Pete Rock’s followup to his 1998 solo debut is a decidedly uneven affair. Like its somewhat overpraised predecessor, Soul Survivor II’s fifteen songs are driven by the Chocolate Boy Wonder’s legendary production skills, yielding tracks peppered with samples from the Natural Four (“It’s A Love Thing”), among other excellent choices…
Britain’s Neil Hannon, a.k.a. Divine Comedy, who is known for his wry sense of humor and singular worldview on the most mundane of subjects, hit his stride with the witty 1996 album, Casanova, and further cemented his reputation with 2001’s Regeneration. Three years later on his ninth full-length, Absent Friends,…
Bittertown, Lori McKenna’s exceptional fourth album, finds the skilled singer/songwriter looking at life through the eyes of one whose hopes and dreams have been tempered by fate and circumstance. Bruised but determined, she has created a harsh yet telling snapshot of rural existence, using riveting melodies to etch an indelible…
Last week’s Miami Beach City Commission meeting was a South Beach-style theater of the absurd. The elderly residents were crabby as usual, party people got political over a misconception, and the city’s elected leaders confirmed that municipal government couldn’t get organized or efficient even if it tried. The hot topic…
Nearly two months have passed since the 2004 Winter Music Conference and it still haunts the Miami dance community like a treasured memory. You can see it at Privilege, which was so empty on a recent Friday night that the raucous breakbeat sounds of Habersham and Dave Preston, together known…
As the cliché goes, nothing is new anymore. But in the music industry, there’s always a new artisan eager to add his work to the pantheon. In other words, don’t try to ask the newly minted label owners behind Somia Music if its output is similar to the legion of…
Charles Feelgood In the wonderfully outrageous world of dance music, three styles predominate over all others — progressive house, tribal, and tech-house. You’ll usually hear a combination of them at a dance club, but Baltimore-based DJ Charles Feelgood specializes in the latter, banging out tracks with a ferocity that rivals…
i, the long-awaited followup to the Magnetic Fields’ acclaimed tour de force, 69 Love Songs, finds genius founder Stephin Merritt doing everything to fend off the threat of stardom that 1999 triple-disc set augured. Eschewing the giddy layers of guitar and dense, synthesizer-laden arrangements that yielded such genre-bending jump-ups as…
Rock fans search for a new band to kick-start their lives by casting fishing lines into the pop-culture abyss. Rarely does one bite that’s worth taking seriously, and only once every five to ten years does one hit, pulling fans into the depths of reality for a rush that seems…
The Beta Band excels at willful awkwardness. A few years back, its weirdo edge made the Scottish quartet hip, thanks to its reckless and High Fidelity-approved album, The Three EPs. Unlike some byproducts of pre-Dubya days, however, the Beta Band still has a pulse. That’s not to say the jams…
After the commercial and creative peaks of its “La Bamba” cover and 1992’s Kiko, respectively, Los Lobos owed themselves — and us — another great record. The Ride, a mix of rearranged band classics and sublime originals, is such an album, not just as strong as the last few outings,…
After four major-label albums and a growing reputation among Nashville’s inner cartel, Allison Moorer was ready to arrive. She possessed the aptitude and the attitude that usually means stardom is merely a hit record away. She apparently wasn’t happy, however, with the star-making machinery, especially after witnessing their impact on…
At the entrance to Miami Velvet, a list of disclaimers is headlined by a forthright suggestion: “If you’re offended by sex, please do not enter the premises.” Miami Velvet is a “lifestyles club,” which is a politically correct term for “swingers club.” Truth is, the Velvet resembles a SoBe hot…
Aside from being a clever album title and a symbol for optimism in a country that continues to recover from its 2001 economic collapse, “Argentinidad al Palo” (“Hardcore Argentinism”) is a great song on which party rock octet Bersuit epitomizes the myth of Argie superiority over the rest of the…
Lanterna is guitarist Henry Frayne’s (the Moon Seven Times, Area) solo project, with Highways being his fourth album under this guise. Although primarily recorded on guitar, the music does not sound as if it is missing something, nor does he get carried away with excessive, showy noodling. Leaving just the…
At 30 years old, the prodigious vibraphonist Stefon Harris already has three Grammy nominations and four albums for Blue Note under his belt. For Evolution he has assembled a band called Blackout, with the intent of injecting some of the bump and groove of hip-hop and R&B into the jazz…
San Diego production duo Sound Providers specialize in the art of the loop — sampling a jazz track’s choicest four bars and then repeating the results ad infinitum. It sounds annoying, but many of hip-hop’s sonic breakthroughs in the early Nineties — such as Gang Starr’s “Take It Personal” –…
Most of the time, it seems like you need to be or at least look like a Very Important Person to get into hot clubs in the Magic City. Even joints that have no business pulling velvet rope snobbery (i.e. State and Butterfly Lounge) are shunning the “masses” in favor…
The sound of Tortoise defies categorization. Like the fusion jazz artists of the Seventies who traversed rock and jazz forms with time signature shifts, the Chicago quintet — John Herndon, Doug McCombs, Dan Bitney, Jeff Parker, and John McEntire — makes instrumental music with everything but the break-room sink in…
Walk into any jazz show these days and you’re likely to find a crowd of older men sipping Scotch and studiously listening to a horn player’s arcane solo. Then step into a gig by the avant-jazz group Sex Mob and it’s a different story: You’ll find young people, particularly women,…
Until now Ron Sexsmith has appeared to be a reluctant rock star, one whose willingness to lay his heart on his proverbial sleeve underscores a sensitivity and naiveté that’s readily apparent in his boyish demeanor and confessional songs. His new album, Retriever, suggests Sexsmith may be ready to steer his…
Kieran Hebden appears to be a normal 25-year-old living in London’s Camden Town who spends a lot of time at home. He’s a guy who wakes up when he wants to, watches television as long as he likes, and spends most of his pocket money on records, stumbling out to…
