Music

If Fritz Lang were still alive and doing straight-to-video work, he might choose Slowdeck to score his films. Not that Slowdeck executes at a B-level, but there is something cinematically subterranean about this sound. Even the LP’s title, Multiple Offenses, invokes visions of desperate thugs escaping down chiaroscuro alleyways, trench…

It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, the former guitarist of the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, join forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and…

All five members of this Seattle-based band — whose best reference point might be Blondie meets At the Drive-In — have roots deep-seeded in punk rock. Bassist-vocalist Derek Fudesco played with the Murder City Devils for more than five years, and lead singer Andrea Zollo, his girlfriend, sang in Death…

Did you ever blast the transistor under your pillow loud enough to risk your mom storming in? How long has it been since you’ve heard a hit? A tune so hot it can even make you believe you’re devastatingly attractive screaming it at the intersection? If you can’t remember, fire…

Mexico City’s Los De Abajo is a good old-fashioned ideologically in-your-face punk band. Case in point, “Screw,” where The Downtrodden come with a confrontational politics that exposes the death-squad/drug-dealer thug as the face of the government on the ground. All this is set to a rapid-fire ska-flavored beat. Except upon…

It sure feels like genuine 1970s nostalgia as Geraldo Pino testifies, “Get down you people. We’ve got a brand-new gal in town.” The organ burbles heatedly in the foreground. The Fender bass bounces a melodic riff off a wah-wah rhythm guitar. But as the song grinds on, it might not…

A boy gets tired, it’s true. Boys grow up, get older, move on. But not Bambi. Her blond hair always shines. Her baby-doll eyes always glisten. Her soft voice soothes, sweet-talks, seduces. And her curves — as impressive as the Montana peaks and valleys where she was raised — well,…

Flashback to the mid-Nineties — when daresay, Depeche Mode and the Cure were regularly getting commercial airplay. A sea of black-clad Gothic clubgoers swept about the dance floor to the slow, morose sounds of Morrissey’s “Suedehead” or picked it up with the harder industrial beats of Front 242’s “Headhunter.” Any…

Like Godzilla and Mothra, Bogdan Raczynski was transformed in Tokyo. The Polish-American expat/sonic terrorist had no intention of overturning the world of electronica while a foreign-exchange student in Nagoya, Japan, skipping classes to make music. “It was just a bit of fun,” Raczynski shrugs. “It was kind of a joke…

Never has electronic music sounded warmer or more human than Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Owen Ashworth uses equipment that could be considered antique (SK-1 or MT-100 models of Casio keyboards) to provide a humming, squeaking, buzzing backdrop for his tales of pained love. When he opens for the Scottish,…

Don’t say anything about the sophomore curse to Colombian singer-songwriter Juanes. Don’t even mention the followup jinx to Panamanian power trio Rabanes. Each act put out disc numero dos this month, and from the sound of the new material, neither one would have any idea what you were talking about…

Peering at a shiny object through a shop window. In the late 1930s, a teenaged Jean Baptiste Thielemans found himself doing that one day during a school field trip in his native Belgium. And that’s how it all began. A couple of francs lighter, he was the proud owner of…

Miranda July is trapped onstage. The Portland performance artist is stuck up on a catwalk, sandwiched between two video screens like a specimen pinned to glass, her every move choreographed to the live score composed by DJ and microbiologist Zac Love. Her trademark puff of platinum hair, an apt hybrid…

When the black-clad members of Cadillac Blindside walk onstage and light enough candelabras to stock a horror movie set, it’s clear this is no run-of-the-mill emo-punk band. By the time the band’s frenetic antics and sonic boom blow enough wind to snuff the candles, the skin of the exhausted backpack…

The Lincoln Theatre is intimate enough that everyone in the audience can watch artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas’s expressions — they tell the story. His enthusiasm and excitement about music are written all over his face, as when he introduced an evening of works by Soviet-era composers, part of the…

It seems shortsighted to begrudge the rain in a year following such a serious drought, but if the rain had to fall so infrequently, why did it always seem to pour on the Rhythm Foundation’s outdoor summer concerts? Colombia’s vallenato king, accordionist Alvaro Meza, was completely washed out of the…

She first dazzled the world, or at least her fifth-grade class, with her rendition of “Be a Lion” in an elementary school production of The Wiz. That might explain her courage. After scoring as a dance diva with “Miracle” in 1998, Henry has opted for a much more challenging career…

The Lincoln Theatre is best known as the home of the New World Symphony (NWS), Michael Tilson Thomas’s “training” outfit, who regularly blow their older Philharmonic peers out of the water. But as anyone knows who’s caught a concert here when musicians of the NWS have hung their strings up…

Guitarist Josh Sonntag and singer-songwriter Catty Tasso make for the perfect rock-and-roll marriage — literally. When Tasso advertised for an axe man on a Guitar Center bulletin board in 1999, Sonntag offered her not only a pair of the best plucking hands in town but also his hand in matrimony…

Spend enough time on the Beach and it can seem as if every sound system marches in lockstep. In 1999 it appeared that the music police were practically forcing every restaurant in town to play the Gipsy Kings — and nothing else. Meanwhile the clubs were filled with trance’s aural…