Cell phone cameras. MP3-playing sunglasses. Laser-pointing, voice-recording, de-ionizing salad spinners. Thanks a lot, technology — now everything that does anything does something else too. The musical equivalent is, of course, the Benevento-Russo Duo, the Brooklyn-based drums ‘n’ keys outfit that’s the Optimus Prime of genre-crushing hybrid bands. With a well-practiced…
The Numb Ones make music that’s brazenly unnecessary: cornball, big-haired, ’80s-rock retread played by hipster, greasy-haired, ’80s-rock acolytes. But believe it or not, the whole unsubtle, steamroller package is not such a bad thing. See, necessity might be the mother of invention, but it’s no relation to good times. And…
While the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and the Hives have made some damn fine modern “garage rock,” nothing beats the sounds from the genre’s heyday in the mid-’60s. The Nuggets and Pebbles compilations already have mined this mother lode of reckless, wailing vocals, fuzzed-out guitar, and caveman drums, with…
Big Star founder Alex Chilton escaped hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, but apparently the masters for In Space, the band’s first studio album in 30 years, were lost in the flood. What else could explain this limp counterfeit now on the racks? Space unfolds like a song-by-song study of what not to…
Playing the Angel’s first cut is called “A Pain That I’m Used To.” Its second is called “Suffer Well.” And the disc’s back cover bears the epigraph, “Pain and suffering in various tempos.” We get the idea. Yes, pain and suffering are spelled out — if never actually conveyed —…
Rogue Wave’s Out of the Shadows was last year’s great indie-pop debut — a bittersweet album of ’60s-inspired pop, ideal for melodists and English-lit students who had gone too long between Shins albums. It was the work of one man — Oakland, California’s Zach Rogue (born Zach Schwartz), who recorded…
Even in South Florida, signs of autumn abound: The bountiful cocaine harvest is over, kids carve up German tourists for jack-o’-lanterns, and the goofballs at NOAA run out of alphabet. Another of fall’s many rituals that local music lovers have come to expect is Moonfest, the annual costume-studded bacchanal that…
“Repackage sex/Keep your interest,” chanted vocalist Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill on the Gang of Four’s slashing 1979 debut, Entertainment! A quarter-century later, the middle-aged pair chant it again on this set of rerecorded classics, all performed without a hint of irony. In England, where the proletariat is more…
The seventh album by these Welsh baroque-pop mavericks refines their flamboyant songcraft in one grandiose, candy-coated, 54-minute package. Far more adventurous and fun (and less maudlin) than recent efforts by peers like Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips, Love Kraft slyly alludes to several classic-rock touchstones (Beatles; Nilsson; Crosby, Stills, Nash,…
Call a band’s style of music “freak folk” for long enough and eventually they’ll get tired of it. That’s the lesson to take from Animal Collective’s Feels, an album that sees the New York quartet not only excising the acoustic elements that dominated last year’s Sung Tongs but also reaching…
How powerful is the sensitive male stink conveyed by Death Cab for Cutie? I’m on a New York City subway, where no one — no one — talks to strangers, and despite my wedding ring, bad haircut, and general homeliness, a young woman approaches me, drawn to the bleed from…
Coheed & Cambria plays with Mewithoutyou, Dredg, and Blood Brothers at 5 p.m. Saturday, October 29, at Revolution, 200 W. Broward Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $19 in advance, $22 the day of the show. Call 954-727-0950.
Two of the most outstanding — and outstandingly named — punk-rock outfits to emerge from the late-’80s/early-’90s South Florida scene were Chickenhead and the Funyons. Chickenhead released a solid seven-inch on Emil Busse’s Fourandahalf Records and a great song about assassinating Fidel Castro (“Young Fidel”) on the Lookout!/Kill Rock Stars…
“Rap these days is like a pain up in the neck/Cornier and phonier than a play fight.” Seems Danger Doom’s mumble-mouthed MC MF Doom would turn back to some bygone, fantasy hip-hop era, evoking the age when he was in footie pajamas, munching cereal, rotting his brains on Scooby-Doo, G.I…
For the last ten years that the Grateful Dead hauled its gypsy-rock caravan across America — that golden decade of 1985 to 1995 — the band was the highest-grossing touring act in the country, outselling pop superstars like Michael Jackson and Madonna. After head Deadhead Jerry Garcia went the way…
I wonder what Metric (and sometimes Broken Social Scene) frontwoman Emily Haines was like in high school. Like most emerging indie-rock icons, she was probably socially awkward, the only sort of pre-adult state of mind that allows for a future of musical talent (no dates = more time alone with…
Trent Reznor is not unhappy. He’s not tortured, distraught, deluded, strung-out, miserable, or bitter. The Nine Inch Nails auteur is, however, angry. The bile that seethes through With Teeth, his first record in six years, which debuted at number one in May, is the emotional link to his first three,…
Two albums and three EPs into his career, the Miami boy known as Iron and Wine is still plucking songs from his original 2001 home demos, and his latest release is further proof that there’s not a clunker in the bunch. On In the Reins, Sam Beam realizes his dream…
In 2002, Broken Social Scene didn’t have much to prove. Most members of the Toronto collective were already playing in other Canadian indie bands (Stars, Metric, Do Make Say Think), and because they were a ragtag group of relative musical unknowns, their second album was likely to be as forgotten…
With a barrage of lurid lyrics, NYC’s Cage spits the sort of storyboard rhymes on Hell’s Winter that sound as if they’re ripped from an underground graphic novel. The dreary war-zone backdrops come from El-P, RJD2, and Blockhead, and their nimble, diesel-charged compositions help drive Cage’s reckless imagination over the…
On their 2004 debut, Hell Yeah!, the Horrorpops weren’t exactly Fugazi. The album was like No Doubt’s early, embarrassing ska minstrel shows, only the ‘Pops promulgated a schmaltzy shockabilly act — complete with colored mohawks, skull tattoos, and leather pants, a pose that afflicts many Rancidites who still think such…
Of all the big Kahunas at the Hukilau, the third-annual gathering of tiki fanatics that just wrapped up October 9, none stood taller than the diminutive, white-haired Robert Drasnin. Pushing 80, Drasnin is a musician unknown outside the tiki circuit. Within it, though, he’s so revered that during his Friday-night…
