It feels weird rooting for the sparkling-new, pre-fab festivities at Seminole Paradise out west while downtown Lauderdale’s Revolution struggles to keep a viable local music night, but you can’t fight the rising tide. After all, South Florida loves a strip mall, and the immaculate, brand-name entertainment complex out on State…
Making like a flock of Northeastern snowbirds, local fave Hashbrown is taking wing to our shores over the holidays. But unlike the rest of the Massholes and Connecticunts, these former Fort Lauderdale freakonauts are more than welcome to return whenever they need a dose of sunshine. If you’ve never had…
Until recently, geriatrically inclined Hollywood was never mistaken as a magnet for dance music culture or even a second-tier nightlife destination. In recent years, though, as the Young Circle area has been revamped, the town’s club scene has undergone its own resuscitation. One of its freshest additions is the sharp,…
When it comes to music, booze is the muse. Rockers love their whiskey, ravers get hopped up on Red Bull and vodka, and broken-hearted country boys shed tears in their beers. But what do jug band fans guzzle while slapping their knees? Tuesday at the Bamboo Room, the answer is…
It’s amazing to see the singer/songwriter genre garnering indie-rock cred. Kids who listened to punk and alternative rock have grown up into adults who understand that turning down and looking inward can be just as powerful as their “loud and fast” roots. Take, for instance, Summer Blanket, a band led…
Fancy your snotty, ska-influenced punk rock with a heaping side of hyper-political rhetoric? Want your anti-establishment booster shot with a spoonful of spiky green mohawk? Against All Authority brings its status-quo-wrecking road show to the Factory on December 26 to kick off a five-day Florida tour. If you’re cranky about…
Even as it shirks the drug-binging, groupie-banging, therapy-seeking responsibilities of a full-fledged band, Popvert has managed to construct a remarkably slick, sophisticated EP. The band’s press sheet is insistent: “Popvert is not a band… It’s a project!” Apparently, core members — producer/bassist Jose Tillian and guitarist/keyboardist Marthin Chan (of Volumen…
When death pulls into most towns, sadness permeates everything and everybody it touches. In the Big Easy, however, grief is as unwelcome as a vice cop in a brothel. “In New Orleans, we celebrate death,” says Efrem Towns, the exuberant trumpet and flugelhorn player for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band…
For its Speed of Surround tour this past October, Perpetual Groove decided to push sound technology further than it had been pushed before. At concert halls up and down the East Coast, the band staged the first completely 5.1 Surround Sound tour in history. Wielding a stylus and digital input…
This ten-song compilation from Latino-loving producer Chris Allison’s Sonic360 label offers a full-body rubdown of slick Argentine electronica. Allison is responsible for bringing edgy Mexican outfits like Kinky and the Nortec Collective north of the border, and though most tracks here fit neatly into the standard funky house niche (which…
What with all the recent ’80s disinterment, it’s good to see a young band looking beyond its older brother’s generation for influence. Heralded in their native Liverpool, the Zutons ply earnest ’60s hindsight and work some eerie déjà vu juju on their stateside debut. The quintet is a garage band…
A street hustler turned jillionaire entrepreneur, Jay-Z doesn’t need to sell records. And while rap-rock is one of the few holes in his résumé, his semicollaboration with Linkin Park is less easy payday than image rehabilitation: After a few weeks on the road with R. Kelly, Jigga could stand to…
As everyone now knows, Nirvana started out merely great and wound up, well, godlike. Not that With the Lights Out is meant as some kind of bible, unless you’re talking about the particularly gruesome parts of the Old Testament. Every manner of misfire and fuckup is immortalized on this boxed…
With tours supporting Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it didn’t take long for the Stills to get noticed and eventually signed with much hype and fanfare to Vice magazine’s record label. The Montreal, Canada-based quartet’s album, Logic Will Break Your Heart, was recorded in two weeks at a Brooklyn…
A consummate showoff, Rufus Wainwright has never had reason to doubt his gorgeous voice, his lush arrangements, his coy sense of romantic drama. Substance, however, presents a bit of a problem for him. Last year’s Want One addressed that deficiency in bracing terms — Wainwright celebrating his 30th birthday with…
A quick survey: Mos Def — quick-lipped conscious MC or headbanging rap-rock drill instructor? Intellectual thespian or slick cover boy? Brooklyn hipster or Tinseltown glitteratus? Don’t look to his recent album The New Danger for clues — this uneven opus veers more wildly than Michael Phelps on a weekend joyride,…
The world’s ugliest, most popular interplanetary purveyors of satirical thrash metal return for what seems like their monthly visit to South Florida. Yes, friends, GWAR (God What an Awful Racket, for the uninitiated) has landed yet again, ready to feed the wretched masses another bodily fluid-filled, bone-crushing metal feast. Led…
Just imagine the chops it takes to be voted the funkiest act in the world’s funkiest town. Out of the sweat-drenched, hard-partying, all-night mayhem of New Orleans comes Papa Grows Funk, winners of Downbeat magazine’s Funkiest Band award for two years running. All the requisite ingredients for an ear-tickling musical…
Hard to believe downtown West Palm’s one and only Respectable Street Café is a ripe 17 years old. The Clematis Street club, long considered the oldest progressive bar in the Southeastern United States, is the cornerstone of nightlife on the city’s famous strip. Founded by ex-film student turned club impresario…
In a place like Miami, it’s not unusual to find supermodels frolicking on the beach in thong bikinis, vapid celebrities doing shots at the club du jour, or cops hassling drunken drag queens. One of the things you won’t find very often is a true-blue rock band. For whatever reason,…
The cantankerous, deep-pocketed giant known as the Recording Industry Association of America is on the move in South Florida. Last month, more than a dozen record companies brought suits against 30 local residents for illegally downloading music files, according to the Miami Herald. Many of the defendants are parents of…
On the surface, Massive Attack’s inaugural soundtrack effort, which was written for a Jet Li thriller scheduled to be released next April, sounds rather atypical. Orchestral strings swell and heave only to be undercut by tense excursions into electronic rock. There is even a motif, a melancholy suite that floats…
