BY AUDRA SCHROEDER Helen Horal’s voice is familiar. Familiar like a face you see at a party, make eye contact with, and smile at briefly before looking away, even though you and that person are total strangers. It’s a voice that garners many comparisons, but there’s something more tangible than…
Our biggest dream is to make it in this country,” says Toto González, drummer for the Miami Latin quartet Sóniko. He’s giving an honest response to a question loaded with pure nostalgia: As emigrated South Americans, do they want to go back there to play in front of their old…
Every band has a story — drugs, deception, debauchery. The Electras are no different. Formed in 1961 by prep school students Andy Gagarin, Jack Radcliffe, Peter Lang, Jon Prouty, Larry Rand, and current presidential hope-hope-hopeful John Kerry, the Electras enjoyed a two-year life span, playing their versions of classic garage…
Once merely wee sensitive emo rockers, the Faint has gone through almost as many metamorphoses in ten years together as Prince has costume changes. This time around, they’ve beefed up the darkness factor and added strings for a heightened sense of drama. But the effect is so histrionic, it borders…
The British duo Swayzak is a dance Darwinist. Last time, on 2002’s Dirty Dancing, the onetime tech-house act’s evolution lapsed into fashion and electroclashed with its previous emphasis on beauty. Loops from the Bergerie, Swayzak’s fourth studio album, houses all that was good about Dancing (specifically, rampant pop tendencies) while…
For the third straight album, Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers write what they know with a zeal unsurpassed in American rock groups. Suicide, drugs, corruption, tornadoes, family — these complex topics populate The Dirty South, a bracing reconsideration of life below the Mason-Dixon Line. What had become an easy cultural stereotype –…
2003 Grammy winner Lady Saw catapulted to fame in 1993 with raunchy hits such as “If Him Lef (A No mi Pussy Fault)” and ribald live performances featuring several simulated sex acts. On Strip Tease, her most consistent album to date, she bumps and grinds her way through raw tracks…
It’s amusing that a band that sets its sights so high with its name (Palomar is an observatory that houses one of the world’s biggest telescopes) ends up writing songs concerning earthly matters. But throughout the 14 tracks on Palomar III, the coed Brooklyn quartet contemplates everything from the Old…
When legendary Brazilian rocker Rita Lee was admitted to a São Paulo hospital for exhaustion last July, her fans feared the worst. But, according to Lee, the event was foreshadowed long ago. “During the ’70s, I wrote a song with [The Alchemist author] Paulo Coelho called ‘Superestafa’ (Superstress), so feeling…
Ben Kweller doesn’t resort to irony the way that Steven Malkmus and Rivers Cuomo — both of whom Kweller is compared to — do in their respective bands. Kweller’s photographs in music magazines, and his somewhat tongue-in-cheek album cover imagery (which he oversees himself) may suggest self-conscious geek chic, but…
If Jean Grae’s last album, The Bootleg of the Bootleg EP, was a stiff middle finger to the male-dominated rap game (the chorus to the song “Hater’s Anthem” was just the phrase “fuck you” repeated over and over), the New York MC is a little more reflective with This Week…
With Euro-heavyweights Múm and B. Fleischmann on its roster, Berlin-based Morr Music has been a consistent crucible for upbeat glitch since 1999. Its latest offering, the Go Find’s Miami, is no exception. More accessible than its other esoteric labelmates, the Go Find is committed to bridging the gap between indie…
This album is essentially a cool experiment that actually works. London DJ Sam Zaman, a.k.a. State of Bengal, went to Paris and tapped Paban Das Baul, an Indian street singer who belongs to a group of gypsy-like mystics, to sing over his beats. Together, they fashion a record that isn’t…
From Pussy to penises, Sally Timms really covers all her bases. The English-born, Chicago-based performer has played the roles of musician, author, actor, and activist since joining the legendary Mekons in 1986. Pussy, the King of the Pirates was the Kathy Acker-inked lesbian opera that Timms starred in nine years…
After more than a decade of delays and a few million blunts, Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, and Warren G have re-formed what was — before the three MCs found individual fame in the early ’90s — their original, Long Beach-based trio, 213. Nate Dogg and Warren G haven’t been relevant…
eL (Revolution by Popular Demand) Once upon a time there was a band called Vinyl. Unbeknownst to it, another band had already called dibs on that name. So they changed the name to Sevens. Oops, that was taken too, and they had to change it again. After a few months…
Go ahead and say heavy metal musicians are arrogant assholes, dirty longhairs, and social outcasts who live with their parents and worship Satan, sniff glue, and set fires. It may even be true. But according to Alex Suarez, guitarist for the instrumental metal quartet Centipede, they’re “just normal-looking dudes playing…
Gospel Gangstaz? That’s the oxymoronic name of a hip-hop group — a Christian hip-hop group. If it seems strange to reconcile gangstas and Jesus, travel to the low end of the radio dial some Friday night for the Jam Session on Palm Beach’s WAY-FM (88.1). The jams in this session,…
When Josh Gabriel first met Dave Dresden, Gabriel thought Dresden was full of shit. It was March of 2001, and the Winter Music Conference was in full glittering swing. Gabriel was staying at the Royal Hotel in South Beach, where Leon Alexander of Hope Recordings was spinning records at a…
Let me know if you’ve heard this one before: Three hipsters walk into a bar in Williamsburg, bond over a fondness for post-punk and Prince (the obligatory post-punk deviation from post punk), form a loft party-ready band, throw in a touch of safe politics from time to time, open for…
Whether you consider her a peddler of precious, pretentious twaddle or an endless font of pure Icelandic genius, you have to give Björk credit for eschewing the safe option. No other platinum-selling diva has had the guts to forge such idiosyncratic paths as this charismatic singer has done over the…
Fuck the Strokes, fuck the Hives, and fuck every other slicked-out, overhyped rock band on the planet. If you want real rock ‘n’ roll, the kind that makes you wanna get all hopped up on booze and dangerous amounts of adrenaline and run around like a maniac bringing glorious chaos…
