This singer/songwriter from London got her start singing on tracks by mid-’90s electronic-music mavens like William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. They provided her with fleshed-out musical settings before her songwriting had evolved to the point where she could provide her own; in return, she gave her collaborators’ work an…
Stephin Merritt has come out of the closet: Of course! He’s a theatrical composer! It must have been so hard passing as a pop singer all those years. The leader of Magnetic Fields and sundry other indie broods slides into musical theater so easily, you have to wonder how he…
Listeners unacquainted with such late-’60s cult classics as Something Else and The Village Green Preservation Society might hear in Ray Davies’ music imitations of the many British pop acts who’ve imitated him. At several points throughout Other People’s Lives, the first solo studio album in the former Kinks frontman’s four-decade…
What the Darkness is to Queen and Electric 6 is to AC/DC, Diamond Nights is to Cheap Trick. That is, unabashed revivalists who self-consciously ape their idols, putting tongue in cheek, cock in rock, and volume in stratosphere. But like their ’80s-lovin’ peers, the Brooklyn-based Nights are more than mere…
It really should come as no surprise, but the way to a man’s heart is through his loins (or, alternately, his nose). At least, that’s what pop taught me in 2005 with the reemergence of cocaine rap and the ubiquity of T-Pain’s pole anthem, “I’m N Luv Wit a Stripper.”…
The flack that religiously oriented music gets from secular camps generally lies within acceptance and “mass appeal” parameters. So it’s strikingly refreshing when a rambunctious teenager discovers the meaning of his parents’ G-d in the wilderness and sets out to mix that with his past rebellions. Matisyahu’s reggae might not…
Once a feral, reviled thing, the genre known as fusion — blending jazz with funk/R&B, rock, etc. — had by the 1980s been absorbed into the mainstream. ‘Round the same time, there was a parallel, though less-high-profile movement, thriving. Musicians established in bluegrass and traditional country circles were branching out…
Barcelona-based Prefuse 73, the many-monikered man otherwise known as Scott Herren, is about to drop a triple whammy on South Florida. With Security Screenings, his new “mini-album” in tow, Herren is sure to wreak havoc on his laptop and decks after being burned by haters of 2005’s Surrounded by Silence…
Actor Jared Leto (Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club) has been fasting for four days. Except for water, fresh lemon, and cayenne pepper, he expects to eat nothing anytime soon. This isn’t one of those trendy Los Angeles diets, though; he’s burning off the staggering 62 pounds he packed on…
Bigger, better, longer, louder: From the opening fiddle flourish of Theresa Andersson on Friday afternoon to the Black Crowes’ final guitar wail Sunday night, this year’s Langerado Music Festival offered more of everything music fans could ask for. With more than 40 bands filling five stages, savvy Langeradans could concoct…
Straight outta small-town Texas, not the Star Wars cantina, Eisley sounds more like the house band of a verdant magical forest or Rilo Kiley’s ambitious babysitting charge than an alien juke joint combo. The five-piece group fulfills the whimsical indie-rock promise of its early EPs with its first full length,…
There’s a power to Earth, Wind, & Fire and it’s a power that transcends the obvious comparison to the elements. I remember many years ago as a young man being confronted by a classmate who could’ve sworn her parents had been “making it” to “some damn Earth, Wind, & Fire…
Part Ultra Fest, part Ozzfest, Global Gathering precedes this year’s Winter Music Conference with a one-day, 12-hour mega-event that blurs the lines between dance and hard rock. In what promises to be one of the most peculiar outdoor fests in recent memory, metalheads, ravers, and rivetheads will gather in (somewhat)…
Hipsters looking for disagreeable, hard-to-digest music will presumably turn toward the new Liars record, Drum’s Not Dead, for a hearty dose of parent-scaring noise. It’s a reasonable assumption, as their last album, in spite of its weirdness and witch-loving themes, won out the noise-rock crowd by pulling off near-poppy magic…
While most “Golden Era” hip-hoppers have retired to community social clubs or made halfhearted, half-cracked attempts at reliving bygone days, Public Enemy has kept chipping away at the cornerstone. While on a seeming hiatus since Apocalypse 91, Chuck D, Flava Flav, and newest addition Paris have designed a sound through…
On the 26th edition of Fabric — host to arguably some of the most forward-thinking DJ mixes on the market (save for Studio Distribution’s long-running DJ-Kicks series) — electronic dance duo Global Communication explores future soul. British producers Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard capably mix a multitude of dance floor…
Released last year, Efon’s The Free Album showed the West Palm Beach hip-hop impresario’s serious determination and drive to put together a full-length mixtape of local talent. Add to the difficulty of shepherding rookie rappers the financial cost of production and pressing and it’s clear that in Efon, you’ve got…
If you’ve read any pop music rags in the past year, you probably came across some variation of the following: “Pete Doherty, singer of the British rock band Babyshambles, was arrested again for [fill in the blank].” Hard drugs. Stolen cars. Most recently, an arrest on February 27 for both…
Are you a Dapper Dan Man? Now before you go searching the mind log for that reference, I’ll quit pussyfooting and just give it to you: O Brother, Where Art Thou, the Coen Brothers’ hilarious rip through Homer’s Odyssey, a great film which also featured a terrific collection of vintage…
Despite his recent troubles with the law (See the October 6, 2005 issue of this publication), Keith Morile Michaud has found the strength to continue on his path. The Summer Blanket frontman’s music keeps him going, enabling him to heal broken emotions and strained heartstrings. His stuff stands strongly on…
At long last rescued from the out-of-print wilderness, Sonic Youth’s self-titled, under-heard debut reveals itself as quite the opposite of the festering, tonal Hades implied by subsequent records like Confusion Is Sex or Bad Moon Rising. Here we find a diminutive, blond Art Forum contributor picking up a bass, a…
The Flaming Lips play at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, March 17, at the Langerado Music Festival. See the following page for details.
