Apples in Stereo September 28, 2007 The Culture Room Better Than: Eating a barrel of Count Chocula while in interstellar overdrive The Review: We dig The Culture Room, even if we’ve gotta drive about a million miles to get there. The joint’s dark, the sound’s swimming, and it’s run by…
Broward County’s the Postmarks have the music industry paying attention to their sugary sounds in a big way. It may have taken two years to put out their debut, self-titled album, but now that it’s on shelves, everyone from Spin to the New Pornographers seems to want a piece of…
I like Rilo Kiley. I can’t help but groove to their country-inspired brand of indie rock loosely influenced by Straight Outta Compton, De La Soul, and The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I find vocalist Jenny Lewis’s quirky, choppy, and occasionally incomprehensible lyrics and pleasantly girlish voice refreshing. I like when…
Rap City won’t be on in the afternoons anymore. The show is moving to 1 a.m., and BET is filling its old afternoon time-slot with some other video-block show. And honestly, I’m not even sure why I care. For one thing, I never watch the show in the afternoon anyway…
Reggae star Mavado, who just performed at the Gold Coast Roller Rink in Fort Lauderdale a week ago, was robbed on Tuesday in Toronoto. According to reports, most of Mavado’s belongings were stolen including a laptop, money, and his passport. As a result, Mavado has cancelled his upcoming shows (Atlanta…
BMG will get you gooey Michelle F. Solomon The Blue Man Group Saturday, September 15, 2007 Universal Studios Citywalk, Orlando Better Than: Late night TV’s stupid human tricks. The Blue Man Group has been a staple of Greenwich Village for almost two decades. I saw them a few years ago…
On a recent Tuesday night, house producer/DJ Ryan Raddon, a.k.a. Kaskade, is holed up in a Salt Lake City studio, ensconced in his latest high-profile project. But when he opens his mouth to describe it, his own muffled laughter cuts him off. “Oh, it’s new material, this and that.” He…
Pretty much every one-person operation in the futurepop/EBM scene has cause to envy Tom Shear’s hard-fought self-sufficiency. In the studio he — and he alone — is Assemblage 23, fine maker of gloomy, industrialized synth-based dance confections since 1988. In his home office he’s 23db Records, responsible for releasing albums…
“Korea’s got the best fried chicken,” claims Dave Hillyard, longtime saxophonist for Brooklyn-bred ska band the Slackers. He would know. Over the past decade, the Slackers have performed across five of seven continents. “Never Africa or Australia,” he says, “but when we performed in Korea, a lot of the people…
There’s nothing like seeing the “Download” links enabled for the tunes on a band’s MySpace site. Wellll, doggy — free shit! Yessir, Mark Dubin of Fort Lauderdale’s Los Diablos ain’t no cheapskate. “We believe that if people are gonna take time to check out our shows, pay for the cover,…
What has four legs and sounds like Redd Foxx trying to freak up a New Orleans blues bar? The Nashville-based duo Black Diamond Heavies, comprising Van Campbell on drums and founder John Wesley Myers on guitar and blackened throat. The band was actually born four years ago as a four-piece…
Southern California has birthed more successful hyphenated punk bands than anywhere else in the world. From the Eighties punk-metal of Black Flag to the latter-day pop-punk of the Offspring, La-La Land and its environs are the epicenter of anger-with-a-twist. Strung Out’s latest release this past June, Blackhawks Over Los Angeles,…
Cleaveland Jones is a band of mystery, insists its frontman and songwriter, named, also, Cleaveland Jones. “I don’t mind it being a bit confusing or ambiguous,” insists the Ohio transplant, who has been in Miami for 10 years and playing music locally for three. Try to get more details about…
The thing that stokes Mark Caro — alias Tech Itch — the most is his rep as the godfather of dark, hard, experimental drum ‘n’ bass. The thing that least stokes him is what the marginal success of d ‘n’ b is doing to the genre. “There’s too much cheesy…
Saturday night the Southern rock hits of Molly Hatchet — “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” “Beating the Odds,” and “Gator Country” among them — will make a perfect soundtrack to blowing some dough on that not-quite-fast-enough filly. Grown from the same musical soil as Lynyrd Skynyrd, in its Seventies heyday Jacksonville’s native…
About two years ago Jason Tyler lost everything in a Chicago house fire, which was accidentally started by a superstar DJ and good friend. Then he spent a couple of semihomeless weeks in New York writing and recording an entire album with nothing more than a laptop he carried in…
In Miami, women’s voices resound all over the music industry, but they usually don’t get much attention unless they’re accompanied by a nice set of silicone implants. Even in the politically correct and culturally diverse local fusion scene, women often find themselves sola amid male-dominated bands. But last spring, 16…
Sometimes the simplest music is the most affecting. So it goes with PJ Harvey’s new studio album, White Chalk, which often feels like a sequel to Björk’s Vespertine. Absent are the scorched-earth guitars and feral vocals for which the songwriter is known. Instead Chalk finds solace and strength in desolation…
Denmark’s prolific electronic experimentalist (and much-lauded remixer) Anders Trentemøller hand-picked his best tracks and remixes for this two-disc set, which follows his 2006 studio debut, The Last Resort. Fans of that album’s dubby down-tempo and gorgeous clicking techno would hope for a collection of similar new compositions. Instead The Trentemøller…
Konono No. 1 is from the Congo and is unlike anything you’ve ever heard. The group’s music is based on the sound of the likembé, or Congolese thumb piano. Angola-born bandleader Mawangu Mingiedi moved to Kinshasa (Congo’s capital) in the Seventies, starting the band with the intention of playing Bazombo…
Prepubescent bands tend to do best when they don’t take themselves too seriously. Rock may be a young man’s game, after all, but it’s hard to sell the lifestyle when sex and drugs could result in a major grounding. Fortunately the three members of Care Bears on Fire — Sophie…
Dropkick Murphys w/ HorrorPops September 25, 2007 Revolution, Ft. Lauderdale Dropkick MurphysPhotos by Jamie Puntumkhul Better than: Three accidental fists to the face due to an ardently chanted Oi! trinity. The Review: I have somewhat of an obsession with that span of time between an opening band’s wasted plea to…
