The Mogwai fan base, patiently biding time since the group issued its first single in March 1996, has calmly (if with steadily heightening anticipation) soaked up numerous singles, EPs, and remix projects and two double-length albums. Rock Action arrives, then, as the culmination of those expectations, and not for nothing…
The three members of Carnival Waste sit outside a local Starbucks, sipping coffee just before closing time. Cars rush by on darkened U.S. Highway 1 as the musicians try to agree on the cover art for … A Perfect Day, their forthcoming album. The South Florida band’s frontman-keyboardist, Robert J…
If you missed the Poor House performance of Dr. Madd Vibe (a.k.a. Angelo Moore from the band Fishbone) April 24, you lost out. About 50 folks turned up to investigate Moore and his exuberant spoken-word performance. Dressed in a tall top hat parked on his clean-shaven cranium, tails, suspenders, and…
The British neo-glam rockers of Placebo have become the most blatantly formulaic band in modern memory, conceptually lashed to an m.o. that’s hurtling down the freeway, rapidly accumulating mileage. In five years of existence, Placebo hasn’t found the time to rotate the tires or change the oil. Black Market Music…
Anyone who’s still daydreaming through that decadelong lazy Sunday afternoon known as Saint Etienne will hardly be taken aback by the following news flash: The group has released yet another disc. Judging by the collection’s title, the trio apparently felt that the hour’s wait between proper albums is simply too…
It takes a certain kind of artist to wear his heart on his album sleeves without coming across as a lovelorn desperado rambling about a lovey-dovey past that flew the coop. But Los Angeles-based Clyde Wrenn isn’t about to simplify affairs of the heart to mere clichés. The Blue Cliff…
We do this because we love it,” the Crumbs guitarist Johnny B declares over a pint of Guinness in singer-guitarist Raf Classic’s Spartan South Miami apartment. “There sure isn’t any money in it.” In this statement are enough grains of truth to brew a keg of stout. After eight years…
Sometimes you can take one of life’s blind curves too fast. And that’s how you wind up in situations like this. If you’d told me two years ago that I’d be spending a Friday night at a Vanilla Ice concert waiting for Lenny Kravitz to walk in, I’d have laughed…
As alleged “gay supremacists” who rattled the cage of underground music with 1989’s cult classic It’s Only Right and Natural, Dennis and Jimmy Flemion have gone beyond telling the world “we are homos, hear us roar.” Racially Yours found the two singing about ethnic tension — one in blackface, the…
Rod Stewart’s Human bears an ironic title, given that the title cut, which leads off the album, sounds like the great rock rooster demoing a Christina Aguilera song. Robotic backing beats skitter underfoot while Stewart (whose vocals were produced separately on some songs) mechanically rattles off his lines. It would…
By the 1970 release of Vintage Violence, John Cale had been deeply involved in the creation of albums that shook the world to its very core (as a performer on the first two Velvet Underground albums, as producer/multi-instrumentalist on Nico’s Marble Index, and as producer of the Stooges’ first album)…
I brought my car phone!” Mr. Entertainment boasts loudly as we file down the “Three-Four Persons” aisle of the Rascal House cattle chute. He waves a bright red Princess tabletop model in the air, cord dangling, attracting the attention of the two-persons and one-persons lined up on our right. Amid…
A long, long, long time ago (November 1991, to be exact), when Bandwidth’s frequency range was tender, green, and underdeveloped, yours truly got to hang with Dr. Alex Paterson, wing commander of the ambient/dance outfit the Orb. At the time I hadn’t heard any of the band’s music (this was…
Since her potent 1995 debut, Songs from the Levee, singer-songwriter Kate Campbell has transcended — or at least lived up to — any and all critical praise heaped upon her. Campbell has embraced the folk ethic while utilizing only the parts of it that she truly needed to cobble together…
Uwe Schmidt — one of Germany’s quirkiest electronic musicians with more than two dozen alter egos, including Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendhaus, and Lisa Carbon — masquerades as South American composer/dancer Señor Coconut on this release, the now-available precursor to 1999’s El Baile Alemán. For that album Schmidt reconfigured the sterile,…
Andy Spence, a.k.a. Organic Audio, was spinning Latin-inflected dance cuts in U.K. clubs a good year and a half before Basement Jaxx broke out in 1999 with the crossover Brazilian house groove of its smash Remedy. By the time OA’s spicy debut, Back to My Roots, was released in 1998,…
Castanets and tablas may seem an unlikely combination. But a New York City production called Nacho Nacho: Gypsy Storytelling actually combines flamenco traditions with northern Indian kathak dance styles. Samir Chatterjee, one of the foremost Indian tabla drummers in the United States, conceived and directed the project. “Flamenco has a…
It’s not the least bit surprising that the Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs lifted their name from the first line of “Search and Destroy,” one of Iggy Pop’s most incendiary songs; the Cheetahs use the Stooges as one of their sonic reference points. But the number of other ’70s stalwarts that surface in…
Some 40 years ago, Cuba’s octave-hopping queen of melodrama, Xiomara Alfaro, poured her persona so thoroughly into the torch song “Siboney” it became impossible to imagine another soul attempting a straight-faced rendition of the same. But Raúl Malo of the Mavericks matches Alfaro’s sun-extinguishing angst, and the all-star ensemble backing…
“Ask me a question; I’ll give you my answers,” announces Don Cohen, owner and founder of Musicians Exchange in Fort Lauderdale. “I have a lot of opinions about things.” He sure does. After all, it’s been almost five years since the city condemned the original Musicians Exchange headquarters at 723-735…
Crawling from the aural and psychic wreckage of the Brian Jonestown Massacre a couple of years ago, guitarist Bobby Hecksher (who has worked with Beck) blinked his eyes a few times, massaged his bruised limbs, and promptly dove back into the fray — on his own terms this time. With…
When Pere Ubu roared out of Cleveland in the mid-’70s, it was clear that the band came with neither an agenda nor a peer group. Pere Ubu was antipunk, antirock, and antimusic, yet managed to attract a sizable following among fans of punk, rock, and music — an intriguing balancing…
