Since Today’s a Voting Day

…And folks in Ohio, Texas,Vermont, and Rhode Island are headed to the polls, it only makes since to play some election music. Here’s some Obama love from the Lone Star state. — Jonathan Cunningham…

Concert Review: 15th Annual Caribbean Festival at Bayfront Park

Ky-mani Marley rocking in front of thousands of fans. 15th Annual Caribbean Festival AKA The Bob Marley Festival Saturday, March 1, 2008 Bayfront Park Amphitheater Better than: Staying home and listening to Exodus on repeat. Over the weekend, one of Miami’s most treasured music festivals returned to the city for…

Jacob Jeffries Band to Play SXSW

Austin’s mega music festival, South By Southwest (SXSW) is almost here and there’s a bunch of great bands from around the world that should be headed to Texas for it next week. Last year was a special treat as the Good, the Bad, and the Queen seemed to descend on…

Monday Afternoon Music Fix

By ANDY VIHSTADT Casino King For those of you holding out for the follow-up to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Stereogum’s got something to hold you over. The song, “Big Ideas,” will appear in 21, the film adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House. The O.S.T. hits stores March…

Gipsy Kings Tonight at Mizner Park

The Gipsy Kings didn’t set out to redefine world music. They didn’t intend to scandalize the world of traditional Flamenco music through their inclusion of pop instrumentation and rock song structures. They just wanted to make pretty girls dance, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The history of the…

Mudhoney presale tickets now available

Chalk another victory up for the super-cool promoter folks at New Art School. Their latest coup? The legendary Mudhoney!! I don’t want to use the “g” word (ok, grunge) here, but they were one of the first rad bands to come out of Seattle in the late Eighties/early Nineties. And…

The U.S. Military Torture Mix Tape

(Via Idolator). Liberal mag Mother Jones did us all the favor of putting together an imeem streaming play list of songs used during military prison interrogations, according to various leaked documents. And I have to say — I, too, would crack pretty quickly if forced to listen to “Babylon” by…

Why Bother With Real-Life Singers…

…when you can use VOCALOID, a totally fascinating, vaguely unsettling singing synthesizer program from – where else? – Japan. It doesn’t just do the robot voice box or vocoder sounds – this one actually sings, mainly through the reedy female voice of a fictional character, Miku Hatsune (based, however, on…

José González at the Manuel Artime

José González is happy to headline a world beat concert for Miami’s Rhythm Foundation and Poplife, but the Swedish-Argentine folk rocker is not so content to discuss the intricacies of his “Hiscandic” heritage. It is what it is, he implies, and only a minimal reflection of how he chooses to…

The Prodigal Piano Man

“When Liza found out that I could sing and dance, she pulled me off the piano,” Johnny Rodgers recalls. “Now I play one of the Williams Brothers in her show based on Kay Thompson.” The Miami native, taking a quick break from working on his latest album, is speaking with…

More than Semi-Pro

You’d think that, after having won six Grammys, Andre “3000” Benjamin, of hip-hop superduo OutKast, would take a break and relax a bit, but the rub is, of course, you don’t win a half-dozen Grammys without forgetting what a vacation means. Lately he’s been moonlighting as an actor with a…

Ghost Stroke

With only a handful of live performances to date, local act Ghost Stroke is already making waves. The quartet comes fully equipped with a seasoned vocalist, a Berklee alum guitarist, a Warner Bros. veteran as a bassist, and a drummer with a Ringo Starr style. Influenced by artists like Tom…

Mannheim Steamroller

Mannheim Steamroller is comin’ to town, which doesn’t automatically mean Santa Claus is along for the ride. Like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Steamroller is best known for concert spectacles in which classical music and standards are rockified for the holiday season. Originally concocted as an alias for record producer/composer Chip Davis…

Ricky Skaggs

You don’t rack up country credibility by wearing big hats and shiny shirts, although the current crop of Nashville movers and posers might suggest otherwise. Better to emulate the trajectory Ricky Skaggs has followed for the better part of the past four decades and return to your roots, or in…

Miami Movement

This weekend marks the impressive 15th anniversary of the local annual event known colloquially as the Bob Marley festival. Which is more or less accurate; meant to honor the legend’s memory, it’s sponsored by his estate’s official organization, Bob Marley Movement, and each year’s headliners represent various configurations of his…

Kryptonite Metal Fest

An anti-harmonic convergence takes place at Tobacco Road on Friday when the 30-band Kryptonite Metal Fest touches down. DJ Oski and QueenOfTheScene.com are handling the event, which will spotlight bands from all over the state playing 30-minute sets. For this minipalooza, The Road will have stages set up in the…

Amerykah Badu Comes Back Funkier Than Ever

In case you didn’t already know, Erykah Badu’s long-awaited album, New Amerykah, Part One: 4th World War is in stores now. The album came out yesterday on Erykah’s birthday and it’s tight. Yesterday was also Ky-mani Marley’s birthday…and it seems that a musical lovechild between the two artists must be…

Last Night: Leon Russell at the Culture Room

Leon Russell February 23, 2008 The Culture Room Better Than: And old 45 and a Kleenex. There are very few songs that I’d travel some seventy-plus miles to hear sung live – very, very few. But among that short list is Leon Russell’s “A Song for You.” Covered over the…