For nearly a decade, the giants of electronic dance music, a cold-blooded cadre mostly from northern Europe, lumbered across the Earth. Tiësto, Paul Van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Seb Fontaine, Judge Jules, and Fatboy Slim dominated small suburban dance floors and Ibizan caverns alike with crafty disco assembled from chest-rattling basslines…
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)…
Sometime back in 1980, keyboardist Thomas Morgan Robertson — nicknamed “Dolby” due to his extensive audio expertise — was enjoying a good gig as a session synth player. After a night with Bruce Wooley and the Camera Club, a proto new-wave outfit, Dolby stole away for a few hours in…
Christmastime is here. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Here comes Santa Claus. We’ve all heard it before, and we don’t need to hear it again. Before you plan a holiday bash or go on a three-hour road trip, burn a mix of these fresh holiday tunes. Winter…
When Swedish death-metal band Arch Enemy announced in 2001 that original singer Johan Liiva had been asked to leave because guitarist Michael Amott wanted “a more dynamic frontman,” few people expected that the new “frontman” would be a woman — a then-unknown German singer named Angela Gossow. Since Gossow joined…
The Twilight Singers’ A Stitch in Time features two of the past decade’s great voices: ex-Afghan Whig Greg Dulli and former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan. And while Dulli steers the ship (more a rotating cast than an actual band), this EP sees Lanegan finally seizing more control. Transforming Massive…
The Game rose to fame with help from Dr. Dre, who godfathered 2005’s The Documentary, a smash that featured cameos by 50 Cent. But a feud with 50 was followed by the sudden end of the Game’s label deal — a split that indicates with whom Dre sided. As a…
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…
As the voice of Los Angeles’ legendary punk band X, Exene Cervenka learned plenty about what the genre’s all about — being conversational and controversial and not sticking to the narrow confines of three-chord Ramones riffs. With her new band, Exene Cervenka and the Original Sinners, Cervenka has found a…
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…
As part of the most successful American DJ duo in history (Washington, D.C.,’s Deep Dish), Sharam has had his fingers in a horde of glossy dance-pop remixes ranging from Dido to Diddy. Now that Sharam has put his Deep Dish dreams on hiatus to pursue a solo career, he’s again…
Ever since he helped form the Squirrel Nut Zippers back in the early ’90s, multi-instrumentalist Jimbo Mathus has made a habit of tapping into one eclectic style after another, inspired by archival genres that rarely turn up on today’s musical radar. Just as the Squirrels mimicked the vintage juke-joint jazz…
In the urban music market’s equivalent of a monster truck radio voice, the ad for the Scream Tour 5 blares: “We Wanna Make You Screeeeeeeeeam!” Well, duh. With a roster like this, it kind of goes without saying that there’s going to be some screaming in the house — lots…
In addition to fruitcake and Carrot Top, the list of history’s true horrors includes the advent of the slideshow party — how many tortured souls have been subject to the interminable boredom, bordering on complete madness, of three carousels of Uncle Morty’s trip to the Grand Canyon? Thank heavens for…
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…
Though they share the same name as a well-known furniture retailer, Miami’s Modernage doesn’t tout comfort or clarity of design. Far from it, in fact — Modernage’s music is seeped in post-punk anguish and intensity, a sound that reflects the anxiety and uncertainty of modern times. Formed in late 2003,…
The brainchild of Kansas-born, Brooklyn-residing singer/cellist Melora Creager, Rasputina is like an Edward Gorey wet dream come to life: a captivating combination of chamber music, doomy goth-metal textures, corsets lifted from a Victorian boudoir, and loads of twisted black humor. An in-demand session cellist who’s worked with Nirvana, Bob Mould,…
Although Army of Anyone features half of Stone Temple Pilots (as well as former Filter lead singer Richard Patrick), the whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. None of the tracks on the group’s debut smolders quite like Filter’s mid-’90s breakthrough, “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” nor does any…
Although Paul Westerberg has always been fond of breaking out Replacements chestnuts live, he seems to be softening the anti-‘Mats stance he often takes on studio-based projects. Witness the two better-than-they-had-any-right-to-be songs recorded for this year’s Replacements best-of collection and the eight tunes he contributed to the soundtrack of the…
Mayday!’s self-titled debut is one of this year’s pleasant surprises. Plex’s early production work for Miami groups like Algorithm and Spirit Agent were simple blue beats that sounded like bedroom soliloquies. In contrast, Mayday! is vivid and colorful, with sounds that range from the hard organ crush of “Watchin’ Me”…
You can reinvent the wheel, and you can reinvent the reinvention. The Hep Cat Boo Daddies, a rough, tough South Florida power trio, manages to do a little of both, drawing on a diverse amalgam of blues, rock, surf, funk, and rockabilly to fuel their highly charged musical motif. While…
