Screaming Trees had just ripped into “Nearly Lost You” when I spotted him — a dusty-haired kid of about fourteen, standing alone, mouthing the words to the band’s 1992 hit. He was like a lot of the other people who gathered in West Palm Beach last Thursday beneath a scalding…
Nightlife, it’s the right life. And this weekend, it’s also a meltdown of music and mayhem. Tonight (Thursday) begin to relive the glamour and elegance of Havana in the Forties and Fifties as Yuca Restaurant (501 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach, 532-9822) starts the summer run of Havana Nights. Enjoy the…
Way back in 1983, when the loud-fast acceleration of hardcore punk had turned the music into an atonal sonic speed race, a little-known band named the Melvins decided to slam on the brakes. Formerly a garden-variety, slash-and-burn combo, this Aberdeen, Washington, trio decided to play it slow. Real slow. Grindingly…
Futuristic glam-rock unit Psychotica is always one step ahead of itself. They signed a recording contract — with Rick Rubin’s American Records, no less — before playing their first public gig. They are touring — on the bill of Lollapalooza, no less — before the actual release of their debut…
Believe all the stress of hurricane threats and beach-bound traffic jams by traveling to another world. Marsbar (8505 Mills Dr., Town & Country Center, Kendall, 271-6909) celebrates 720 days of terrestrial occupation on Saturday, July 20, with complimentary cocktails and a seafood buffet from 8:00 to 10:00, a fashion show…
“Radio has pretty much disappeared as an art form and it’s getting worse day by day,” says Greg Baker, the former music editor for this paper and, along with Steve Alvin, host of The Beast & Baker Show, quite possibly the best thing you’ll find on the AM side of…
Metallica Load (Elektra) Soundgarden Down On the Upside (A&M) For headbanger careerists like Metallica and Soundgarden, heavy-metal angst can present some real artistic problems when all those bad vibes and bad-ass guitar riffs start sounding like the same old bitch-and-boogie. But as their latest albums indicate, Metallica knows this and…
Kembra Pfahler is a self-proclaimed rock goddess. And why not grant her the title? As the cofounder of the arty glam-punk New York City ensemble the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the subversive singer, songwriter, multimedia artist, and weirdness guru has paved the way for a strange new aesthetic, created…
For more than a decade, Elvis Costello has been toiling away in the gap that separates blind ambition and tedious experimentation — a willing slave to the concepts and conceits of high art, a poster boy for creative indulgence, able to rock out only with other people’s songs. In the…
Los Lobos Colossal Head (Warner Bros.) All artists show their influences in their work. What separates the sublime from the hapless in this regard is the ability to do it without being crass. And there’s certainly nothing crass about Colossal Head, the seventh long player from Los Lobos. Genius is…
“The blues is alright” goes the refrain of the anthem of the same name, a regional Southern hit back in the mid-Eighties for its writer, vocalist/guitarist Little Milton Campbell, a 40-year veteran of the blues club circuit. The song has become Milton’s signature track and is already something of a…
This is going to be difficult for me — for all of us, I expect — because this isn’t going to be some misty recollection, but rather the dredging up of a very specific and humiliating sliver of the past. Which means what we’re dealing with is, in essence, disclosure…
Michael Timmins readily acknowledges the irony surrounding the biggest hit to date by the Cowboy Junkies, the Canadian group for which he serves as guitarist and songwriter. Said hit — a mournful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” — came in 1994, a full six years after it was…
The Specials Today’s Specials (Virgin/Kuff) You can’t say the time isn’t right for the triumphant return of the Specials, the English group that way back in the late Seventies combined punk’s rant-and-roll dynamics with the slippery grooves of Jamaican ska. Close to fifteen years after the Specials broke up, their…
Your First, Your Last, Your Everything: Four years ago, before his umpteenth comeback, before his 1994 The Icon Is Love album and its “Practice What You Preach” single both went to number one on the R&B charts, Barry White, the grand pooh-bah of le musique de fuque, lolled in the…
A lot of things seem weird to Amanda Green. The 24-year-old singer/songwriter uses the word a lot to describe, in general, her personal life and, in particular, the confluence of professional events ranging from her first club gig last August (a solo date on the patio of Churchill’s Hideaway) to…
Guided by Voices Under the Bushes Under the Stars (Matador) Three albums after the rock press discovered them in 1993 (and nine since the band formed about ten years ago), Guided by Voices remains the rarest of indie-rock rarities — a critically hoohahed outfit that actually deserves the hosannas. Robert…
“It’s kinda hectic, man,” says Wyclef “Clef” Jean, rapper, songwriter, and sonic engineer for the Fugees. “A lot of things are going on.” And, Jean should have added, those things are pretty damn nice A the kinds of things that happen only to a band experiencing a commercial breakthrough. The…
Love and Rockets has achieved an almost unheard-of feat with its new album Sweet F.A.: The three-man band has created a near-perfect alternative makeout record. Sweet F.A. boasts sensual, shimmery soundscapes punctuated by twangy, languid guitar lines and ultra-sultry rhythms. Listening to the hourlong set is like taking a swim…
Scattered throughout the songs of Archers of Loaf are moments when you’d swear everything will explode in a discordant burst — when the tension builds to a point where it threatens to rend the quartet into a thousand pieces of bone and flesh, spraying shrapnel of guitar wood, drumheads, and…
The instrument seems such a natural fit in his large, graceful hands that it’s hard to imagine a time when Buddy Guy wasn’t playing the guitar. Truth is, the 59-year-old blues legend had no idea what a guitar was as a child. “I grew up on a farm near Simmesport,…
Mike Boudet doesn’t like talking about Enjoy the Cancer, the EP he has self-released under the name Lounge Act. He says it makes him uncomfortable, and on a recent afternoon at Tapeworm, the Miami studio Boudet co-owns, he’s clearly ill at ease. The 21-year-old singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist squirms nervously…
