Ultra Music Festival released the second phase of its lineup, and while the biggest names in the list offer no big surprises, a number of other, smaller acts added to the bill demonstrate more of the festival’s forward-thinking approach this year. So here are the titans who will play (again):…
Beyond the unending, dentist-office-like whir of hundreds of tattoo needles buzzing on and off, the Miami Tattoo Expo will feature another soundtrack – an impressive lineup of local and national musical acts. While other South Florida tattoo conventions have relied mostly on rockabilly cover bands and the like, the Miami…
“Brooklyn,” as the current day manager of the Vagabond in downtown Miami is known, has done and seen it all around the South Florida music scene since arriving here from his native New York some 12 years ago. Younger types flitting around hipster nightlife know him as the improbably, heavily…
Pat yourself on the back for attending Saturday’s early evening, all-ages extravaganza at Revolution. It’s sponsored by Music Saves Lives, a California-based group on its way to nonprofit status that aims to “create opportunities for people to save lives with simple contributions, and to teach the facts about the effects…
This Friday’s excursion into sonic brutality at Churchill’s Pub is not just another exercise in aggression. This time, it’s to support a nascent all-ages venue in the inner city, tentatively called GOO. The project is being spearheaded by a local music fan, Kenneth Fee. The graduate of Hialeah High has…
Scottish indie rock act Bis’ overtures were expressed rather neatly in its 1997 single “Tell It to the Kids”: “And now, coming through the airwaves into your home/Introducing the new transistor heroes.” San Francisco’s hey willpower lacks a similar expressive salutation, but it shares Bis’ affinity for trash culture, “kandy…
Little, it seems, can stop the improbable Tampa-based female party – rap juggernaut that is Yo Majesty. Not even the occasional almost-implosion of the group itself. Early last summer, some undefined internal meltdown sent home half of the group, the gospel – trained vocalist – turned – rapper Jewel B…
Credit it, partially at least, to the rise of smooth – jam – loving new indie-ish bands like Tigercity, the Yacht Rock series on YouTube, and the unexpected, fanatical boosterism from people like Travis McCoy of the Gym Class Heroes. The blue-eyed soul duo of Hall & Oates is experiencing…
To read past installments of Miami According to Brooklyn, click here. With the tattoo convention coming up this weekend in Miami, I want to talk about how these conventions are full of jackasses. I used to work for Eulogy Recordings, one of sponsors of it, and Madball is playing on…
A family-led operation, the Machito Orchestra was established in 1939 and continues to attract some of the best-known musicians in Latin jazz. The New York-based group comes to town on Thursday, January 15 in a celebratory mood. The show pays homage to three departed legends of the genre: the Machito…
As the Seventies ended and disco pushed into the mainstream, those who came of age during that period always seemed to be reminded that they had missed out on the great cultural revolution of the raging Sixties. As many recall, former Beatle John Lennon himself pretty much summed it up…
Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter still looms in the margins of jazz history. Until now, her contributions during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies were known mostly to insiders, aficionados, historians, and journalists eager to sensationalize her association with the death of Charlie Parker, who famously died in her living room in…
Probably the only surf-rock song nearly everyone recognizes is “Wipe Out!” (if you really need a reminder, click here). And the version with which people are familiar is that done in 1963 by the Surfaris, a California quartet still making bank on the nostalgia circuit today. By all accounts, pretty…
This past December, Rolling Stone published an interesting industry – centric article detailing the ongoing business battle between ticket-sale monolith Ticketmaster, and live-show monolith Live Nation. Of course, everybody knows that until very, very recently, Ticketmaster was inescapable, even at certain small venues (locally, for instance, even Culture Room uses…
The last thing the world needs is another rant by some snooty music scribe who actually believes he can peg the next Coldplay or validate some MySpace wannabe. Don’t worry; yours truly doesn’t make any such presumptions. You won’t find any holier-than-thou prognostications here — just good new sounds worth…
When New Times last checked in with Miami’s premier live hip-hop party, Mayday!, we were happy to see they had survived the wave of almost-hype in ’06/’07 and were back to the grind. (Nutshell refresher: The group recorded a track with Cee-Lo and DJ Craze called “Groundhog Day,” played a…
On Combichrist’s fourth and latest album, Today We Are All Demons, the band’s mastermind, Andy LaPlegua, effectively ups the ante on the tried-and-true answering machine intro. It begins with a message from an unfortunate soul on his way to jail on a concealed-weapons charge. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is in the…
Churchill’s at nightPhoto by Tony VargasLongtime Churchill’s Pub manager/booker/in-house promoter, Michael Toms, made his exit from the venerable Miami institution this past January 1. Churchill’s marks its 30th anniversary as a mainstay of the Miami music scene in 2009, and owner Dave Daniels will be taking over the lion’s share…
Retro video game nerds, don’t get too excited. Friday’s guest act at the Vagabond has nothing to do with the mostly forgotten Nineties Nintendo game, but rather has appropriated the moniker, a la Crystal Castles, to broadcast a fascination with retro bleeps and bloops. The multicolor, 8-bit style graphics festooning…
Few local DJs in any genre have such a scarily deep and broad knowledge of music as Alex Caso. Able to wax poetic on and dig deep into any genre from psychedelic garage nuggets, to Jamaican rocksteady, to robotic electro, Caso’s consequently spun everywhere from straight-up raves to hipster hotspots…
(Photo via Galacticfunk.com)So how does a group of (mostly) non-native college students go on to become ambassadors of New Orleans funk? For Galactic, of which all but one of the band’s current members relocated to the Crescent City in the early Nineties, it took more than just practice and persistence…
(Photo via Stonefox’s MySpace page)Stonefox is a garage band in the purest sense of the word — except, perhaps, for the fact that they did most of their recording in living rooms. But they did accomplish the entire recording for their first full-length LP, Dead in the Sun on “barely…
