The electroclash scene isn’t dead yet. Or if it is, then nobody told Felix da Housecat. Once a Chicago house DJ who was huge in Europe and barely noticed in the States, Felix arrived in 2002 with one of nouveau synth-pop’s finest platters, Kittenz and Thee Glitz. And his latest…
Where would country music be without songs about booze, tattoos, gasoline, God, the devil, one-way streets, broken cars, broken hearts, and broken bones? Somewhere between the grit of X and the dusty road poetry of Merle Haggard stands Porter Hall Tennessee, all whiskey swagger and eyes shooting daggers. Singers/guitarists Molly…
Skidmark Lost Identity (self-released) Take a look at these guys on their album cover. They look pretty confident. They appear to be hip dudes. It doesn¹t really seem they met in high school or college. I bet they met at a really cool job. Or maybe through a want ad…
On the tenth floor of an anonymous building in the Brickell district is a small room that looks like a college dorm room, decorated with random pictures of graffiti and a boom box on the computer desk. This is the quiet, abnormally normal headquarters of RK Netmedia, one of the…
Rock dudes who make minimalist electronic music on the side ought to be lined up, bent over, and savagely molested with a 12-disc Philip Glass box set until they bawl like Michael Jackson’s paperboy. Thankfully, Omaha’s indie-dance outfit the Faint isn’t exactly a rock band, and the group’s bassist, Joel…
The San Francisco Bay Area is filled with lots of dorkballs, gaylords, punkers, and other people who just sort of suck at life. William Hung was one of them, but now he’s graduated to celebrity status. Despite getting the shaft on American Idol, Willy’s gone and made a record of…
A couple of times a year, you get an album that puts all others in perspective, one that makes everything you heard recently that you thought was great sound merely good, everything you thought was good seem average, and everything average sound just plain bad. The Loretta Lynn-Jack White collaboration…
If you title your new album Start Something, you’d better actually do something. So it’s a good thing that Lostprophets can walk the walk. These Welsh boys hit the ground running with the radio hit “Last Train Home,” which may have laid the tracks for “Make a Move” and “Burn,…
“It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance.” — Vladimir Nabokov, on Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Lolita “Take a bite…
It’s a little after midnight, and the room is already packed. A sweaty crowd is waving hands in the air, trying not to spill Budweisers and martinis, and dancing boisterously. As Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” starts to play, a woman in a black, low-cut dress climbs up on…
Brian Tappert is co-owner of the Fort Lauderdale-based house label Soulfuric Recordings and one-half of the remix team Jazz-N-Groove Productions (with partner Mark Pomeroy). He tackles the question that has haunted music for decades: What fashion trend should never come back? “Well, I recently saw some pictures of myself in…
So everyone’s talking about how the French duo Air’s latest disc, Talkie Walkie, is a total “makeout album” filled with softcore-porn soundtrack fodder, longing glances, and face-in-the-pillow talk. That’s all fine and good, but two Brits, Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker, a.k.a. Zero 7, created an album in 2001 that…
Hip-hop’s global empire is a juggernaut, racing from braggadocio to backpack-toting purists who shun the materialistic. But the true demographic of the genre is harder to nail down than a Pauly Shore fan. The once strictly urban b-boy ideologies have overtaken the suburbs, grabbing the youth market, which is hastily…
Remember your first bike? Whether it was a black BMX complete with a handlebar shield and the number 9 or a pseudo-Huffy with a pink banana seat and handlebar tassels, it was still freedom on two wheels. After destroying it by jumping over wood ramps and pulling friends on skateboards…
Damn, Jon Langford’s got a lot of music welling up inside him — he’s a member of the UK’s primo punk/post-punk/alt-country stalwarts the Mekons; Chicago’s country-charged rowdies the Waco Brothers; Bloodshot Records’ house band, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts; and, of course, he puts out the occasional solo album. All the…
Lust Now that the under-21 crowd has been sent to its room and banished from Clematis by the crotchety crone running the city, it’s time for some smut. Atlanta’s Lust brings its, uh, “adult-themed” rawk to the dirty South. Singer and guitarist Susanne Gibboney, bassist Barb G., and drummer Mark…
In their continued efforts to tout the so-called “revival” of rock ‘n’ roll, mainstream media rags focus only on bands that rip off either the Rolling Stones or the Velvet Underground. Apparently, nothing earlier than the 1960s is worth reviving. Sure, it’s good that kids brought up on metal are…
Karma Lounge is located in the rarefied realm between the beginning of Riverwalk and the west end of Las Olas, neatly tying together the party crowd and the upscale fashionistas. On any other night at Karma, an internationally acclaimed DJ might be spinning progressive house and clubgoers might be schmoozing…
Is it wrong to want bands to stay broke? To wish that they would keep recording on shitty four-tracks and never upgrade? We Shall All Be Healed is good. We’ll give it that. John Darnielle is a talented lyricist and vocalist; all the fancy new equipment in the world won’t…
You’re digging through your closet or drawer, sifting through all the years of junk, and you find something. You thought that Bell Biv DeVoe “Poison” single was a goner, but there it is. You brush off the layer of dust and pop it in your car stereo later that day,…
The curse of the side project dictates that no matter how vastly different your new band is, you will be held up to the ungodly standards of the band that made you famous. Many Mötley Crüe fans (present company included) would listen to any side project — even watch an…
Pigeon Funk is a minimal techno side project initiated by San Francisco producers Kit Clayton, Sutekh, and Safety Scissors in 2001. Though originally released as a series of EP-length “battles” among the three artists, the trio’s Pigeon Funk! compilation is still remarkably consistent, a weird collage of scattershot samples and…
