I’m guilty of wishing bad things on good people. When I hear a beautiful album full of frustration and pain, I fall totally in love with the sound of the artist’s struggle. When that artist inevitably finds success and happiness, I feel a little cheated. The music is never quite so…
For most South Floridians, the worst thing about living here is the traffic. In our heavily suburbanized landscape, getting anywhere means crawling into a car and suffering through the frustration and tedium of a long — and often dangerous — drive. But for Fort Lauderdale native Jess Gentile, better known…
With the release of his new album, Third Ward Stories, Fort Lauderdale-based saxophonist Jason Hainsworth set out to create a musical biography of his childhood in Houston. But how do you tell a story through instrumental jazz without any lyrics? “Too often I think we take for granted the countless…
The cost of living in South Florida is notoriously high. This week, that price is going to skyrocket because of the obscene number of great concerts swinging through town. Brace your wallets, because in the next seven days, you’re going to want tickets to Foals at Revolution Live, Lindsey Stirling…
Other Body has been relentlessly pacing around the Miami alternative scene for over a year now, turning venues around town into pressure cookers of condensed punk vitriol. Formed in the wake of local acts like Teepee and Lil Daggers, the band includes Jacob Israel on bass, Melvin Zantua on drums,…
Record Room studios in North Miami has hosted a who’s who of top-charting artists — everyone from Lil Wayne to Kent Jones has laid down tracks here. Its latest star-in-waiting could well be PBG Miami, who has spent plenty of nights cooking up dope in the lab with Cool &…
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Keith Johns played on a temporary stage under the Brickell Metrorail station as his audience — face-painted children, adults, and costumed dogs — swayed along to his breezy, lazy-afternoon cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” Midway through the set, Miami’s schizophrenic weather took a turn from…
There’s no tougher weekend on your pocketbook than the last of the month. You’ve been spending over your means for three weeks now, and suddenly it hits you: This has to be a low budget kind of weekend, especially with all the Halloween festivities on the calendar next week. That…
How big a week has this been for hip-hop in Miami? Our own DJ Khaled got to be President Obama’s hype man yesterday. Meanwhile, Rick Ross, his Maybach Music Group and plenty of other Miami emcees are going hard in the 4th quarter of 2016. After dropping off several major…
There are two things that have been Bardot’s trademark since the venue opened its doors in 2015: intimacy and quality of sound. Bardot is one of those rare venues that gives music fans the opportunity to listen to some of their favorite musicians play right next to them. And it…
Since he dropped his debut mixtape, About A Girl, back in 2009, there’s been one thing on rapper Audubon’s mind: making it in the music industry. Once the star of MTV’s reality series, Washington Heights, Audubon, who was born Jonathan Perez, eventually traded his life on the small screen to continue the momentum of…
It’s Halloween season, and while the rest of the country is carving pumpkins and sippin’ spiced lattes, Miami is doing spooky the only way it knows how: really, really weird partying. A lot of scariness and strangeness happens around these parts, so it’s only natural that the oddballs who make…
Even in an average year, Halloween in South Florida means shoulder-to-shoulder hordes of zombie Trumps and $5,000 Harley Quinn getups jostling for space from Lincoln Road to Las Olas and inside every bar and club in between. But this year, thanks to October 31 falling on a Monday, the drunken…
This year’s edition of III Point was notable for plenty of reasons, from narrowly dodging a hurricane to taking audiences on a VR trip to Mars. For rapper IndigoChildRick, though, it marked his first performance at the growing indie scene festival. “I think this one was exciting and different in…
What’s makes a hit song these days? It’s got to be sticky. It must have a hot beat and a catchy hook that gets stuck in your head at the most inappropriate times: work meetings, conference calls, hooking up with that boring guy who you only hang out with because…
As Spongebob once told our generation in his gloriously nasally voice: “‘F’ is for friends who do stuff together.” Friends help you make music, let you stay over when your parents kick you out, and are here for you when your girlfriend cheats on you for the 59th time. But the word…
In 2016, celebrations worldwide marked the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, but for many of us outside the UK, there’s only one true British queen, and her name is Adele. At only 19 years of age, she burst onto the scene singing her full-throated lamentation “Chasing Pavements,” a song…
III Points ended a couple of weeks ago, and even amid all the stellar local and national talent on the bill, you’d be hard-pressed to find an act that embodied the spirit of the festival as well as Twelve Tales. The Miami-bred production duo, composed of lifelong friends Michael Montuori…
Lauryn Hill has had an interesting relationship with Miami audiences in recent years. In 2010, she put the year’s single best concert at the University of Miami’s homecoming; the next year, her Jazz at the Gardens’ set was marred by technical problems and a shaky performance, but she immediately followed…
A couple weeks ago, the Grey 8s had the privilege of returning to III Points for the second year, making the group one of only a few local acts that can call themselves III Points veterans. The psychedelic-tinged blues rocker band, made up of guitarist/vocalist Danny Burns, drummer Andres Bedoya,…
After the resurgence of vinyl, perhaps no other twentieth-century artifact has made as unlikely a revival as the celebrity roast. Late at night, after the kids went to bed, commercials for The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast used to air. Today, it seems so old and musty as one rat pack member after another…
Eight years into his career, that there doesn’t seem to be a genre out there that Chaz Bundick, better known as Toro Y Moi, doesn’t love. Under the moniker of Toro Y Moi, Bundick has now released four LPs, with his sound evolving completely since his debut record, Causers of…
