Johnny Cash

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…

Timb

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…

Kool Keith

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…

Soup’s On

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…

Simple Girl

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…

South of the Border

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…

Gnarls Barkley

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…

Rise Against

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

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…

Otto Von Schirach

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…

No Fair Fights

The transformation of No Fair Fights has been absolutely stunning. Just two years ago, the group was churning out mediocre, cookie-cutter pop punk. But the outfit’s musicianship has taken a quantum leap since then, and its latest effort, a self-titled, seven-song affair, is killer from start to finish. The prog-inflected,…

Keepin’ It Wheel

It was just after 10 p.m. when I arrived at Gold Coast Roller Rink (2604 S. Federal Hwy., Fort Lauderdale) for its Tuesday-night “Rollout at Rainbow Skate” party. I’d seen fliers for it in the previous weeks but hadn’t seen any advertising for this particular night. So I took my…

Get in the Van

Action Action doesn’t have a huge tour bus. Hell, the band doesn’t even have a small tour bus, just a van — a ’98 Dodge Ram that serves as sleeping quarters half the time. Though, if you ask bassist Clarke Foley, it works just as fine as any four-star hotel…

Teen Idol?

Dave Melillo is the kind of heartthrob tween girls swoon over and young guys either envy or admire. Melillo’s handsome, young, bright, and articulate. But he knows that adolescent-themed music is like adolescence itself — just a phase. And at 17, Melillo’s at the age where youthful passions intersect with…

Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys

Once upon a time, America had more to worry about than whether Elvis’ shaking hips would lead to premarital sex. There was a war, a very Cold War. Children would bury time capsules so that future generations could retrieve from the Earth just a little slice of American life. Future…

Nelly Furtado

These days, few performers are capable of crafting long-lasting careers — but producers like Tim “Timbaland” Mosley are another story. More than a decade after emerging from the wilds of Virginia, Timbaland is as in demand as ever, and his work on the unexpectedly pleasurable Loose ensures that his cell…

Richard Thompson

There’s always been an innate English eccentricity in the music of singer/guitarist Richard Thompson. But his latest opus is perhaps his most oddly ambitious. A live DVD/double-CD set detailing a millennium’s worth of popular song, it paints the survey in broad strokes, melding old folk melodies, carols, and madrigals with…

Ska Cubano

In the early 20th Century, a bridge was formed between Cuba and Jamaica. It’s a bridge made not of concrete and asphalt but of rhythm and melody. And now the audio architects in Ska Cubano are giving it a 21st-century renovation. The swingin’, high-styled outfit is fronted by British ska…

Black Cobra

Time and space are inconsequential, and the proof is in the cobra — Black Cobra. Despite living on opposite ends of the country, South Florida expatriates Jason Landrian (guitars/vocals, now a New Yorker) and Rafael Martinez (drums, now a Californian) are as tight as they ever were. Since first joining…

Up a Hill

So the space shuttle Discovery finally launched three days after its original lift-off date of July 1. NASA blamed bad weather for the three-day delay. Fair enough. But what was the reason for the other delay on July 1 — you know, Ms. Lauryn Hill’s big holdup at West Palm…

Weapons of Mass Construction

In the five years since the release of the last Coup album, Party Music, there have been enough high-octane political scandals to power the space shuttle. The poorly reasoned Iraq War, illegal spying tactics, Plamegate, the torture photos of Abu Ghraib, Tom DeLay’s indictment, the botching of Hurricane Katrina —…

Engaging Music

It used to be that dating someone in your band could only lead to headaches, the type no amount of Vicodin could silence. Forming a band with a sibling was almost as volatile a combination too — just ask Oasis. These days, though, sharing a bed or DNA with your…