Picture the following gang of hip-hop misfits: two Harlemites — one an imposing 300 pounds with a Zeus-like voice, the other cherub-faced and sporting an incongruous nasal twang — who interweave sci-fi imagery into their hyperrealist ghetto tales; a dreadlocked freestyle champ with a socialist agenda and a knack for…
A number of long-in-the-tooth retro rockers are releasing Christmas CDs this season (Brian Setzer, the Rev. Horton Heat). And this wacky band of surf rockers sporting Mexican wrestling masks wasn’t going to sit there and watch the others sled by. Like Setzer and the Rev., Los Straitjackets’ shtick is pretty…
I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank the Sony Music Group for its short-lived, ill-fated foray into digital copy protection. For yea, though public outcry and class-action lawsuits have forced the Nipponese entertainment behemoth to discontinue discs preinfected with its heinous spyware, my review copy of Santana’s…
Jazzanova has made its mark on long remixes — at times, exceedingly long — for nearly a decade. The six-member German-based collective (or, as the group’s label name suggests, Kollektiv) is more geared toward interpretation than creation, and this compilation gathers four years of its favorite works, each one an…
Blessed with exotic good looks and a razor-sharp tongue, former water-polo star Sean Henriques reinvented himself as Sean Paul and became dancehall’s urban-crossover poster child — his second album, 2003’s Dutty Rock, knocked 50 Cent from the number-one slot in Billboard. Such success may have gone to his head. The…
That opening count-off on the high hat, followed by that vicious ripping-into by the rest of the band, makes Miami’s Hellhounds reminiscent of second-wave hardcore British punk acts like the Varukers and Disorder, but the comparison ends there. This well-executed version of American hardcore keeps the rhythm section on a…
Dear Snowbird/Tourist/Recent Immigrant: Welcome to South Florida! This music column is dedicated to you, the flocks of intrepid travelers who packed up the Lexusi or booked overpriced flights so you might sample our region’s famously sunny disposition. Let’s face it — this is the place everyone wants to be right…
“I do not want to explain, and I’m not going to/I wanna get high on something/Go dancing with someone/Turn our backs to the battle/I didn’t see anything/Nothing worth remembering.” — Castanets, “Dancing with Someone (The Privilege of Everything)” Ray Raposa is not afraid of abstractions. “Those are the terms I…
One of the most original bands to gain a bankable following is beginning to sound a little too comfortable in its own self-invented genre. Not that any other band has duplicated the formula: metalcore mosh with auctioneer-gone-mad vocals, followed by incantational harmonies and exotic-stringed acoustic breaks. And few other bands…
In the early ’90s, the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” took cheeky vocal samples and mushroomed them into something stranger and spacier. While rhythmically rooted in house music, Alex Paterson and crew dosed it with stoned dub and U.K. prog, even goofing on Pink Floyd album covers. This dizzying mixture of…
As the world turns away from melody and harmony to fully embrace post-hip-hop rhythmocentricism, jazz hasn’t kept up, losing relevance like a hemophiliac rolling in broken glass. Drummer Steve Reid has returned to stop the bleeding, and he’s brought producer Kieren Hebden (of bedroom electronica outfit Fourtet) with him. Reid…
Anyone confused by 2003’s worldwide Darkness phenomenon — How does a band this goofy compete with U2 on the charts? — shall remain so. The Darkness has nothing up its spandex sleeve but exuberant hard rock and satire. Still, One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back does differ from the…
There’s generally more than a hint of pretension linked to artists who choose to be known by a single moniker. Madonna, Prince, Nelly, Ludacris — Liberace? Could be there’s more invested in branding than in craft with some folks. So why should we believe that someone who refers to herself…
There were several signs that Q-tipping wasn’t enough: I could no longer hear the difference between Coldplay’s mushy whine and U2’s throaty self-satisfaction. I couldn’t hear the drunken hippie standing mouth-to-ear inside the Poor House yelling last week’s RatDog set list at me. I couldn’t hear Mike Jones bark about…
Somewhere between the char-broiled metal of Ozzfest and the souffléd skate-punk of the Warped Tour lies the Buzz Bake Sale — where a baker’s dozen is 17 and the main food groups are grunge and metal. But while most of its ingredients are derived from those two overdone genres, there…
While the average American’s knowledge of Swedish music starts and ends with ABBA, Stockholm’s Adam Olenius boasts a childhood that — musicwise, at least — could have been plucked from any stateside suburb. As a teenager, the first album he bought was George Michael’s Faith. He grew up listening to…
With Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna makes progress in returning to form after the preachy, pale American Life, but this seamless, beat-filled ode to dance clubs isn’t enough to restore her pop relevance. These are the sounds of 1998, halfway between the Chemical Brothers and Stardust, and on “Sorry,”…
How strange — in a musical climate that gives a new Neil Diamond CD all the promotion in the world, the newly released soul-throwback I Believe to My Soul is already collecting dust. Maybe it’s just that this music doesn’t yell, “Look at me, I’m important!” but these 13 grooveful…
The current round of ’80s dance-punk redux has been going on long enough that it’s only a matter of time before some bandwagon-jumping latecomers become the chart-topping equivalent of Creed for the skinny-tie set. Happily, 24-year-old Brit Tom Vek shows there’s still some life to be breathed into the genre…
First, a couple of basic axioms: Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek is underrated; Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock is overrated. That said, Sun Kil Moon’s Tiny Cities, an album of Modest Mouse covers, just doesn’t add up. While Kozelek has previously paid tribute on disc to AC/DC and John Denver, the…
Samantha Jones ought to be a familiar name if you’ve ever dug the Central Florida music scene. From her stints in punk/indie bands like Crustaceans and Bitchin’ to her most recent bass/vocal work with Hot Water Music’s Chuck Ragan and Chris Wollard’s alt-country-punk side project, Rumbleseat, Jones likes to keep…
And now for something completely different. NASCAR! Yeah, I said it, and you read it. Legions of those left-turn-lovin’ rowdies inundated South Florida last weekend for the final beer bash — I mean competition — of the season, held at the Homestead Speedway. Normally, that fact wouldn’t register a blip…
