On its seventh record, Portland trio Sleater-Kinney finds itself in the same predicament as its heroes Sonic Youth and tour mates Pearl Jam: It’s honed its sound so precisely that it has to decide where to go next. With The Woods, the answers are jumping to indie-label heavyweight Sub Pop,…
While artists these days are obsessed with sex of the romantic, psychological, and gynecological kind, few are as playfully raunchy as Blowfly. The funk musician who’s also called Clarence Reid charmingly reduces the act of making love to its nasty, all-too-human essence: pussies and dicks, cunts and cocks (or, in…
When the Black Crowes and Velvet Revolver play back-to-back South Florida shows, it’s not tough to spot the trend: Tomorrow’s bleeding-edge anachronism is surely surly ’90s alt-rock. Goodbye, jittery and angular. Hello, brash and swaggering. Every tie-dyed longhair and half-drunk frat boy who flocked to downtown Fort Lauderdale hours before…
It’s a warm Wednesday night in Delray Beach, and David K walks into Dada bearing a gift. Paleface’s Multibean bootleg is nothing to look at — just an 80-minute disc in a square white envelope with a circular window. But to adherents of a loosely defined genre called antifolk, the…
For such a convoluted, self-referential art form, hip-hop constantly — and unfairly — measures itself in rigid, linear terms. Your school is either old or new, your ethos either stratospheric pop or subterranean underground, your bank account padded by zeroes or nothing but zero. Only an elite few hip-hop artists…
Smart-asses in more ways than one, Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian may not be the first to have read media critic Danny Schechter while playing Slayer and actually absorbed both. But on Mezmerize, System of a Down’s third and most consistent album, the front men, now equally billed, revive a…
If you were to hear one of Celso Fonseca’s mesmerizing bossa novas perambulating from the radio, you might think it was Joao Gilberto making a comeback. There are the same tricky, stop-start rhythms Gilberto (now in his 70s) used to employ, the same softly percussive guitar playing. Maybe Fonseca’s singing…
Thanks to Weezer’s synthesis of naked self-pity and grungy power chords, many credit the group’s 1990s output for today’s Dashboard Confessionals. In reality, the quartet gave suburban kids sanitized versions of Pavement and Sebadoh, along with a narcissism on par with that of the hair-metal icons that vocalist Rivers Cuomo…
Composed of members of Palm Beach County’s most stonerriffic bands, the Gruntled lays a playful pop-rock structure la Mr. Entertainment over Baby Robotsesque shoe-gazer meanderings. The residual lysergic hangover aligns the 12 songs on the band’s self-titled debut in the catch-all descriptor known as quirky and keeps it from finding…
Lock up your daughters, Pompano: The Deadheads are coming. The Deadheads have, in fact, been making inroads in this beachside community for ten long years. It was in May 1995 that Crazy Fingers first unraveled their noodly grooves at Fisherman’s Wharf, the well-worn restaurant and tiki bar that’s the gateway…
The Raveonettes may hail from Denmark, but the duo’s all-American muse is unmistakable. Hatched out of love for an era when cars were long, women were glam, and rock ‘n’ roll was unadulterated, the Raveonettes are a foreign-born mirror of the American pop radio ideal of the ’50s and ’60s…
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 might be the Optimus Prime of genre-crushing hybrid bands…
After several EP releases, The Secret Migration collates a series of crystalline, gossamer work by Johnathan Donahue and his confreres and illustrates the repeated lyric “Life is but a dream. ” Providing escapist hymns with merit, the disc proffers pastoral lullabies for the end of Gen X that’s now on…
Luaka Bop’s third volume in this series — following discs devoted to Brazil’s Os Mutantes and California’s Shuggie Otis — is subtitled The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa. That’s a far better descriptor than world psychedelia, because, while fans of the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service may…
Most metal-electronica or electronica-jazz fusion experiments are born to fail, but one of the luckier scientists is DJ Spooky, a hip New Yorker with more contacts than God. Spooky has a new book and art movie out this year, in addition to this latest musical experiment, a collaboration with Slayer…
Being a knockoff band isn’t such a bad thing if you meet two requirements: (1) You can play your instruments, and (2) you’re imitating good stuff. The boys of Jupiter’s Boxelder measure up on both counts, which makes their Deep Water Influence EP a fun if unoriginal ride. Fortunately, their…
It’s not every day you get to talk with one of the architects of modern rock. When Beatcomber was offered the opportunity to rap with Michael Andrew McKagan, better-known to any head-banging child of the ’80s as Duff, he wrapped his bandanna around his leg, fluffed out his bleached locks,…
Good punk is all about vintage. Squeeze the grape before it’s ripe and the result is tart and shallow; let it stay on the vine too long and the fruit loses its freshness and vitality. The juice coming from the Wellington four-piece Odd Man Out is at its prime –…
“Frankie was definitely one of the best. He had his very own style, his very own momentum with the crowd. I don’t think that anyone else did it his way.” — DJ Paul Van Dyk Orgasmic, climactic, and maddeningly frantic, Frankie Wilde’s megahouse and two-step booty-trance might be some of…
It’s Saturday night, and Jimmy Cavallo is doing what he’s done nearly every weekend for the past decade. The 78-year-old singer and sax man is playing to a full house at Doogie’s, a jazz supper club in Deerfield Beach. Between Sinatra standards, Louis Prima hits, and big-band-era favorites, the Pompano…
“The whole message of our music is ‘be a better person,'” Ronan Harris says. “Do good things and make the world a better place, without necessarily associating with that cheesy, granola, Birkenstock-wearing shit.” It’s a surprising slice of optimism from a man who’s aligned with the cold pulse of industrial…
With a soaring choral intro that erupted abruptly into erratic sprays of knuckle-blistering guitar, British Sea Power’s debut, The Decline of British Sea Power, was anything but predictable. But Open Season, the English group’s anticipated follow-up, is exactly what you’d expect from a sophomore effort: a tamer, meeker, more manicured…
