U.K. music scribes have always been addicted to hype — but their ballyhooing of Arctic Monkeys is over-the-top even by their standards. The group couldn’t live up to their praise if it featured Jesus on vocals and Mohammed on guitar. (We’d illustrate that, but we’re fond of the building.) So…
Back in the early days of Mogwai’s career, an album titled Mr. Beast would have matched the band’s Category 5 noise hurricanes perfectly. But as the Scotsmen refined their sound over the next decade, moments of levity and clarity — airy synths, strings, eerie silences — made the band’s emotional…
One more reason to hate/boycott/firebomb Starbucks: Without some serious redirection of popular perception, Shawn Snyder’s kind of intimate, cozy folk music will forever be associated with currant scones and half-decaf triple venti lattes. Maybe, though, that’s not such a bad thing — if the World Caffeine Syndicate chose to carry…
If necessity is the mother of invention, then South Florida’s lack of concert venues has given birth to some truly bizarre music-scene mashups. Local promoters have always had to improvise to make shows happen, which is why we’re now used to folk strummers at sports bars, hip-hop at Irish pubs,…
Justin Warfield is a sonic chameleon, shifting and evolving with the times since the age of 14. He was a teenaged lothario rapper who recorded the cult gem My Field Trip to Planet 9 in 1993; a frontman for various short-lived projects, from the trip-hop group One Inch Punch to…
A monument stands at the center of What the Toll Tells, Two Gallants’ sophomore album, and like any dramatic reminder of a dark era passed, it inspires some serious introspection. At almost ten minutes in length, “Threnody” is exactly what its title suggests, a poetic song of lament — specifically,…
Lately, labels not known for heavy music (Drag City, Matador, and now Kemado) have been releasing albums by long-haired knuckle-draggers: Pearls and Brass, Early Man, and the Sword, respectively. And Age of Winters is a capable attempt to seize the throne of heaviosity from High on Fire and/or Mastodon. It’s…
Although he crafted beats for hip-hop’s finest (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, Common), the name J Dilla, a.k.a. Jay Dee, is still largely unknown outside of hip-hop’s cognoscenti. All that will change in ’06 — if for no other reason than Donuts was released the…
Aceyalone’s 2003 album, Love and Hate, inspired a lot of hand-wringing, as critics bemoaned the glaringly obvious gap between the MC’s slick, flowery raps and his bullshit-ass beats. It looked like he’d hit a career zenith with 1995’s All Balls Don’t Bounce (reissued in 2004) and wasn’t destined to produce…
Walking into the Fort Lauderdale offices of Eulogy Recordings is more like reaching an intersection than a destination. One route — past the standard plastic furniture, fax machine, and copier — leads through the typical, successful American business manned by a small, efficient staff. The other winds into the isolated…
Singer Billy Corgan is alt-rock’s Barry Bonds, a star whose outspoken awareness of his own singular gifts make him unpopular and somewhat undervalued. Last year, with Bonds nursing injuries, the San Francisco Giants trotted out younger replacements who couldn’t come close to matching his performance. Similarly, with the Smashing Pumpkins…
Orlando, March 1993, some forgotten dive bar. Standing beside a small, sticker-laden Toyota are four fanzine-peddling teenagers from Palm Beach County. The reason for their three-hour sojourn: to get an interview with the evening’s headliner, NOFX, the clown princes of punk rock. At the time, Orlando was as far south…
“Oh my goodness. Oh my God.” Langhorne Slim is on his cell phone, ambling through Manhattan’s Chinatown toward Little Italy. Some noisy commotion has stopped him in his tracks. “My friend, if only you were with me right now. You would see — there’s all these Hassidic Jews, and there’s…
With delicate tunes and referential album titles like The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian main man Stuart Murdoch is a cult artist who has more or less birthed a scene of pop miniaturists known as twee. But Murdoch is moving ever closer to potential fans who are…
Even as it ages, Generation Hip-hop will never appreciate classical music to the same degree previous generations have. We’re myopically fixated on rhythm, so despite the bombastic, dramatic heights a 60-piece orchestra can achieve, unless there’s a bangin’ kettle drum break, we’ll probably shrug it away as lame. Fortunately, there’s…
The smoggy synths and heavy beats that permeate the music of Anticon acts Subtle and Themselves can be traced to Jel, the DJ and sampler artist who has just released his second long-player. Soft Money boasts contributions from labelmates as well as a couple of guest raps — including Poor…
Listen, kids: There was a time when the splinter cells of punk, hardcore, and metal distinguished themselves with divergent doses of brutality and technical prowess. But in the late ’80s came a wave of bands pulling those forms together into the same fold, and crossover acts like Nausea, Destroy, Hirax,…
Something cherished goes away, and something new takes its place. Last Sunday night, a rabid crowd bid a cathartic farewell to Awesome New Republic at Churchill’s Pub, South Florida’s oldest, most venerable rock ‘n’ roll mecca. Here’s the only band that can sound sexy singing “Poody poo poo poo, I…
Unlike bands who spend entire careers composing songs, desperately hoping to stumble upon the secret formula for pop-hit status, the Detroit Cobras skip the hubbub and go straight to the source. For more than ten years, the Cobras have un/covered obscure, übercool soul tunes from decades past and updated them…
Hot Chip is the precocious U.K. outfit that’s gonna split listeners down the middle like a sharp ax through cordwood. The slow-bumping, lo-fi reverie of Coming on Strong is so calculatedly fuzzy and detached that it begs the same questions of hip-hop authenticity that LCD Soundsystem did to dance: Are…
Cat Power is the greatest femme misérable in hipster rock. While other sad-slacker singers have waxed and waned — changing course, as Beth Orton did, or dropping from sight like Shannon Wright — she-cat Chan Marshall’s moon has risen with each new release. Yet despite the blunt boast of its…
When Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key was writing the follow-up to 2003’s platinum-selling major-label debut, Ocean Avenue, the Florida-born former punk rocker was struggling for inspiration. Although surrounded by a bevy of beautiful ladies in Los Angeles, Key found himself without a female muse. And so, refusing to let his single…
