The curse of the side project dictates that no matter how vastly different your new band is, you will be held up to the ungodly standards of the band that made you famous. Many Mötley Crüe fans (present company included) would listen to any side project — even watch an…
Pigeon Funk is a minimal techno side project initiated by San Francisco producers Kit Clayton, Sutekh, and Safety Scissors in 2001. Though originally released as a series of EP-length “battles” among the three artists, the trio’s Pigeon Funk! compilation is still remarkably consistent, a weird collage of scattershot samples and…
A low buzzing sound fills a small schoolroom, which is dark save for a single string of Christmas lights. Suddenly, bright beams burst from a large, square hodgepodge of coils, tubes, and scrap metal that looks like a junkyard version of Mouse Trap. Green. Red. Yellow. Purple. The colors bleed…
Chances are you had a parent or teacher force you to read something at one point in your youth and you thought the book really sucked. You hated having to slog through it and carried around resentment for years. You’d snap “I hate Shakespeare” or something like that, until by…
Savath and Savalas performs with Juana Molina and Nobody at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 5, at I/O, 30 NE 14th St., Miami. Tickets cost $20. Call 305-672-5202.
Go ahead, laugh. No, really. It’s OK. Sure, you’re laughing at a bunch of handicapped kids, but they pretty much asked for it. The Kids of Widney High is a rotating group of special-education students from Los Angeles who write and perform original songs. Original, yes. Entertaining, yes. Hilarious, most…
While the band’s name conjures up visions of Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, this Madison, Wisconsin, post-punk quintet was inspired to form by self-deprecating funnyman Neil Hamburger. The band took baby steps in 1998, when recording its self-titled demo in the Madison studio of Kyle Fischer, a guitarist for…
Broward DJ and producer Jason Dunne, who is working on a remix of Gary Jules and Roland Orzabal’s rendition of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, might not know who let the dogs out or who left the cake out in the rain, but he knows…
The four years that passed between Modest Mouse’s 2000 album The Moon & Antarctica and its new opus, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, seemed like an eternity. Gone is the world-weary anxiety that girded The Moon… like a vicious, inescapable undertow; in its place is leader Isaac…
Junkie XL, the man behind the most ubiquitous exhumation-cum-remix, Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation,” returns to production land with a lengthy, two-disc set, which is separated into “3PM” and “3AM.” The “PM” disc is obviously the attention-getter due to collaborations with everyone from Robert Smith to Depeche Mode front man…
Descendents front man Milo Aukerman, Ph.D., might be the smartest guy in rock. But more remarkable than his knack for biochemistry is his exceptional grasp of some elementary practices that elude many players who’ve been in the game 25-plus years. Lesson one from Dr. Milo: Don’t fix what ain’t broke…
A CD not to think about but to groove on and on and on. King of the stoned age Josh Homme, kickin’ it behind the drum kit on this side project’s side project, wouldn’t have it any other way. If his band Queens of the Stone Age exists for the…
The Great Super Bowl Rogue Breast Disaster of 2004 reached truly epic levels of overexposure, with every pundit, columnist, blogger, and dude standing behind you at Subway scrambling to weigh in on the moral outrage of it all. But in our haste to denounce either our shot-to-hell sense of human…
Kieran Hebden appears to be a normal 25-year-old living in London’s Camden Town who spends a lot of time at home. He’s a guy who wakes up when he wants to, watches television as long as he likes, and spends most of his pocket money on records, stumbling out to…
The first thing you hear when you put on Fabulous Muscles, the third full-length from Oakland’s Xiu Xiu, is a couple of giggly synths burbling over skittish drumming. It sounds like tweaky circus music. “Oh,” you think, “a fun-time happy album.” Then vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Jamie Stewart starts singing in a whisper…
If you remember the original cover of Exodus¹ seminal 1985 thrash classic Bonded by Blood, then this little bit of speculative trivia is for you. The artwork depicts a demonic pair of Siamese twins joined at the back. The twin on the left has curly black hair and olive skin…
Audible Almost There For the sake of journalistic integrity (is that an oxymoron?), you shouldn¹t judge a CD by its cover art, no matter how stomach-churningly bad it is. Well, sweet snake whiskey, the CD cover for Audible¹s latest CD is bad. Putting a half-naked chick on your cover, her…
The Geriatric Gestapo is after the kids. The West Palm Beach City Commission seems to believe that only those of us born between 1983 and 1986 have caused Clematis Street to turn into, as West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel put it, “Bourbon Street.” Cue Skynyrd’s “That Smell.” Or whatever…
Hold it right there, kid. Before you go and jump on MF Doom’s stainless-steel jock and proclaim him “the only hip-hop MC still getting stupid-fresh in the zero-quatro” or something, you’d best read up on his back story. After all, one doesn’t just become a supervillain overnight. As any comic…
For numerous indie bands, Bee Hives, recorded between Broken Social Scene’s cerebral debut, Feel Good Lost, and its pop-friendly follow-up, You Forgot It in People, would be a masterstroke. But for these Canadians, still glowing from last year’s breakout success, it’s simply a stretch of sometimes enchanting songs recorded with…
Stargazing, the third album from Corin Dingley and Andy Jenks, a Bristol, England-based duo who initially debuted on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label, sees them delving into their classic songwriter roots. Less of a trip-hop affair than their previous records, Stargazing — a revamped U.S. version of the original, with a…
Sacramento’s Hella (guitarist Spencer Seim and drummer Zach Hill) make tinnitus-inducing barrage rock that has inspired many a noise connoisseur to draw comparisons to another power duo, Lightning Bolt. Like that Rhode Island outfit, Hella mostly proceeds at two speeds: helter skelter and pedal to the metal. On The Devil…
