The phrase “singer-songwriter” usually conjures up images of blandly dressed young men with acoustic guitars intoning personal songs in an overwrought voice, not noise artist Xela Zaid. Zaid comes from an alternate universe. He has developed his own method of tuning and plucking a guitar that allows him to produce…
If you think that the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake nipple shield flash and Michael Jackson’s child molestation trials are the biggest scandals in entertainment right now, then you obviously haven’t tuned in to Spanish-language television recently. While the Jackson family exercise the Anglo media with their travails, Univision and its competitors…
Jerome De Missolz’s documentary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: The Last Prophet, the latest installment in Shanachie’s World Music Portraits DVD series, starts off rather shakily with a meander down New York City’s streets as a cab driver explains how much the Pakistani qawwali singer means to him. But the anonymous…
Over the course of a nearly twenty-year career, Australia’s Paul Kelly has demonstrated an innate ability to write songs that are as moving as they are memorable. He does so by tapping into feelings and experiences that resonate in everyday lives, recounting the joys and heartbreaks, aspirations and disappointments that…
Willard Grant Conspiracy isn’t so much a band as a concept, a swirling torrent of sounds and observations from the mind of its sole mainstay, singer and songwriter Robert Fisher. Having relocated from Boston to the fringes of the Mojave Desert, Fisher drew on the mysticism that surrounds this retreat…
On Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg and Stephen Malkmus defined the indie rock aesthetic. Any sense of proficiency was thrown out the window in favor of near-shoddy sound quality, absurd sing-speak lyrics, jackleg guitar, and very loose musicianship, all gobbled up by the grad school slacker set…
The Holy Terrors’ This Is What It Sounds Like When You’re Dead is equal parts retrospective and new album. All of the tracks from their 1992 Live Six cassette, which were originally taken from the May 18, 1992 broadcast of Bob Slade’s Off the Beaten Path show on WLRN-FM (93.1),…
In the fickle world of pop music, evolution is essential. That’s been the operative rule for Elvis Costello, an artist whose stylistic flip-flops have veered from rebellion to respectability. While punk was engulfing England in the late Seventies, Costello (a.k.a. Declan McManus) made his debut as a bitter, barb-tongued nebbish…
When a young woman trying to retrieve a friend from behind the velvet rope is pushed around, called a “bitch” by a bouncer, then handcuffed and placed in a cop car for no good reason, then it’s time to expose those bullies as the pricks they really are. Last week…
The Power Out sounds like a pastiche of different styles filtered through a uniquely singular voice. The all-woman band appropriates everything from Stereolab lounge on “Gone Under Sea” (where Verity Susman even sings in French like Laetitia Sadier) to Fifties-era choral music on the surprisingly expansive “The Valleys.” It is…
Despite four critically acclaimed albums, a heap of media exposure, and membership in what may be folk’s first true supergroup (the excellent Cry Cry Cry), singer/songwriter Lucy Kaplansky has yet to achieve the same degree of popular appeal accorded Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, Nanci Griffith, and other artists with…
Back in the day George Jones had a hit single, “Ragged But Right,” about a ne’er-do-well who managed to win the hearts of everyone he met. He could have been singing about the boys in the Old Crow Medicine Show, undoubtedly the finest bluegrass/ragtime/altcountry band in the land. OCMS, like…
Bio Ritmo is Richmond, Virginia’s hottest salsa band, which may be damning it with faint praise since it’s the city’s only salsa band. They started playing together almost by accident when conguero Gabo Tomasini, timbalero Giustino Riccio, and singer Rei Alvarez put together a small group for a jam session…
College Dropout has been touted as the year’s most anticipated release — less because of what Kanye West has achieved as part of Roc-A-Fella’s hitmaking in-house production team, and more for what he represents: The long-awaited bridge between hip-hop’s over- and underground, he’s a guy who admits that he wants…
For many people the Nineties ska revival was an uptempo bubblegum pop hell where anything deeper than a birdbath was discarded and skanked on until it died. But while the third wave has crested and receded into oblivion, N.Y.C. rocksteady kings the Slackers are the last men standing. Unlike its…
Gerry Kelly and Maxwell Blandford have returned to the playful sass they’ve always been known for with the launch of State. The club debuts in the middle of the biggest season South Beach has had in six years. It proves that we’re now completely past the “dark ages” of clubland,…
On the 2000 album The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse opens with “3rd Planet,” one of the great songs in recent American rock. Opening with a few solitary chords plucked by guest musician and lap steel guitarist Ben Blankenship, “3rd Planet” thrusts the listener into a melancholy world of self-doubt…
Apparently there’s a standing offer of one million dollars from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Boston to anyone who can solve the Poincaré Conjecture, a geometrical problem that has baffled the world’s brightest minds for a century. There should probably be a similar reward for anyone who can figure out…
In the streets of Barcelona, Spain, the word barí means “gem.” Barí was the name alternative combo Ojos de Brujo (Eyes of the Wizard) gave to its second album before critics all over Europe began using the same word to describe the songs on it. Shiny and pure like a…
For too many years, it seemed as if the only references to Peruvian music in this country were Andean sounds (like Simon & Garfunkel’s rendition of “El Condor Pasa” and New Age musicians’ love affair with the pan flute) or Inca kitsch queen Yma Sumac (a whole genre unto herself)…
99 Jamz (WEDR-FM 99.1) likes to present itself as the ultimate party, a nonstop hip-hop and R&B throwdown. But the reality is quite different. Up in Hollywood at the Cox Communications building on a recent Friday, the small studio that is the nerve center for the top-rated urban music station…
Like many Mexicans who are thriving against the odds in the United States, Francisco Gomez cannot believe his good luck. Akwid, the rap duo featuring him and his older brother Sergio, has been in the top twenty of the Billboard Latin album chart for the past 30 weeks, and Proyecto…
