Arlo is a band of the kind of back-porch rockers that speed through a 30-minute set on One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer night at your local club, so it makes sense that the group is named for its Tuesday-night soundman back in L.A. Arlo’s second LP, Stab the Unstoppable…
Close your eyes and you can picture the scene. Ominous piano thunder rolls as the musicians approach their instruments, dank amber silhouettes. Electronic sparkles signal the drums and ignite the rhythm. Bright white house lights pop and flood the room, synchronized with the guitar melody. “Words,” the opening track of…
Last November, when the Argentinean government blocked access to everyone’s bank accounts and the national economy collapsed, rock band Los Piojos still managed to fill a 40,000-seat soccer stadium. It should come as no surprise, then, that the rockeros whose name means lice played to sold-out crowds of Argentinean expatriates…
In 30 years the Argentine audience will end up signing autographs, predicts Ratones Paranoicos singer Juan Sebastian “Juanse” Gutierrez. The emotional crowds who greet every Argentine artist who ventures to the United States will become stars in their own right, he insists, not only in Miami but across the globe…
Okay, so there wasn’t an overwhelming shout-out over the music on Memorial Day weekend; maybe the eclectic mix for the second annual Soul Beach Music Festival this weekend will ease some eardrums. The list of performers runs the gamut from Cameo, Luther Vandross, and Morris Day and the Time to…
“When you’re playing music that has some humor to it, you can make all the mistakes you want,” offers Chris DeAngelis of the Miami band Avenging Lawnmowers of Justice. “With serious music, one mistake and they hate you.” By that yardstick, the ‘Vengers should be allowed more than their fair…
With songs like “Martian Martians,” “I’m a Little Aeroplane,” and “Abominable Snowman in the Market,” it’s hard to believe that troubadour Jonathan Richman played such an important role in the burgeoning punk movement of the 1970s. But the Talking Heads, Television, and even the Sex Pistols (they covered the Richman…
J.G. Thirwell creates a new moniker for each of his musical outings — Foetus for the pioneering whipsmart industrial urges, Baby Zizanie for the electric and eclectic, Manorexia inadvertently scoring the sequel to They Live, the synopsis of which still resides just behind John Carpenter’s left eye. And now Thirwell’s…
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…
Once the Goths get enchanted with you, they never let you go. Loyal and a tad masochistic, Goths love their icons till death, even if their icons don’t love them back. Which is why Peter Murphy can hide out in Turkey reading Rumi, release albums only sporadically, have those albums…
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…
