After listening to Taking Back Sunday’s third album, it’s quite clear why the band’s fan base consists mainly of adolescents. Like its prone-to-conformity teenaged admirers, the Long Island quintet prefers to let outsiders dictate what it sounds like — and hasn’t yet cultivated a unique identity. Whereas producer Lou Giordano…
Orthodox Funkateers worship the Four Forefathers of Funk: James Brown, P-Funk, Sly Stone, and the Meters. From these sacred outfits, born in the heyday of the late-’60s, every strand of funk-inflected music can be derived, from acid jazz to gangsta rap to Lenny Kravitz. Lefties Soul Connection, then, can be…
It was recently brought to my attention that there’s a strong element of ambivalence in the stuff I write. Not of the apathetic variety but the kind that’s anxious with powerful, contradictory feelings pulling in opposite directions. Right on. It’s been my goal to use this space to genuinely validate…
She’s been branded everything from tortured and bruised to moody and difficult, but right now, Fiona Apple just has a case of the sniffles. Talking on the phone from her Venice, California, home, the much-praised, much-embattled singer/songwriter/pianist is lying low, preparing to embark on the biggest concert tour of her…
The career of Frederick “Toots” Hibbert predates reggae — in fact, he’s the guy most often credited with naming the genre. But the music’s reigning patriarch isn’t a museum piece just yet. Last year’s True Love — an album that found the 60-year-old Hibbert and an all-star cast of supporters…
A few nights ago, Jamie Cullum was set to celebrate the birthday of his older brother, Ben. The younger Cullum was even going to cook, but according to the breakout Brit pianist/singer/songwriter, both siblings “managed to come down with something.” The situation was so grim that Cullum tried to cancel…
In a past life, the arena-striding Goo Goo Dolls were thought quaint by their critics and artsier alt peers: too in love with their punk heroes, too working-class sentimental, too straight rock. Well, they got the last laugh when the money rolled in. But while re-creating the success of the…
Some things don’t lend themselves to snap judgments. From the start, it’s obvious that Mobile’s main focus isn’t easy accessibility. Expect to be challenged whether you know Kotche as the drummer from Wilco, Loose Fur, or Fred-Lonberg Holm. Thanks to the album’s meandering ambiguity, it’s virtually impossible to form a…
While the current British Invasion is wearing a bit thin — particularly when the bands are seemingly interchangeable and all apparently worship at the altar of Ian Curtis — the very British foursome the Rakes aren’t so tiresome. The London band’s ADD-influenced, punk-tinged tracks on their debut contain a raw…
Some listeners will interpret the Girls’ third disc as the sort of mainstream move currently being attempted by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — but the alterations in their sound seem inspired more by creative concerns than by commercial calculation. Instead of replacing former guitarist Nathan Thalen with another ax-wielder, the…
It’s an amazing feat when a mere four songs contain as many ideas and as much fun as the JeanMarie’s debut EP. The title alone — What’s a Revolution Without Backup Dancers? — hints at the highbrow pop playfulness of this Miami quintet. And right from the kickstart opening of…
“Being a black kid that skateboarded, I was breaking serious ground in a lot of people’s family traditions,” says Paul “Gnu” Jennings. “I’d show up at my friend’s house, and there’s never been black people in that house. The whole family is like, ‘Holy shit, there’s a fuckin’ nigger here,’…
Last we heard from Urban Mystic, the rising R&B star was pulling away from Cooper City’s 2005 MLK Day celebration in a white stretch limo. A year, a new album, and countless performances later and some things have changed. Some things have not. “We still traveling in the white stretch,”…
It’s not that he’s a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but Charlie Solana isn’t afraid to admit that South Florida’s dance scene is hurting. “It is dying,” the 39-year-old DJ/producer says with a slight, knowing chuckle. “You can tell just by the clubs. Crobar went from 100 percent dance to open…
Nominated for Best Riff of ’06 (So Far): “Conventional Wisdom” by Built to Spill. Oh, it’s so, so good. Air-guitar-in-your-underwear good. In that one giddy, irresistible guitar figure, Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch both refutes and affirms everything his outsider Idaho project has ever been. A quintessential pop-rock hook,…
Drive-by Truckers’ songwriting trio — Mike Cooley, Jason Isbell, and Patterson Hood — have already established themselves as one of the best rock acts of the past half decade. Picking a favorite from their last three albums — 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, 2003’s Decoration Day, and 2004’s Dirty South —…
Here’s an MC boast so frank, it’s hilarious: “In this corner, the undisputed champs of hip-hop — RJD2 on the beats, Blueprint on the rhymes—versus everything that sucks about music in the opposite corner.” But it’s no joke: Soul Position’s second LP is a stone classic. It’s not just that…
It would be too easy to call out Nothing Rhymes With Orange for its lack of originality, for its lowest-common-denominator amalgam of a decade’s worth of Brit-pop — from Blur to James to U2 to Coldplay — for its self-seriousness that borders on self-parody. So let’s not go there. Instead,…
Zeitgeist: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit): the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. Yeah, it’s a loaded word, one that knots sober Teutonic gravity around dramatic academic loft. But Merriam-Webster’s definition couldn’t be more on-point in describing the music of U.K. quartet Bloc Party. When…
Trained in jazz trumpet since he was 14, Hugh Masekela was one of the first African musicians to make an impression on American ears. Masekela was born in South Africa in 1939 and came to the States in 1961 to escape apartheid, landing in New York and absorbing as much…
Listening to Band of Horses’ stunning debut, Everything All the Time, it’s almost impossible not to hear echoes of the Shins and My Morning Jacket. They’re no mere copycats; it’s just that they forge their sound from the same familiar elements — the pitch-perfect pop songcraft of their Sub Pop…
“It’s goin’ down, y’all, like the wall of Berlin,” Prince says during 3121’s opening title track, a slice of funk more wobbly and bizarre than anything he has released this side of that wall tumbling. It’s comforting to know that, like Kate Bush, he still lets the weirdness in. And…
