Knock, knock. Who is it? Hey White America, it’s Kanye, open up. Yo, what’s good … oh Babu, Evidence, and Rakaa … uh, come on in. Dilated Peoples’ third LP, Neighborhood Watch, sees the portly Southern Californians still starved like college students, still vowing to sneak some good old skool…
While not attracting the same sort of attention as fellow Eighties downtown New York acts Liquid Liquid and ESG, Death Comet Crew was just as important. This groundbreaking trio — Stuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann, and Shinichi Shimokawa — used the postdisco, nascent hip-hop sound as a starting point for their…
Madlib’s Madvillain project is the second of his dream matchups, following his slightly disappointing pairing last year with Detroit iconoclast Jay Dee (Jaylib’s Champion Sound). While Jay Dee favors original compositions, track-busting Madlib finds more in common with MF Doom, since the latter’s early-Nineties work with KMD as Zevlove X…
Everything about Nicodemus Hammil and Anitra Warren, from their appearance to the eerie, Venetian-style masks hanging on the white walls of their West Avenue apartment in South Beach, is enchanting and mad freaky. Their union is draped in theater and consecrated by black magic. Nicodemus, a high priest-looking Aussie whose…
Germans seem to have a natural affinity for making cars, techno, and beer, but not hip-hop. One rare instance was Funkstörung’s glitchy remix of Wu-Tang Clan’s “Reunited.” Now after that 1999 breakthrough, followed by an uneven career of noisy electronic experiments, the German duo — Chris De Luca and Michael…
While New York, Chicago, and Detroit’s DJ/producers were reveling in the spotlight during the early Nineties, San Francisco quietly built a scene that eventually spread across the West Coast. At the heart of it was the Wicked crew: four DJs, one ridiculously superior sound system, and parties that took place…
With Johan Lagerlof’s clipped vocals soaring against angular guitars and rolling snares gunning it from all quarters, Kid Commando posits a manic conflict of an album inside the ashen, desolate territory of postpunk. The music on Holy Kid Commando, this Swedish outfit’s debut LP, conjures the raw force of an…
The cover photo adorning Gingersol’s third full-length opus is a visual pun of sorts. By showing L.A.’s architectural landmark, the Eastern Columbia Building, it hearkens back to the album’s title, which literally refers to the fact that band founder and songwriter Steve Tagliere and his musical partner Seth Rothschild left…
Raul Malo, lead vocalist and leader of the Mavericks, has one of the best voices in pop. In several recent interviews Malo said he spent the early years of his career trying to “not sound like Roy Orbison,” the singer he was most often compared with. But since signing onto…
I’ve been living next to the Abbey Brewing Company for eight months, and I never knew it. Like a lot of people, when told about the neat little dive bar where the conversation froths as much as the homemade microbrewed beer, I assumed it was a reference to the Abbey…
The smoke. The backbeat. The dancing. The jubilation. The hand claps. The bouncy New Orleans jazz scene that thrived in the Sixties sure as heck isn’t dead. Not if the Preservation Hall Jazz Band can help it. Ben Jaffe, who plays bass in Preservation Hall, just turned 33 years old…
College campuses are the perfect place for a concert, where a young crowd is guaranteed to be up for a party. Sometimes you’ll even hear some good bands brought in by an enlightened student activity group or a campus radio station. But more often than not, big events at So-and-So…
Robi Draco Rosa is best known among Anglos as the co-writer of Ricky Martin’s breakthrough hit, “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” But even though he’s spent most of his adult life trying to bury the Menudo curse, we Latinos know the truth: He once belonged to the most insufferable “band” in…
Inside the Miami Shores home where Sam Beam, better known as Iron and Wine, writes and records, he generally secludes himself from the rest of the city. The house is a small one, the kind a struggling musician might live in: beds without box springs, furniture without cushions, and a…
A handful of fans peers into the backstage area of the Pepsi-sponsored main stage at the Calle Ocho 2004 street festival. A light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in her mid-thirties sits in a wheelchair, beckoning along with her companions to a young black man in spiffy urban street wear standing near…
On Friday afternoon, March 19, I sat on a bed in an Omni Hotel room in Austin, Texas, and picked up my cell phone, preparing to call Murs. For the past two weeks I had been trying to arrange an interview with the L.A.-based MC, who just released a new…
The surprising thing about Seventies progressive rock was its popularity. Epic rock operas laden with poesy, costumes, keyboards, and attempts to appropriate jazz and classical music through guitar and drum solos were topping the charts. Everyday people bought into this willfully pretentious music of ideas. They were proud to call…
Stargazing, the third album from Corin Dingley and Andy Jenks, a Bristol, England-based duo who initially debuted on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label, sees them delving into their classic songwriter roots. Less of a trip-hop affair than their previous records, Stargazing (Special Edition) — a revamped U.S. version of the original…
So what guarantees the perfect pop hit? A riveting refrain? An irresistible beat? Perhaps a dazzling arrangement, insightful lyrics, or a captivating chorus? In fact there’s no definitive formula. If there were, they couldn’t build enough banks to stash the cash spawned by those reaping its benefits. That said, Owsley’s…
Led Zeppelin was a truly mystical band. Nobody else mixed up decadent, witchy lyrics with overdriven guitars and pastoral folk influences such as Pentangle and Incredible String Band so well. The Japanese collective Ghost understands this cosmology and has applied its knowledge to Hypnotic Underworld, one of the heaviest psychedelic…
For numerous indie bands, Bee Hives, recorded between Broken Social Scene’s cerebral debut Feel Good Lost and its pop-friendly followup You Forgot It in People, would be a masterstroke. But for these Canadians, still glowing from last year’s breakout success, it’s simply a stretch of sometimes enchanting songs recorded with…
It was so easy to despise the Vines when they emerged like creatures from the garage lagoon back in 2002 with Highly Evolved. The Australian-turned-Los Angeles quartet was jammed down our throat ad nauseam; they had a nitwit, room-trashing poseur of a frontman in Craig Nicholls; and they unabashedly ransacked…
