What do candy ravers, goths, and swing kids have in common? They were all products of trends that flourished and then receded into the depths of subcultural obscurity. Several years later the Rainbow Brite-wannabes may have adopted a more demure style, but that doesn’t stop them from coming out of…
Chances are that if you live in Miami-Dade County, you have at one time or another heard the swirling, merengue-tinged rhythms emanating from homes in Caribbean neighborhoods or rising from strip malls that seemingly contain only a beauty parlor and a Haitian video store. Most likely what you are hearing…
Japan’s chromatic quartet MONO balances bursts of catharsis and pleas for clemency. The groups exalts tone-rending reverence with the deft delivery of many Chicago postrock groups and equally hefty, heavenly bands including Boston’s Isis and Texans Explosions in the Sky. Six years in existence, MONO has established itself adroit at…
Less than 60 seconds into Don of All Dons, his comeback album and alleged swan song released this week, Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell is already knee-deep in raunch. “How many ladies’ pussies smell good?” he coos to his unseen (and likely nonexistent) female audience. “Give yourself a round of applause…
An avant-garde effort by two disparate bands attempting to bridge the expanse between experimental jazz and neoclassical composition, The Nitrate Hymnal is odd yet ambitious. Punk veterans the Gena Rowlands Band and fusion cooperative Anti-Social Music have pooled their ambitions to create a sparse, idealized narrative about an old woman…
Finding himself committed once again to a slower, gloomier aesthetic with this Frisco indie-metal all-star project, High on Fire/Sleep frontman Matt Pike chose not only to swim rather than sink but also to spin it into the Devil’s water ballet. Fierce shades of Sabbath carry over from Pike’s HoF scene-busting,…
Hillstomp
Much of Calexico’s Garden Ruin is bland and muted. Many of its songs are slow and sonorous, but not in a good way. It isn’t because of Joey Burns’s small, unassuming voice, which is evocative in a heartfelt way, nor is it the band’s musical abilities, which are sharp. It’s…
Avant-garde New Waver, auteur, and mastermind producer behind (heh heh) Coil’s epically experimental Scatology, Marc Almond has likely been yearning lo these 25 years to become disassociated from the instantly recognizable snyth sample in 1981’s fluke Soft Cell hit “Tainted Love.” Rihanna, Jay-Z’s teen prodigy from Barbados, grants Almond’s wish…
As Court & Spark guitarist/singer M.C. Taylor unhurriedly lays down meaty, old-school Joe Walsh-style riffs, it’s impossible not to picture him affecting a self-satisfied pout — an image that seems at odds with the poignant, clearing-at-the-end-of-the-path lyricism he imbues with such weary resignation: “I’m an old man in the gloaming/Sky,…
Assuming the position, following “that cute DJ” Desyn Masiello’s turn, as mixmaster for the Balance CD series (it’s up to number nine) is Paolo Mojo, a British turntablist who has been around since the early Nineties and has flirted often with ignition but failed to quite catch — until now,…
Two punk/hardcore/oi! powerhouses collide within the confines of Churchill’s for what will surely be a drunken testosterone orgy. Legendary British street punk the Business has two-plus decades of fist-waving anthems to its credit, while New Yorker verité Roger Miret of the Disasters made his unquestionable bones fronting Agnostic Front. Though…
The talented Argentine interpretive pianist Marcela Martinez will have her hands full as she presents the American musical debut of the work of Cuban composer Ramiro Valdés Puentes, who was born in Havana in 1963. Martinez will introduce audiences to Valdés Puentes’s “Sonata Americana” and will also perform other pieces,…
The showcase of hip-hop overachievers seems at first offing to be an effort toward creating one of the most dour concerts of the year, given “conscious” rap’s reputation for PBS-correct depictions of urban dwelling. The Roots, however, have become more interesting and more verbally aggro, following the failure of 1999’s…
“What you know about purple drank/What you know about poppin’ trunk, neon lights, and candy paint,” raps Paul Wall on “They Don’t Know,” his 2004 kaleidoscope of Houston’s rap landscape. “What you know about white shirts, starched-down jeans with a razor crease/Platinum and gold on top our teeth/Big old chains…
Young Jeezy will be back in Miami this weekend; back, one might say, to the scene of the (alleged) crime. The handsome hip-hopper from Georgia was arrested this past March in Miami Beach and charged with two counts of carrying a concealed firearm without a permit (in an SUV, no…
In a sabbatical of silence in the desert, Sam Sanford of Sound Team had time to ponder. “I was at a point in my life where I wanted to find something to do…. I didn’t want to work in restaurants my whole life. I had been an assistant teacher, but…
Though there are still only two axe-wielding gents at the helm, Growing masks its drone rock on Color Wheel as if a stage-filling band is mulling around for at least six minutes at a time, peaking in spotty, shimmering crests of amp buzz (“Blue Angels”) and chunks of thick call-and-answer…
This sprawling 21-track album is the work of the Birmingham, Alabama-based duo of Brad Armstrong and Buzz Russell, recorded with the help of twenty guest musicians. The tunes flow along like a dark folk-rock river, almost silent as it whispers over a bed of mossy pebbles, and aggressively noisy as…
It’s no small dividend of evolution when a band is able to grow up and realize it no longer needs to cram its records full of the summer-stock trappings that got it where it is now. Early Fields of the Nephilim was a misunderstood, barely listenable post-Lemmy fetish targeting lonely…
The Austrian duo of singer Silvia Ryder and guitarist Ben Bohn have obviously listened to a lot of Velvet Underground albums. If Moe Tucker had fronted the Velvets, they might sound like the Sugarplum Fairies, with their minimal drums, droning guitars, and Ryder’s world-weary vocals, a breathy whisper that’s barely…
It is not unusual to find a veteran artist’s latest offering touted as an auspicious undertaking and hailed as a milestone, especially when given the anticipation of an album long overdue. However, in the case of roots rocker Alejandro Escovedo’s The Boxing Mirror, those pronouncements are well warranted. It comes…
