… and from there we ended up at the Culture Room around midnight on Wednesday, May 30, just in time to watch the always-entertaining and gotheriffic Fort Lauderdale outfit the Wicked Screaming Squirts pack up their collection of props. Then we managed to find a safe refuge from which to…
Remember that weird childhood game of sitting in the dark on Halloween, passing around human body parts? You know, carrots for fingers, peeled grapes for eyeballs, or chilled spaghetti for guts? The mere power of suggestion (combined with too much candy corn) could make for a rollicking evening of disgusting…
There was a time (before Queen emblazoned every album with the bold and snippish pronouncement “No synthesizers!”) that synths were actually valued tools for enhancing the rich and exotic texture of music. And there was a time before that when synths existed only in the minds and hands of the…
As the Saturday-night crowd gathers at the A Train Blues and Jazz Cafe, a live-music mainstay on the downtown strip in Delray Beach, a well-coifed gentleman approaches the back bar and poses a question that, in context, is not as funny as it sounds. “Is the fiddle player here tonight?”…
If it’s not the thud of a heart — the one that hits rock bottom like a lead weight in a sea of love — it might be Spain’s I Believe. And if it’s not a rainy saxophone that accompanies a burning man walking down a street as he ponders…
Brotherman, You know I’m a total fan, dude. I mean, if there’s, like, a new disc out or, like, a show, I’m THERE. Totally! All the way back to Remember Two Things, man. I turned my whole frat house on to your jams. And when you played those shows at…
Tampa-based metal band Savatage isn’t known for subtlety or graciousness. But the band members outdid themselves when they visited Boynton Beach club Orbit on May 19 as part of the group’s Poets and Madmen tour, according to some of the venue’s employees. “If they come back,” fumes Orbit manager Pete…
Ex-Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell is one of the few major punk figures of the past 20 years successfully to marry his past to his present. Most of his contemporaries have traded their youthful fire for a more sedate and reflective stance as they move further into middle age; Cornwell has…
Everything is overlabeled now,” Against All Authority guitarist Joe Koontz asserts during some rare downtime at a chiropractor’s office where he works as a masseur. “In the ’80s, bands like the Circle Jerks and Bad Brains would play together — bands with totally different sounds — and no one would…
David Byrne has been a smarmy academic know-it-all on record for almost 25 years. He has also been oblique, ambiguous, and often difficult to decode. So it’s hard to tell how seriously we should take his latest album, a relatively earnest effort that sort of wraps up a little of…
Where doth hipness dwell in Fort Lauderdale these days? For those bored with drum-machine karaoke at the Elbo Room (which everyone should witness once just to calibrate the ol’ suck-o-meter) there are a few places sure to satisfy your musical appetite. Perhaps the most consistently hopping place in terms of…
With the exception of movie soundtracks, various-artists samplers are usually a marketing ploy by some record label to lure you into listening to tracks by a bunch of its B-list artists, tacking on a song or two by a big-name band to get you to push play in the first…
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Autechre, the British posteverything electronic duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown, can count on a warm reception in South Florida. Much has been said of the unlikely nexus of Jeep and laptop culture here that stirred an affinity for Autechre’s cerebral aesthetic at the local Schematic Music Company and…
Anyone who’s ever been in a band knows the deal is as precarious and passionate as any marriage. Groups break up, members are replaced, and creative differences tear folks apart, but politics is usually not a top reason for strife among working musicians. Unless you’re in the complicated universe that…
Tom Reno is laughing in the face of music journalism. Hapless scribes try to describe the music he makes with his band, the Mercury Program, and none of them is getting it right. Reno may not have a pat answer when it comes to name-tagging the Gainesville band he’s captained…
Once again rock has been readmitted into music’s critical ward, with the biz scrambling about for someone to serve as its latest savior, and somewhat unfairly, that mantle has been projected onto Creeper Lagoon’s sophomore release, Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday. In the face of such expectations,…
The phenomenal success of the Buena Vista Social Club did much to reawaken interest in Cuban music around the globe, but more remarkable was the effect the album had on the lives of its featured artists. As he approaches his 100th birthday, Compay Segundo probably is the most internationally recognizable…
On a recent weekend, while driving around suburban Broward County — west of I-95, which I used to consider unworthy of my presence (until I moved there) — I was listening to Mos Def’s excellent 1999 release, Black on Both Sides. It’s a great record, and if you don’t have…
For years, decades, ages, and epochs, music journalists have been writing articles declaring that rock is dead — but it ain’t, my friends. The underground rock scene, in particular, hawks up good stuff on practically a daily basis, and less adventurous stuff is still selling in sizable numbers: Of America’s…
In the front room of Dada, a Delray Beach coffeehouse, in early April, bassist Thom Hammond sits back on an overstuffed couch and enumerates his musical influences, which include Britpop acts, heavy progressive groups, hard-edged guitar players, the Sundays, and Rush. “And I like Seal,” he adds earnestly. The rest…
In recent years, the viscosity of the Valvoline that lubricates today’s metal machines has been reduced to that of Johnson’s baby oil: weak, safe, and not good for much of anything other than rubbing on an infant’s butt cheeks. But Hog Molly, whose frontman Tad Doyle is best known for…
