Hula dancers and mysterious wood carvings surround you. Sarong-clad maidens come bearing flaming tropical drinks. The music, with pounding drums and ringing guitars, is intoxicating — or maybe that’s the rum. But this night at the Mai-Kai is different from other nights. On this night, the landmark, old-school tiki bar…
Congratulations, De La Soul — you’re the proud parents of a pair of bouncing baby bands! Surprising, since you’re from Long Island and both of your offspring hail from Atlanta. But hey, the four-man Minamina Goodsong follows in your footsteps, adding infectiously funky beats to soulful smarts and hot-potato lyrical…
Naming itself after Erica Jong’s phraseology (see her book Fear of Flying) for unrequited, driving urges (Jong’s vernacular for “jones,” if you will), Boynton Beach’s Hunger-Thump emerged from an overlap of the local music and poetry vistas. Poet/singer Marya Summers, a star of the international poetry-slam scene, encountered guitarist Jeff…
Arguably the hardest-working band in South Florida returns home after a triumphant showcase at this year’s South by Southwest Festival. Garage ‘n’ roll foursome the Heatseekers are back once again to thrill downtown scenesters and innocent bystanders with their first-class rock. Featuring Owen Maclean on vocals/guitar, AC Cobra drummer Chris…
With his sophomore release, Santa Cruz MC Proe proves conclusively that all music is hip-hop if you just spin it right. Fresh and untainted at 20 years old, Proe fits squarely into the hip-hop generation, which was born into a world where everything from hard rock to doo-wop can bounce,…
Hot Hot Heat has bet its cred by making this major-label debut endlessly catchy. Sure, catchiness has been a calling card of this Victoria, British Columbia, quartet since 2002’s Knock Knock Knock, a Sub Pop EP that marked the addition of guitarist Dante DeCaro and the abandonment of synth-noise experimentation…
When a band loses its most menacing member, it’s just going to rock a little less. If said brute gets the boot because of a hard-partying lifestyle, that cranks the volume down another notch. So Queens of the Stone Age, now without Nick Oliveri’s bruising bass lines and barroom-brawler persona,…
So many bland new-wave bands have emerged so far in the ’00s that they’re beginning to dry up the musical credibility of the original ’80s synth-pop and -rock experiments they’re ostensibly inspired by. Fischerspooner is supposed to be New Order-meets-Cirque du Soleil, even as the old New Order continues to…
My, my, my. South Florida, give it up to the Fluent. Here’s a young band actually — thankfully — doing something different and doing it damn well. I imagine that the four Fort Lauderdale teenagers’ thinking process behind Apartments, their debut EP, went like this: Dude, dance punk is too,…
Isaac Alexander, whether he admits to it or not, is a key hipster in Broward’s nightlife strata. But the Crush founder’s new venture adds a high-end twist to the standard social proceedings. With Bling, Alexander is pulling a Puffy-style about-face, imploring a “dress to impress” approach rather than the normal…
Ashlee Simpson sucks. A Yahoo search on that phrase generates 135,000 hits. Last December, New Times contributed to that chorus, writing that she had “dyed blandness black.” But we revised that opinion after witnessing Simpson’s compelling caterwauling during the Orange Bowl halftime show in early January. Despite her deceptively demure…
“Most of my musical and artistic heroes were connected to dope,” former Stone Temple Pilots’ front man, Scott Weiland, says in the April issue of Esquire. “Everyone from William Burroughs to Keith Richards and Gram Parsons to Bird, all the jazz greats — if you listen to the fluidity of…
It’s no wonder Brazilian singer Maria Rita is an eclectic bossa nova baby. She suckled from the breast of Brazil’s all-time greatest female singer, the late Elis Regina, and she was raised by her father, pianist/composer Cesar Camargo. Considered a South American Norah Jones, Rita’s music rocks like a tropical…
Moby is far too wealthy to care about credibility in the dance-music world he left behind after 1996’s ill-conceived rock album, Animal Rights, and the mega-success of 1999’s Play. Dissed as a crass merchant of bogus blues, soul, and gospel retrofitted for the laptop generation, Moby earnestly guffawed all the…
The danger in a project like the Decemberists’ — basically, the Portland band plays intellectual sea chanteys about topics both grim (unrequited love) and grimmer (murder by whale) — is the inclination toward the half-assed. In a post-Elephant 6 era in which gear is as affordable as it’s ever been,…
Best I could tell from months of listening without a lyric sheet — thank you, Internet — this second disc from the kin of itinerant evangelist Leon Followill had something (OK, everything) to do with fuckin’. You could hear it in singer Caleb Followill’s delivery, the greasy whine of the…
How do you follow up an album that opened with the sound of a surgical saw cutting into someone’s chest cavity? You make cartoon music, of course! No matter how hard it might try, though, Fantomas just isn’t wired for levity, which means that Mike Patton and his hyperabrasive supergroup…
I’m still trying to figure out what Pompano Beach middle-of-the-road-rock outfit I Digress is referring to with its name. There really isn’t much of a digression from anything on Justice, the group’s straight-ahead, self-released debut. Standard midtempo power balladry dominates the disc, both of the axe-grinding, fist-pumping variety and also…
As any driving school instructor will tell you, you can’t teach people who don’t want to learn. Miraculously, Hollywood-based folkie Matthew Sabatella has packaged a history lesson in the guise of a strikingly good album (Ballad of America Volume I: Over a Wide and Fruitful Land, released last month) and…
The alarm dutifully pummels your gourd, rousing you from a peaceful slumber. You stand up, rub your eyes, and have a minor cranial meltdown. Then you beg for five more minutes in the sack. You consider smashing that clock when your eye catches the calendar: It’s April 8, and you…
No need to give you the details on Huey Lewis’ semi-illustrious pseudocareer. You know all the highlights, which center mainly around 1983’s Sports, ’86’s Fore!, and the slew of damnably hummable, soundtrack-ready, radio-dominating hits they spawned. Since that time, Lewis has made a comfy living as a county fair and…
File under the “so random we had to publicize it” file — and wait for the whole enchilada, because this party sports some funky sauce. This weekend, hip-hop supa-produca and Miami resident Timbaland is holding the Beach Ball Festival, a competition among 12 South Beach hot spots in a sort…
