Rising out of the Mississippi hill country earlier this year on the strength of an engaging if uneven debut album, Shake Hands with Shorty, and some overripe hype (a Time magazine spread a few months back was so heavy on down-home mystique that it should have made any actual Southerner…
What does the music wrenched from the reluctant psyche of a tortured man sound like? Kid A. With more audience anticipation than the birth of a nation, Radiohead has released Kid A, the fourth album from the media-defined Most Important Band in Rock. To listen to the album is to…
It’s all too typical that a man who should be revered for co-writing “Soul Man,” “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” or “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” for Sam & Dave or any number of stellar achievements has stickers placed on his albums telling the world that this is the…
In terms of quantity and quality of music produced during the decade, Polly Jean Harvey can make as much of a claim to being most significant music maker of the Nineties as anyone. But while all five of her previous albums are astounding aesthetic artifacts, it’s hard to put them…
Pianist Brad Mehldau is an interesting critter: a rather uncommercial-sounding jazz player who alternates between solo piano and work with his trio of bass, drums, and piano. He is not quite 30 years old, has a multirecord deal with Warner Bros., writes brainy and ponderous liner notes to accompany his…
Until recently, two constants have defined Elvis Crespo’s career: a chin-length bob and choruses built on the same three-note melody. That’s all over now. The waifish merengue megastar has traded in the familiar hairdo for a sophisticated layered cut and exchanged producer Roberto Cora, who oversaw Crespo’s first two blockbuster…
Once known as the Hawks when they backed Arkansas rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, they jokingly dubbed themselves the Crackers. They finally became the Band when they served as Bob Dylan’s back-up group on the legendary The Basement Tapes done in Woodstock, New York, in 1967, following the songwriting legend’s near-fatal…
Despite the way this undoubtedly will be marketed, there’s not as much novelty here as on 1994’s American Recordings: Johnny Cash singing a U2 song? Hell, he did that on Zooropa. Singing with Tom Petty and backed by various Heartbreakers? That’s all Unchained is. And sure, he offers his take…
British-born Richard Blair takes his world music literally. He got his start in the recording studio engineering reggae and bhangra in Birmingham and then manned the controls at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio, producing acts ranging from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Geoffrey Oryema to Toto la Momposina. Momposina, the…
G.O.A.T. stands for “Greatest of All Time,” and while LL Cool J may or may not be the greatest MC ever (I’m sure there’s a fella named Rakim who would take exception to that, and Kool Moe Dee is bound to be getting riled up right now just thinking about…
Drums line two walls at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s exhibition “Ritmos de Identidad: Fernando Ortiz’s Legacy and the Howard Family Collection of Percussion Instruments.” Drums fill the cases that sit in the middle of the room and cluster about the door. The sound of batá drums, the sacred…
First came the name. “We actually had the name even before we dared to put a band together and play live,” says singer Michael Roderick about Maria, the rock group he founded with childhood pal Paul Molina. It may seem as if they’re commemorating the Virgin Mary’s Spanish nombre or…
There are many fine lines that all artists and would-be contenders must walk. There’s clever and stupid. There’s sincere and sentimental. There’s influential and influenced. The list is long, and achieving an authentic balance is always more instinctual than learned. Artistry is the illusion that something mundane can walk for…
The smart, unflashy white guitar rock known as emo has become the faceless new face of indie, and, in the form of its sophomore effort, Four Cornered Night, genre standard-bearer Jets to Brazil has released the music’s most high-profile album. Throughout the record’s first five songs, Four Cornered Night sounds…
The Beach Boys did make more than just one great album — speaking of Pet Sounds of course — before they became an oldies-circuit cliché and a mere job for Mike Love. This two-for-one re-release of Sunflower and Surf’s Up, from 1970 and 1971 respectively, proves that. With this release…
Some bands benefit from the box-set treatment and some don’t. Falling into the latter category is Little Feat, on Rhino’s Hotcakes & Outtakes: 30 Years of Little Feat. The box takes four compact discs, eighty-two tracks, and five hours to prove that the band’s best work was done on its…
It’s only 9:00 a.m., but Al Sparhawk is wide awake. Such is life when you’re the father of a six-month-old. As young Hollis Mae Sparhawk lets out an exuberant squawk and her dad gushes on and on about the joys of fatherhood, it’s clear the elder Sparhawk is no ordinary…
It’s seldom a good thing when songwriters decide to indulge their literary pretensions and try to set the great American novel to music. For every Paul Kelly, who did a bang-up job back in 1989 with his interpretation of Raymond Carver’s So Much Water So Close to Home, there’s a…
On radio the legends of country music might as well be dead and buried. In the recording studio, though, many of that genre’s greatest singers are proving that traditional country music is still very much alive. And this is traditional country in the most vital sense of the word: It…
Is this the home of Rebert Harris?” I asked anxiously. The woman who had answered the phone said yes. “Rebert Harris of the Soul Stirrers?” Yes, she said again. I told her I was writing a story on the legendary gospel quartet from Trinity, Texas, and I wondered if I…
I can’t tell anecdotes,” says Julieta Venegas, between bites of a take-out sandwich in an empty hallway at the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) in New York City this past August. “I’m no good at it,” she continues. “I have to paint situations.” On her celebrated sophomore release, Bueninvento (Goodinvention),…
People never forget where they were when Kennedy was shot. Or John Lennon. Or the first time they saw the Beatles or the Ramones or Nirvana — on TV. Certain momentous occasions never leave us. For me, I’d add the first time I heard Nick Drake coming out of my…
