many on drums. On Pedro the Lion’s latest release,…

Just after midnight on the bus that runs across the MacArthur Causeway from Miami to Miami Beach, aspiring Kentucky trance DJ Soren LaRue and unknown Indiana breakbeat jock APX are sprawled across the handicapped section, backpacks full of promo CDs balanced on their knees. They’ve come to the twelfth annual…

Not much these days lives up to the idea of the present we’ve sold ourselves through the culture of the past. Didn’t it seem ten years ago, when alternative rock was just beginning to elbow its way onto radio playlists — when weird shit like dancemeisters My Life with the…

Ho-hum. Classic reggae and Indian film music. Tell us something new. Decades after their big breakthroughs in the late 1960s, reggae and filmi have become marginalized by their popularity. Stuck in their respective niches, the genres haven’t gained appreciable momentum from the sputtering but occasionally lively world-music bandwagon. Innovation has…

Touring musicians, by the nature of their jobs, usually have a couple of ZIP discs’ worth of colorful tales. That goes several times over for anyone who has spent time on the road with Miami’s still-so-horny Luther Campbell. That’s why, despite a brand-new album of their own and big-time recognition…

“Just when I was thinking of getting out of the business … ” begins Beres Hammond. Before he can finish a chorus of boos breaks in, letting the Jamaican soul crooner know exactly what the audience thinks of that idea. The singer lets the response stand as an explanation of…

Dan Bryk, a frumpy Canuck who refuses to give his age but looks to be in his twenties, sits on an outdoor patio behind his Yamaha keybs and sings his ass off, which isn’t such an easy task — the dude’s heavy, literally. It’s 9 p.m. on a Thursday in…

All you Kruder & Dorfmeister fiends, take heed: Some new shit has arrived from those illustrious Austrians. But don’t get too worked up — this isn’t exactly new new. Each album is a remix of the 1999 album Suzuki by Tosca, a duo made up of Richard Dorfmeister (the “D”…

If university music departments offered a survey course on the history of hip-hop, lazier students would be advised to use the X-ecutioners’ new album, Built From Scratch, as their Cliffs Notes. More than a vehicle to showcase the quick hands of X-members Rob Swift, Roc Raida, Mista Sinista, and Total…

Right next to the cash register, there it is — shiny foil wrapping gooey hummability. Plop it in your gob, the hooks and melodies vibrate in your mouth. Then the acid hits. Imperial Teen’s dark charm derives from earthy boy-girl harmonies, spacious synth and guitar, and Saturday Morning phrasing of…

Nearly half the song titles on Andrew W.K.’s debut contain the words “party,” “love,” or “puke” — a sure sign that this is the best party metal the Eighties never gave us. Formerly a one-man show, W.K. built I Get Wet into a dual-ax, kick-drum assault chocked with shout-along choruses…

Merge may want to re-examine the status of “Nashville’s Most Fucked-Up Country Band” as an altcountry outfit. Lambchop’s latest is markedly different from its comparatively lush, heavily orchestrated predecessors (most notably 2000’s commercial/critical hit Nixon). Principal songwriter Kurt Wagner’s amiable croak and pianist Tony Crow’s Vince-Guaraldi-in-Vegas lounge trip wind comfortably…

Forward motion drives Chocolate Industries. “Because people were so attached to the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, no one got to do anything new,” complains Seven, the owner-operator of the Chicago-based label, as he looks back on the past decade. “When bands like Oasis come out, the first thing people say…

What’s it like to listen to a piano solo by musician John Hicks? “Taking a five-minute compressed course in piano history,” once said a writer for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. While one is more likely to hear something closer to Duke Ellington than to Chopin when he plays, the depiction…

The San Francisco-based quintet Vue, a band in touch with the purest of rock and roll’s primordial ooze, is regularly hit with observations regarding its similarities to other seminal stalwarts. Guitarist Jonah Buffa puts up with the volleys of comparisons but defies anyone who would try to pigeonhole Vue as…

The French Kicks are from New York City, have scruffy-but-chic looks, and play a neo-art-rockish sort of pop. This means that when the band’s first full-length recording comes out in May we should all prepare for comparisons with the Strokes, as well as lengthy editorials on the “New New York…

Madam, my name is unimportant, and this is my wife, whose name is unimportant, and our two lovely children, whose names are unimportant. Robert Ashley does not exist. He is a character William S. Burroughs invented in Tangier in 1955, the throb of a raw nerve in the fever dream…

Nelly Furtado doesn’t speak in words, phrases, or sentences. She speaks in salvos, cluster bombs. How does this fit in with her self-professed fear of coming across as shallow? Not that you could ever accuse of shallowness a Grammy-Award-winning singer/songwriter who effortlessly fuses hip-hop, world music, rock, and dance. But…

It’s a Friday-night hardcore show at Club Q in Davie, and the inevitable pit standoff is in full swing. Some newbie has taken exception to the teenage skinheads’ penchant for Tae-Bo high kicks and is doing his best to start a brawl. “Enough!” yells Trust No One singer Chris Coach…

If the folkie soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ romp O Brother, Where Art Thou? has given you a hankering for American roots music, Rounder Records’ Roots Music four-disc set might seem like the logical box to buy. But hold your horses. Don’t confuse this mislabeled anthology with the just-released American…