One decade and eight albums after its 1980 formation, long-running Australian combo the Church fell from American prominence just as quickly as it rose – not an unusual occurrence in pop music, sure. But Steve Kilbey, the band’s good-natured, 51-year-old frontman, offers a rather unique explanation. “The way I see…
In 2002, “My Neck, My Back,” Khia’s bass-heavy ode to oral pleasure, took over the urban airwaves. Despite the song’s explicit exhortations, it became an international mainstream hit for the young Tampa rapper (born Khia Finch). Her debut album, Thug Misses, sold 800,000 copies independently. Then the rumors began. First…
Man has been boiling meat and veggies for about 5,000 years now, but it wasn’t until some Neolithic primitive had a brain fart and invented the spoon that we also learned to sup up the liquid with the boiled contents. A few thousand years and countless varieties of soup later,…
In the indie-rock canon, the Pacific Northwest gets its rep mostly from its Seattle and Olympia greats. But the best Pac-NW album of the year is just a ferry ride away from Seattle, and perhaps the short distance (and free Canadian health care) was all it took for Victoria, British…
Six years after leading a charge for sex-positive electro punks to “fuck the pain away,” Peaches has been slowly slumping into a one-shtick pony. Her 2000 debut, The Teaches of Peaches, was a much-needed jolt to affectations in dance music; while electroclash was concerned with keeping its veneer on ice,…
This man is worth more dead than alive. After being immortalized by Joaquin Phoenix in last year’s Walk the Line, Johnny Cash rises from the dead yet again for 12 tracks recorded just months before he followed his wife into the grave. Like American I-IV, V contains yet more moaning…
Holy shit — another Timb album?! Hasn’t this dude already put out eight other full-length discs in a few years’ time? Well, yes and yes. But Enjoy — the ninth release by this local DIY workhorse — isn’t adding to the 400-some songs in Timb’s catalog. It’s a collection of…
James Brown may hold the title of the hardest-working man in show business, but in the business of post-hardcore music, As Cities Burn could be the hardest-working band. Within two years of its first practice deep in the swamps of Louisiana, As Cities Burn had self-released two EPs and played…
Remember the good ol’ house party days, when you filled up a living room with 50 of your closest friends, broke out the booze, and played DJ for the night on your parents’ turntable? Well, April French does. She’s co-owner of local music shop Karma Records (868 E. Oakland Park…
See what happens when you create nine fucking alter egos under a bajillion different labels with all manner of collaborations? You see?! Apparently this album is some treacherous betrayal (not the first, mind you) of an aborted 3-year-old project featuring legendary underground New York rapper Kool Keith, a onetime Bellevue…
Confucius say, “Rabbit in the Moon will make electronic music more entertaining than a fire-breathing stripper with three boobs.” All right, so the ancient Chinese philosopher didn’t say that. And neither, for that matter, did the music producer born David Christophere. But it was the basic idea the latter had…
Sure, Ryan Cabrera may be best-known for his failed relationship with Ashlee Simpson, but beneath the flat-iron Stegosaurus ‘do, the scorned man is one hell of a pop-rocker. Although plenty of teenaged girls blindly reel for his lovelorn lyrics, Cabrera’s resonant tenor and effortless falsetto separate him from the whiny…
I was standing about 20 feet from the entrance when he walked in. The guy looked and smelled like he was on some sort of Olympic dumpster-diving team, a cross between a construction worker and a beach bum — dude obviously wasn’t here for the live music. That’s not why…
South Florida is choked with English and Irish pubs, so it isn’t news that another one is turning 10 years old. Only, in this case, Blue Anchor Pub is really turning 141 years old, and here’s how: In the mid-1990s, the pub’s façade was taken apart and shipped over from…
It’s no secret that Pink has a beef with the pop tarts whose genre she inhabits — Britney Spears is practically her arch-nemesis — but on the first single, “Stupid Girls,” from her latest album, I’m Not Dead, she threw punches at every other “porno paparazzi girl” you’ve read about…
Pop-punk, ska-punk, garage-punk, goth-punk, post-punk — is there any part of punk rock left to explore? Sure, but it may come from outside the cultural lines of middle-class America. There’s a whole multicultural angle that’s been mostly untouched. And that’s where Miami’s Güajiro comes in. The fourpiece — composed of…
If the punk rock attitude is all about anarchy, freedom, and not living by other people’s rules, then why is punk rock music the exact opposite? That’s a question the Minutemen’s Mike Watt has been asking for nearly three decades. Punk was already several years old by the time the…
What started as a one-off collaboration became an international phenomenon — an “Overnight Sensation,” as the Raspberries would say. Gnarls Barkley, the duo of ex-Goodie Mobster Cee-Lo Green and bizarro producer Danger Mouse, weren’t counting on their debut single, “Crazy,” to take off. But it did, and so did its…
The video for “Ready to Fall,” the lead single from Rise Against’s latest salvo, is like a punk-rock version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, except with fewer shots of melting icebergs and a lot more images of doomed wildlife: dead deer, dead dolphins, baby chicks riding a conveyor belt…
Thom Yorke’s first individual outing is about what you’d expect — a glitchy, primarily electronic excursion that mirrors Radiohead’s most recent work. The Eraser’s dour compositions conjure the icy, detached vibe of Kid A and Amnesiac, and were it not for Yorke’s beguiling melodies and consistently compelling fey falsetto, it…
Imagine a human civilization built on a swamp, surrounded by beaches, and populated by everyone from condo-dwelling retirees to crack dealers. That’s South Florida, all right, and it’s the perfect setting for the break-core/noise-hop that Hialeah native Otto Von Schirach has been producing. After releasing several albums and remixes, Von…
For those of you tired of the paint-by-numbers approach employed by too many emo bands, here’s some good news: An increasing number of them find it boring too. Matchbook Romance is a case in point. A quartet from the rock hotbed of Poughkeepsie, New York, the group, led by guitarist/vocalist…
