The time has come — now that Spandex pants, high kicks, and leg splits are back in vogue — for dormant local legend Stickshift Lover to emerge from its metallic cocoon and stalk the Earth. This fivesome unloads guitar solos and drum fills like a dump truck dropping a pile…
The official story of the Legendary Pink Dots’ name mentions a keyboard player who needed nail polish to remember the notes. Yet leader Edward Ka-Spel has picked up the kaleidoscope dropped by Syd Barrett and brought it blazing into the 21st Century with a distinctly Pink Floydian hue. Not the…
Sunday, November 30, 2003, was the last day of Kemar Campbell’s Thanksgiving vacation. There’s no way he could have known it would be the last day of his life. The 17-year-old spent that afternoon playing basketball. By 4:15, he and his brothers had wrapped up their game and were walking…
Inside the conference room of the Hallandale Beach headquarters of Empire Musicwerks, the order is given to kill the lights. Label honcho Paul Klein, a barrel-bodied man with the requisite open shirt, gold chains, and slick black hair, warns Scott Putesky — the artist responsible for this particular effort –…
And we were doing so well. Just a few minutes after the northbound Tri-Rail train begins its jaunt from Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, we slow to a crawl and stop for no apparent reason. Engineer and conductor converse. Radio static cuts through the quiet. An employee leaves the…
Poulain front man Isaac Lekach was named Best Solo Performer last year in the New Times 2003 Best Of issue. Though some Best Of recipients have found their careers in a dead zone after winning, this isn’t true for Lekach. The Miami-born singer/songwriter went on to form a band to…
Every Tuesday, Frank Burgos receives a fresh shipment of cold wasps. Bred for bloodthirstiness in a Puerto Rico government laboratory, 4,000 of the insects are overnighted to the Davie office where Burgos reports for duty. He gently removes them from their temporary Styrofoam crypt and places them in a 48-quart,…
In these uncertain times, of one thing I’m certain: This is the very last Bandwidth. Ever. There. I said it, and I’m glad. In the final analysis, mixed feelings abound, but the opportunity to write news and feature stories is too exciting to pass up. I will leave you in…
Since the beginning of time (roughly the spring of 2000 for yours truly), the easiest band to write about from our peninsula tip has been Death Becomes You. The band’s grim grindcore was built on the guitar, bass, drums, and screaming, over-the-top stage props, boasts and Tourette’s-like exhortations to “Release…
Some bandmates find one another through want ads. Others meet in high school, college, or at shitty day jobs. But one night back in 1989, four strangers came together through one passion: breakdancing. The place was the now-defunct dive bar Summers on the Beach, and the men — Steve Copeletti,…
On a January morning of such meteorological perfection that it felt like a summer afternoon on the backside of Pike’s Peak, vultures circled a parking lot on Federal Highway just north of Sunrise Boulevard. The carrion? Anything and everything not nailed down inside the headquarters of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra…
The pen is mightier than the small willy, especially when wielded by small-willied music journalists all too eager to oversimplify the truth for audiences all too willing to put artists in a box. If you had a buck for every time Pat Benatar was cited for “paving the way for…
Dressed in a faded pair of jeans cut off just below the knee and a clean, white wife beater with a tiny two-piece swimsuit underneath, grooving to a Mudhoney CD spinning in her boom box, Ginger looks more like a student rocker than a part-time hooker. “You could make good…
When famed Fort Lauderdale B-movie king Herschell Gordon Lewis teamed up with legendary Cleveland punk rockers the Pink Holes, the task was simple: Take the theme songs from two of Lewis’ best-known flicks and revamp them with modern-day plumbing and electricity. “The South’s Gonna Rise Again,” the redneck battle hymn…
Any show that ends with two guitarists (sans pants) screaming at the top of their lungs could spell trouble, but not so in the case of Black Lips. They use a hatred of pants to their advantage. The Atlanta-based foursome kicked Churchill’s in the crotch last summer when it played…
Duncan Cameron isn’t going to lie to you. This is all about success. It’s about fame, money, fortune, exposure, selling a superior product, and being recognized for those achievements. The Hashbrown guitarist just wants to acknowledge the crowds that have made the hard-funk band one of South Florida’s favorites. “All…
Maypop, the outfit formerly captained by West Palm singer/songwriter Keith Michaud, wore out its welcome after a couple of years. The group¹s comfortable emo respectability left it with little to distinguish itself from the pack of SoFla peers. Michaud¹s new project, Summer Blanket, is much more complex and tougher to…
Was 2003 a good year for South Florida music? Sort of hard to tell, innit, when we’re always worked into a self-flagellating lather over how tough we have it down here? Well, buck up, lil campers! Sure, the radio sucks wet, musky, pachyderm balls, our big concert venue is named…
Here’s hoping you finished your gift shopping early, especially for that friendly, red-eyed pothead on your list. ‘Cause if you didn’t already buy little Derwood a hand-blown, color-changing, double-thick glass bubbler for a special stocking stuffer, you’ll have to improvise with a cardboard tube and some tinfoil. This is because…
Revolver — the hip little cadre of indie kids shuttling from one über-cool club to another looking for its next fix of underground music — turns 3 years old this week. So, if you count yourself among that contingent, you’ll want to make the trip to Miami’s Design District to…
When all the ex-principals of Fort Lauderdale’s long-gone Collapsing Lungs agreed to get back together again, the holiday season just seemed like perfect timing. All seven members of the industrial-rap band have family in the area, the last time they played together as a complete unit was the summer of…
For City Link’s venerable staff writer Bob Weinberg, it’s bad enough that his biweekly column about all things bluesy and jazzy got yanked. But now he’s got a noisy detractor — oddly enough, with the same name — bitching that his hasty exit wasn’t graceful enough. At the conclusion of…
