Although Bob Marley’s meteoric career was cut short by a bout with cancer in 1981, his legacy lives on in the Wailers, the band he helped found in the late ’60s and later fronted for much of his career. Few groups would have such an indelible impact, given the fact…
In the early and mid-1960s, while jazz innovators like John Coltrane were, well, innovating, another phenomenon — tagged soul-jazz — happened simultaneously. Soul-jazz groups generally featured an organist playing the robust Hammond B-3, a drummer, a saxophonist, and/or an electric guitarist. Birthed in hard bop’s 1950s cauldron, soul-jazz shunned its…
Following on the heels of Daytona’s “This Is for You Fest,” the Blackbirds, Years From Now, XRadical AttackX, Another Breath, About to Snap, Cross Examination, and Sick of Talk head to Delray Beach to end the year with a hardcore bang. With a few local stragglers also onboard (Barriers Now…
When XTC’s Andy Partridge is reached via phone at his home in England, he’s doing exactly what one expects the prolific studio musician to be doing. “You caught me having a secret strum on the guitar,” the 53-year-old says cheerfully. “I just blundered into quite a nice chord change that…
Musician-turned-novelist Frank Portman of the Mr. T Experience has long joked about conceiving his novel King Dork as part of a strategy to “get out of debtor’s prison.” After 20 years in the punk-rock biz without a hit, it appears his strategy has finally paid off. On November 14, Gary…
Latin/Anglo Crossover is what Latin American artists have always dreamt of and what American artists are starting to realize they need to pull big sales numbers out of a shrinking market. Crossover success means jackpots in both concert tickets and CD sales, so expanding a fan base across genres, countries,…
The Nashville way of making music is unlike any other, comparable only to the studio system of Hollywood’s golden age — a closed system of songwriters, producers, record labels, and artists that creates most of the sounds you don’t want to admit you listen to on the radio when no…
Hey, dude. So here’s my mixtape that’s been 12 months in the making. Sorry it’s taken a while, but reality often moves at the same molten pace as a couple of the bands culled here. While the new folksters get accolades for their freaky psychedelic tendencies, there’re plenty of heavy…
Recordings of DJ mixes have been multiplying like e-mail spam over the past decade. The sheer volume of said releases is overwhelming, and it makes one wonder: Who the hell is buying them? There must be a demand if labels keep issuing the things as if the music industry has…
In 2006, the pop singles market continued to dominate, in no small part because the pick-to-click-driven mentality of online music stores and ringtone sites gave consumers unparalleled freedom to choose their own musical adventure. What suffered in the meantime, though, was the quality of pop/rock albums. These platters frequently spawned…
This story, as originally conceived, was supposed to be a compilation of the year’s best boxed sets and other reissues. But then it hit us — in today’s shuffle-driven iPod world, with the pace of pop culture moving at breakneck speed, it’s pointless to make such temporal distinctions. The past…
Clearly nobody needs a primer on indie rock. We all have our own idea of what it is, right? Still, why is it that so few of us can agree on who deserves such a designation? Fact is, trying to define indie rock universally is as futile a task as…
Remember the first time you heard the Pixies classic “Where Is My Mind?” It condensed the euphoria of cutting anchor and sailing into the abyss into a four-minute pop song. Now Jay Reatard (that Memphis garage punker from the Lost Sounds, the Retards, Angry Angles, and probably a dozen other…
Gwen Stefani is still pushing the limits of ridiculousness on The Sweet Escape; after all, it takes a person quite secure in her self-confidence to bring back yodeling as a viable chorus hook. But the aforementioned von Trapp-fest (“Wind It Up”) is actually the worst song on her second solo…
Given their eclectic mix of Mississippi Delta blues, jazz, country blues, roots, and ragtime, the Banyan Street Jug Band might be as informative to scholarly types as it is entertaining. Indeed, its performances suggest the aural equivalent of being whisked back to an earlier era, to places where itinerant musicians…
It looks as if Christmas presents are going to be arriving early — at least for the many electro fans who’ve managed to slip some nice into their naughty this past year. Yup, Candyland is back. The 11th rendition of the longest-running dance event in South Florida goes down Saturday…
As is readily apparent from the name itself, imadethismistake operates from a somewhat tenuous perspective, a place where trauma and uncertainty seem to reign supreme. Kylewilliam Campol, the primary mistakemaker, offers up a heartbroken narrative recapping a bittersweet farewell to a dying lover (“Staring Blindly Into a Dull Sunset”) and…
Wendy O. Williams always said she liked to make “aggressive art,” and that’s what she did as the front woman for ’80s punk-metal band the Plasmatics — sporting a Mohawk on TV, wearing nothing but electrical tape over her nipples, blowing up luxury cars and school buses, cutting guitars in…
Local stalwarts the Livid Kittens have been making some kind of rock-oriented racket for a long time now. Combining elements of hard rock, punk, goth, glam, and surf — and filtering it through the rabid vocals of lead kitten Paige Harvey — the unit’s sitting on its latest slab (and…
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…
Case. Case… hmmm, is that the rapper who kicked it with Diddy for a while, quit the music biz to become a preacher, and then returned to the game a couple of years ago? No, wait, that was Mase. Case… oh, now I remember. Kind of. He was that supersmooth…
