The Slackers September 28, 2007 Studio A, Miami Better Than: That place with the good fried chicken with biscuits and gravy and all the fixin’s The Slackers are all about democracy. After a few wise cracks about President Bush and the state of the war, the band was feeling awfully…
The cast of Stomp, that international theater hit starring a motley gang of percussive dancers, performed at Mansion this past Friday as a special addition to the show’s week-long stint at the Carnival Center. The event, billed as “Stomp vs. DJ Ideal,” wasn’t so much a rivalry between a wax…
Apples in Stereo September 28, 2007 The Culture Room Better Than: Eating a barrel of Count Chocula while in interstellar overdrive The Review: We dig The Culture Room, even if we’ve gotta drive about a million miles to get there. The joint’s dark, the sound’s swimming, and it’s run by…
Broward County’s the Postmarks have the music industry paying attention to their sugary sounds in a big way. It may have taken two years to put out their debut, self-titled album, but now that it’s on shelves, everyone from Spin to the New Pornographers seems to want a piece of…
I like Rilo Kiley. I can’t help but groove to their country-inspired brand of indie rock loosely influenced by Straight Outta Compton, De La Soul, and The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I find vocalist Jenny Lewis’s quirky, choppy, and occasionally incomprehensible lyrics and pleasantly girlish voice refreshing. I like when…
BMG will get you gooey Michelle F. Solomon The Blue Man Group Saturday, September 15, 2007 Universal Studios Citywalk, Orlando Better Than: Late night TV’s stupid human tricks. The Blue Man Group has been a staple of Greenwich Village for almost two decades. I saw them a few years ago…
There’s nothing like seeing the “Download” links enabled for the tunes on a band’s MySpace site. Wellll, doggy — free shit! Yessir, Mark Dubin of Fort Lauderdale’s Los Diablos ain’t no cheapskate. “We believe that if people are gonna take time to check out our shows, pay for the cover,…
What has four legs and sounds like Redd Foxx trying to freak up a New Orleans blues bar? The Nashville-based duo Black Diamond Heavies, comprising Van Campbell on drums and founder John Wesley Myers on guitar and blackened throat. The band was actually born four years ago as a four-piece…
Southern California has birthed more successful hyphenated punk bands than anywhere else in the world. From the Eighties punk-metal of Black Flag to the latter-day pop-punk of the Offspring, La-La Land and its environs are the epicenter of anger-with-a-twist. Strung Out’s latest release this past June, Blackhawks Over Los Angeles,…
Cleaveland Jones is a band of mystery, insists its frontman and songwriter, named, also, Cleaveland Jones. “I don’t mind it being a bit confusing or ambiguous,” insists the Ohio transplant, who has been in Miami for 10 years and playing music locally for three. Try to get more details about…
The thing that stokes Mark Caro — alias Tech Itch — the most is his rep as the godfather of dark, hard, experimental drum ‘n’ bass. The thing that least stokes him is what the marginal success of d ‘n’ b is doing to the genre. “There’s too much cheesy…
Saturday night the Southern rock hits of Molly Hatchet — “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” “Beating the Odds,” and “Gator Country” among them — will make a perfect soundtrack to blowing some dough on that not-quite-fast-enough filly. Grown from the same musical soil as Lynyrd Skynyrd, in its Seventies heyday Jacksonville’s native…
Dropkick Murphys w/ HorrorPops September 25, 2007 Revolution, Ft. Lauderdale Dropkick MurphysPhotos by Jamie Puntumkhul Better than: Three accidental fists to the face due to an ardently chanted Oi! trinity. The Review: I have somewhat of an obsession with that span of time between an opening band’s wasted plea to…
Our punk rock icons are aging. Mike Watt now looks more like a retiring shop teacher than a rocking member of the double bass group Dos, and the recent surprise guest on NPR’s quiz show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me was not a senator with presidential aspirations, it was the…
Stevie B Thursday, September 20, 2007 Nectar Lounge The Review: It’s a sad thing when your life peeks at 13. Ever wonder what those kids that used to rule the roller skating rink grew up to look like? Well, kind of the same – ghetto-fabulous in tight clothes and big…
Duncan Sheik w/ Holly Brook September 22, 2007 The Theatre, West Palm Beach Better than: MTV Unplugged The Review: Politically charged lyrics that are shrouded in double entendres, Buddhist sensibilities and laid-bare songwriting are the hallmarks of a Duncan Sheik semi-acoustic show. Known for his chart-topping “Barely Breathing,” which garnered…
Miami fans of intelligent, funky grooves and beats: This edition of the weekly Switch dance party at PS14 is for you. The star of the evening? The DJ/producer born Adam Dorn, a.k.a. Mocean Worker, known by the downbeat cognoscenti for his funk-inflected, organic take on jazzy drum ‘n’ bass, breaks,…
Interpol singer Paul Banks Interpol September 19, 2007 BankUnited Center Better Than: The big bright dark of a full-on eclipse. The Review: Sure it’s nice to know people, but it’s really nice to know cool people, and at last night’s BankUnited Interpol show, cool converged in abundance. From the editor…
The Las Vegas-based quintet Escape the Fate is a refreshing anomaly on the post-hardcore scene. Sure the bandmates have enough morbidity in their often-screamed lyrics for an entire Warped Tour, which they just played this summer. (Their release titles to date are There’s No Sympathy for the Dead and Dying…
DJ magazine’s number 32-ranked DJ in the world is a relative newcomer whose reputation borders on the messianic. In 2004 Sander van Doorn began to focus more on DJing and less on production, the field in which he’d been working under names like Sam Sharp, Purple Haze, and Filterfunk. In…
It’s a battle of the club music heavyweights in downtown Miami this Saturday. While Sander van Doorn is at Space, the producer born Brian Transeau — better known as BT — takes over the Pawn Shop Lounge a couple of blocks away. Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the Eighties,…
Listening to Dashboard Confessional can sometimes be like picking at a scab or poking at a cavity — vaguely painful and enjoyable at the same time, weirdly compelling and hard to stop. But not because the music, masterminded by Boca Raton native Chris Carrabba, is unpleasant. Just the opposite —…
