Unlike too many lumpenproletariat punk bands, hip-hop trio Dälek deploys serious Marxist dialectics. As a method of argument, it uses language to illustrate the incongruities of American culture, systematically weighing contradictory facts or ideas with a view toward resolution. On “Opiate the Masses” leader/MC Dälek attacks the repulsiveness of organized…
Some have claimed that Big Pooh is Phife to Phonte’s Q-Tip in Little Brother. But that compliment is slightly inaccurate, if Sleepers is any indication. Phife had a knack for punch lines such as “Bust a nut inside your eye,” but Big Pooh is strictly about beats and rhymes, churning…
Sage Francis is from the Sean Daley school of underground hip-hop, full of tempered anger and frontier spirit. Kicking off with “Buzz Kill,” the first track on A Healthy Distrust, Francis exhibits true grit through sarcasm, spitting, “I used to think that rappers had it figured out/Brass Monkey, St. Ides,…
Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird, a graduate of both the Squirrel Nut Zippers and his own band Bowl of Fire, takes a new route with his latest solo outing, swapping that earlier eclectic jazz-pop sound for a pop-rock approach with a more personal perspective. Melding ornate orchestration — violins, whistles, synthesizers, and…
Most rappers couldn’t put on a good show if their lives depended on it. But Garcia, a member of Crazy Hood Productions, knows how to rock the mike without relying on hoary traditions and making the crowd “say ho!” Whether freestyling over instrumentals of radio jams or ripping through “Anti-Social,”…
South Florida will be Duran Duran’s first mainland stop on their three- month North American tour. They’re hitting 40 cities to buoy Astronaut, the first album from the “fab five” lineup of Simon LeBon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Andy Taylor, and Roger Taylor in twenty years. Gone, though, is the…
Puerto Rican band Plena Libre isn’t boricua, it’s barbicua. Contributions to the Afro-Rican plena music were made in part by Barbadian immigrants in the Nineteenth Century, but plena is the most organic of Puerto Rico’s sounds. What sets the gregarious down-home jam of a plena apart from other tropi-Latino styles…
Don Wilner is well known in these parts as the house bassist at the Van Dyke Café, the glue at the center of Miami’s forever endangered jazz scene. He has recently issued a new album of jazz standards, Figments of My Imagination, that’s heavy on the Brazilian, with several classics…
Don’t be fooled by the slick duds and white stretch limo. Urban Mystic, the Fort Lauderdale native rising fast on the national R&B scene, hasn’t let success go to his nineteen-year-old head just yet. “I try to keep it straight, let the homies know I’m from the hood,” he says,…
With Alan Hughes, chef extraordinaire and lead singer of the hard-driving band Prole, songwriting and baby-making have a lot in common. They both require some serious rocking. “Somebody who makes songs has a cosmic duty to be wise with the [words they choose]. It’s almost like human conception,” says the…
Hattie’s Hat in Seattle is your typical urban haunt, an intimate, unassuming, and somewhat charming gathering place for close chums, perpetual barflies, and worker bees looking to grab a quick cocktail on their dash back to the suburbs after a maddening day at the office. It was there one night…
When Sabina Sciubba, the only woman in the New York group that calls itself Brazilian Girls (and, for the record, she’s Italian, not Brazilian), sings on “Corner Store,” “I love the music on the radio/And this is how it goes,” you have to assume that the radio she’s talking about…
On Blessed Black Wings, High on Fire’s third full-length, the Bay Area power trio has really come into its own as one of the most punishing metal bands on the planet. Guitarist-singer Matt Pike’s monomaniacal vision is his band’s crowning virtue. The recent addition of bassist Joe Preston, formerly of…
Broken verse, glam rock, miscellaneous Brit-pop sounds, and a thin voice that wavers in and out of tune: a recipe for disaster, right? And yet, Michigan’s Cass McCombs somehow combines these elements into PREfection, one of the most unique albums of this fledgling year. Backed by keyboardist Natalie Conn, drummer…
Ed Harcourt is another sleepy-voiced, tastefully appointed singer-songwriter from Britain. But unlike the more ambitious Chris Martin (Coldplay) and Badly Drawn Boy, Harcourt shuns lugubrious concepts in favor of melodically direct and sonically rich music. On Strangers, Harcourt’s third and best album, he teases with the rangy shoegazer frission that…
John Frusciante’s year-long string of six solo albums, an interesting if odd enterprise, ends with Curtains. The music on it is relentlessly depressing, and his lyrics consist of the self-conscious poesy one might find in a high schooler’s chapbook; it’s less self-contained works than processes with which he can unleash…
Fractured, fragmented, and woefully lethargic, Parker & Lily’s aptly titled third album, The Low Lows, is a sluggish snoozefest that rarely coalesces. Granted, the pair do an adequate job of weaving atmospheric arrangements that can be haunting, harrowing, or heartbreaking, particularly on songs such as “June Gloom” and the shimmering…
Singer-songwriter/pianist Antony is one of those rare artists who, while not unprecedented, still emerges as singular. Pouring forth an arresting vibrato, his presence is gender-anxious and confrontational in its vulnerability. His fey yet firm poise is quivering, tension fraught, but never engulfingly overwrought. Roping in mentors Lou Reed and Boy…
Finally, a reason to break out those checkerboard creepers that have been gathering dust in the back of your closet since the mid-Nineties third-wave ska revival! New York City’s The Toasters are honest-to-goodness American ska pioneers, and they’ve stayed true to the genre’s Jamaican R&B roots while many of their…
Buoyed by contributions to the best-selling soundtracks O Brother, Where Art Thou and Cold Mountain, Alison Krauss and Union Station not only gained recognition as one of America’s hottest contemporary bluegrass bands, but also helped nurture new interest in roots music in general. Still, Krauss and company’s approach is far…
For a city weaned on ultrahard and percussive club music, the soft, earthy productions of Andy Caldwell can sound as if they’re from another planet. And they are — San Francisco, to be exact, where deep house never died and locals pride themselves on nurturing a positive and supportive dance…
Seguenon Koné, a master balafonist from Ivory Coast, once toured with Jimmy Buffett. Now he’s the creative director of Le Ballet Ivoire Spectacle, an African music and dance ensemble that currently performs five shows a day at Walt Disney World in Orlando. His new disc, Afro Beat, showcases traditional rhythms,…
