The rockabilly revival has always had a cartoonish element that, despite the quality of the players, creates a sort of costume show, making the music that much easier to dismiss. So when a no-frills group like the Legendary Shack Shakers arrives, the established rockabilly and juke-joint bands get a deserved…
No doubt the novelty of being a hip-hop group from Bowling Green, Kentucky, played a large part in the success of Nappy Roots. Now that Goodie Mob is no more, the seven-member Nappy Roots has taken the role of Southern-victual champion. Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz, the band’s 2002 debut, represents…
The Rapture arrive like a prince at the dance-punk potluck with Echoes, a casserole of crispy electroclash-ic percussion, gooey blues guitar, and bubbling vocals. Think the Faint meets White Stripes and you’ll come close. Containing the much and justly hyped “House of Jealous Lovers,” Echoes is a bit cleaner than…
Montreal-based Kid Koala (born Eric San) is not only a world-class DJ on eclectic British electronica label Ninja Tune and a member of jazz-jam-fusion band Bullfrog. He’s also the author of a darkly cryptic graphic novel. Published earlier this year, Nufonia Must Fall is the story of the illicit love…
Details magazine proclaimed I’ll Take It “the best album by a New York band since Remain in Light” — such gushing has been common for Brooklyn’s Mink Lungs. Unlikely candidates for antiscenester royalty — Talking Heads be hanged — the band is infinitely more adventurous than the one-note gutter rawkers…
In these days of crushing uncertainty and desperate misery, the Handsome Family gives dread a decidedly cheerful twist. A married couple who sing about death and loneliness with faux-brimstone severity, this duo lends a little grandeur to what is often a very funny one-joke approach. Singing Bones is a fine…
If you ask the average, aging, leather-clad punk rocker to explain the difference between “old school” and “new school,” he or she will bitterly complain about the last decade of pseudo-punk pop poofery started by Green Day and currently championed by Good Charlotte. Then he or she will mutter a…
If you had black skin during the mid-1960s in South Africa, the white government kept you penned in by apartheid. Social fence posts were connected by nothing: no schooling, no money, and no representation in government. Captives in their own country, black South Africans made do on nothing, scraping together…
Shortly after releasing a critically acclaimed debut album — 1998’s 2000 Fold — a couple of left-coast emcees, Ryu and Tak, and their turntablist/producer, DJ Cheapshot, single-handedly created a deafening buzz in the underground only to quietly disband early last year. After a brief sabbatical, the resurgent, L.A.-based hip-hop combo…
It’s just another weekend in Margate, when the malls and Playstation-filled living rooms of this lowly suburb belch forth hordes of disaffected youth eager for cheap beer and loud music. Lucky for them, good old nappy-ass Mother’s Pub is in full compliance with the newly ratified Dive Bar Act. Every…
With a master’s of fine arts in poetry, Brooklyn-based Joe Pernice writes lyrics with his education pinned on his sweatered sleeve. The excellent “Baby in Two” is a direct reference to Solomon — the king who settled a dispute over an infant by suggesting two contending women cut it in…
The fact that I own this album is a testament to the mega-media marketing machine: I saw California’s Ima Robot perform on Letterman a few weeks ago, and that three-minute taste drove me to the record store to pick up their debut album. The high-energy performance of “Dynomite” on the…
Distortion and attitude. Attitude and distortion. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club don’t know much beyond these two rock ‘n’ roll tenants. And, frankly, they’re not very interested in broadening their horizons anytime soon. On their first album, the trio got slagged for being too Jesus and Mary Chain with their overamped…
A late-’80s landscape littered with crotch-stuffing, meatheaded, misogynistic hair farmers was ripe for change. And Perry Farrell — looking like some primal, pre-op, transsexual pygmy — was just the creature for the job. Donning a corset, dreadlocks, and goth whiteface and using his unique banshee wail, the singer/shaman armed himself…
When David Lee Parsons died of cancer in a Swiss hospital on September 23, he was only 58 years old. But in his relatively short life, Parsons had ventured across three continents, switched his gender, helped popularize the electric ukulele, worked with the Charlie Chaplin Estate in Switzerland as a…
In September, NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy emits B-flat sound waves. That was almost a year after Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo — a.k.a. Denmark’s the Raveonettes — released their first album, Whip It On, composed entirely in the key…
For a brief moment in the mid- to late 1990s, it looked as if the hippies were taking over. Phish had picked up where the Grateful Dead left off. Widespread Panic slipped into household-name status for a millisecond. And Blues Traveler had a little multiplatinum album called Four. So it’s…
Andrew Bird has written one of the best-crafted songs of the year for his fourth album, Weather Systems. As “Lull” begins, the pep of brushes on a snare and the simple picking of guitar and violin strings set an ironic stage for the underwhelmed singer, who’s too socked into what…
Elefant must have stolen a bottle of essence du T. Rex and stashed it somewhere. The band’s debut album, Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid, features some of the catchiest and cheekiest rock to be heard since the late great Marc Bolan haunted the early ’70s glitter rock scene. “Fuck yeah, that’s…
A lot has changed in Sam Fogarino’s world over the past 14 months. Last August, the former Victoria Park resident turned Brooklynite was embarking on his first U.S. tour as the drummer of Interpol, a NYC-based quartet of sharply dressed, moody post-punks riding a gigantic wave of overseas hype. For…
Finally putting the high back in Hialeah, Humbert goes against the pop-rock grain on its new CD, Plant the Trees Closer Together. Not that Humbert has gone hard on us, but this five-piece adds the unexpected to its usual power-chord fare. Gloriously goofy, Plant the Trees¹ 11 songs approach modern…
The Detroit-based, four-piece, female band Slumber Party lays down a hypnotic groove based on several layers of lulling dream-like vocals and mildly distorted keyboards and guitars. The whole formula harks back to the Velvet Underground, with whom they share a staccato pulse and flirtation with transcendent beauty. Other comparisons could…
