Oh, the holidays. The only thing more annoying than family reunions is the onslaught of played-out Christmas music. Well, here’s one gathering that should help counter all that. For the second year now, Respectable Street (518 Clematis St., West Palm Beach) hosts the Foundation Reunion, a night of musical reverie…
Search through the iPod of any pop-punk fan over 12, and you´ll see the names Screeching Weasel and Riverdales in the artists menu. Search through their closet shelves and you´ll find where many of those iTunes files came from — rows of compact discs that have sat untouched since the…
The times, they are a-changin’ for Irish music enthusiasts — and their feet too. When the Pogues emerged from the early-’80s post-punk landscape, most of their fans wore Doc Martens. Some two decades later, though, California’s Gaelic Storm dropped its latest album, 2006’s Bring Yer Wellies, offering a spirited mix…
There’s something about making plans that’s been proving difficult for me lately. First, Low-Fidelity’s UM radio show got bumped the day I planned to visit the studio (see last week’s column). Then I found out that the December 30 Sleeparounds show at South Shores Tavern in Lake Worth — part…
Coming on the heels of last month’s Circle Jerks show, Respectable Street plays host to yet another seminal SoCal punk band — Agent Orange. Like the Circle Jerks, the Orange County-based trio, led by guitarist/vocalist Mike Palm, was a forerunner of the early ’80s West Coast punk scene. But unlike…
It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a college radio station. The last time was a guest spot on DJ Ellegitimate’s (now-defunct) show, The Bonus Cup, on FAU’s Owl Radio. It was weird talking to an audience I couldn’t see. Of course, because I couldn’t see them, I…
Sure, they’ve got a song called “Ska Is Dead,” but Boca Raton’s Skuff’d Shoes are anything but departed. Neither, for that matter, are the band’s numerous two-tone-toting peers. How else would they be able to pull off booking all these ska fests? This weekend’s Black and White Ska Fest features…
Five Star Iris shows all the makings of a radio-friendly rock group. The band’s eponymous debut has all the right ingredients for a Top 20 album — overly slick production, alt-pop melodies, and post-grunge rhythms that occasionally move at a snail’s pace. It’s the kind of thing A&R types eat…
Early last year, when Boca Raton’s Fallen From the Sky came up with the artwork for its self-titled EP (on JMB Records), it had no idea that the Mountain Dew can drawn on the back cover was a premonition of sorts. By mid ’06, FFTS was in the running for…
It Was Free Cuz I Stole It The year in unfair shares Now is a bad time to be a giant music corporation, but ethically challenged music fans couldn’t ask for better days. Bootlegging has always been about catering directly to the fans, and the Internet breeds the best bootleggers…
Two months ago, I came across a MySpace group for the Foundation, the long-defunct West Palm Beach club that was the hub of underground music in Palm Beach County (groups.myspace.com/foundationnightclub). But what began as simple cyber nostalgia soon spawned a real-life reunion (or, as MySpace heads call it, a meet-up)…
It can be said that punk-rock vocalists often sound a bit dog-like, what with all the frenzied barking that only a lyric sheet could decipher (though, in crit-speak, the correct term’s probably something like canine-esque). But the ruff-ruff-styled backups on the Sleeparounds’ “Shitty Party” aren’t coming from lead vocalist Devin…
We’re all familiar with this story: local band gets a decent following, signs to a major, and moves to New York (or Austin or L.A.). Some of these bands do well. Most do not, getting dropped by their label after a few months before disbanding. Still, whether such a band…
Truckstop Coffee is a good enough live band — it’s the reason the Palm Beach County quartet gets booked to play all those Honeycomb.com-sponsored street parties in West Palm. But even so, TSC through a live PA system isn’t the same as TSC recorded. One Damn Thing to Redeem is…
Ah, the mid-’90s pop-punk boom… remember that? Probably not, now that the genre’s nearly synonymous with emo. But there was a time when everyone was more in touch with their Ramones roots. At the forefront were bands like the Riverdales, a group comprising three-fourths of Screeching Weasel (which was pretty…
It didn’t take long for the Asylum Street Spankers’ video for “Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV” to become a big hit on YouTube. It’s exactly the type of guffaw-inducing political satire that gets e-blasted throughout cyberspace. Like any good Spankers’ song (remember “Boogers”?), “Ribbons” starts out innocently enough, sounding…
So I checked my mailbox the other week and found a package from one BradLeo Fabian, postmarked with a Fort Lauderdale address. The last I’d heard from this guy, he was living in Orlando, playing in a band called BradLeo and the Heartstoppers (and before that, the Consumers). I’ve seen…
It was bound to happen sooner or later. After months of onstage collaborations, the Friendly Fire and Pyrohypnotik camps have tied the knot — part of ’em, at least. Since Pyrohypnotik has been on hiatus, one-half of the group — drummer Rolls Royce and vocalist Jessi James — has all…
Inside the Tamarac home of Death Becomes You’s John Janos and Christopher Lee, the living-room wall is lined with many a horror flick poster — Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Mummy. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from the group of theatrical horror-rockers. But the…
With a name like Mongo, the North Miami fourpiece probably gets its share of “What’s that mean?” and “That’s the guy from Blazing Saddles, right?” The real question, of course, concerns the indie-rock band’s take on its chosen genre, which runs the gamut from midtempo, Guided by Voices-like rock to…
It’s November. I don’t even know what I’ll be doing on New Year’s Eve, let alone next March. A lot can happen in the next four months. A band can form, record an album, play a few shows, and break up within that time span. Hell, if I could have…
So the Who is back on tour, performing its only Florida date in Sunrise. Why should we care? Well, to start with, it’s the Who’s first visit since original bassist John Entwistle died in 2002, some 38 years after joining the band (which is now called “the Two” by those…
