And what a trite saga it is. Following his well-publicized criminal trial and subsequent acquittal, Sean “Puffy” Combs has slithered back into the spotlight boasting a brand-new name. Now answering to P. Diddy — which sounds more like a pesky urinary tract infection than a fearsome hip-hop chieftain — Combs…
Mike Truman, Chris Healings, and Lee Mullins never were typical rave DJs. Even as they paid their dues on the decks, the three Welshmen known as Hybrid were breaking down breakbeat barriers. The three turntablists honed their skills in the clubs of Swansea, a seaport town in southern Wales, where…
The rich, ganja-fied voice of Ky-mani Marley — one of the many singing offspring of Bob Marley — fills the void left by the death of his iconic father. (The watered-down pop stylings of his half brother Ziggy, favored by undiscriminating members of the Abercrombie & Fitch frat-boy set, only…
Some people hear voices. Moke’s John Hogg hears entire songs. Often these cerebral symphonies surge forward and come alive; other times they lie dormant. “Sometimes you feel a bit lost. I’ve got all these songs in my head. I can hear them, but I don’t know what they mean,” says…
Friday, October 12, is going to be a weird night at Boynton Beach’s megavenue, Orbit. Of course any time you’re watching a band from a spot where, only a year before, a Winn-Dixie butcher sliced bloody T-bones, it’s gonna feel odd. But the “Morpheus” party the club has planned for…
All Jeff Snow, drummer for West Palm Beach’s Legends of Rodeo, will say is, “We’d rather not say.” “We don’t want to make a wrong move,” cautions singer-guitarist John Ralston. “We’re keeping our cards close to our chests right now,” adds Snow, his voice indicating the discussion is over. A…
I was hoping to use the upcoming Tangerine Dream show to draw parallels between the “space rock” music of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the first haul of electronic music made when synthesizers were invented — and Orbital, perhaps one of the best techno bands operating today. Tangerine…
Writing reviews of recordings by freshly dead artists is a tricky business that frequently results in overrating, a critical embarrassment that keeps on giving. Think about all those poor schmoes who, rightly thunderstruck by John Lennon’s murder, found themselves raving about Double Fantasy, a modest album that’s not even within…
As if South Florida didn’t have enough trouble luring cool musical acts to its sandy shores, the September 11 terrorist attacks have brought a wave of cancellations and/or postponements. Steel Pulse, Youssou N’Dour, Tangerine Dream, Living Colour, Marky Ramone, Suzanne Vega, and Eric Burdon are only some of the topnotch…
Edith Frost is among the cadre of amazingly rare artists for whom genre-pigeonholing is thankfully impossible. While Frost occupies a sonic territory that might be most comfortably described as altcountry, her use of violin and pedal steel is a hallmark of the baroque pop of Velvet Underground and John Cale…
As spinoffs go, Tom Tom Club came with a remarkable schematic for success. Jettisoning the intellectual elitism that had a grip on their full-time group, Talking Heads, drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, founded their side project on the premise of funky, beachcombing fun. It worked, too:…
By all accounts Björk’s albums should be commercial disasters. Her lyrics make little sense to the outside world, and she’s known to invite listeners into the depths of her mind. (She also doesn’t care one bit about the repercussions of dressing like a swan, but that’s beside the point.) On…
“I took a bus to Baton Rouge,” Lucinda Williams croons lazily near the end of her new album, inadvertently putting her finger on the problem: Essence drifts by like lonesome miles spent staring out a bus window, a journey perhaps pleasant and comforting at the outset but boring and monotonous…
Most of the time South Florida seems even farther than a whole peninsula away from the rest of the United States. The wave of benefit concerts in our area, with proceeds to be funneled to victims of the September 11 terrorist disaster, proves that this is far from an un-American…
The members of The Faint are in limbo, between two stops on their five-week tour in support of their newly released album, Danse Macabre. The industrial-strength, new-wave quintet is on its way from Urbana, Illinois, to Bloomington, Indiana, as one of the headliners at Bloomingtonfest, a three-day weekend festival of…
The Donnas offer good, clean fun. Well, not exactly good or particularly clean. But it should be fun when Donna R., Donna A., Donna C., and Donna F. perform the gutter-slut punk they made infamous on their most recent outing, Turn 21 — an age at which the four have…
At the height of MTV’s cultural influence, musicians still kidded one another into believing videos were propagandistic statements, short-format art films, while hiding from the reality of what they were really creating: television commercials. And it is harder to find a more revelatory clip than Living Colour’s strafing “Cult of…
Perry Farrell has found God. That fact would usually send most music scribes hurriedly scurrying to write an artist’s epitaph — and rightfully so. Rock ‘n’ roll legend has it that musicians hoping to tap into their creative muses have successfully done so only by choosing to sell their souls…
New Orleans-based duo Telefon Tel Aviv trades in “experimental” dance music: in other words the kind you can’t really dance to. The band’s lovely Fahrenheit Fair Enough album — awash in peaceful, hypnotic melodies, chattering electronic percussion, serene keyboards, and dreamy guitar glissandi — has more in common with ambient…
It sort of sneaked up on us, caught us unaware. Who was ready for Fort Lauderdale’s beloved Metal Factory to change its attention-grabbing name? Removing the metal — but maybe not the mettle — from its sign, stationery, outgoing voice-mail message, matchbooks, and more, The Factory (as it is now…
Like a lot of great compilation albums, 1999’s first volume of The Funky Precedent got to have it both ways — celebrating the past while dropping hints about the future. To hear the assembled Angelenos of Vol. 1 tell it, the destiny of hip-hop was a fusion of old-school funk…
Adam Schlesinger is one of rock’s most ambitious overachievers. His membership with Fountains of Wayne has been marked by major cultish success, and his penning of the song “That Thing You Do” for the Tom Hanks movie of the same name earned him a pedestal in the power-pop hall of…
