The same week the Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart debuted in area theaters, the band rolled into town for a spectacular, sold-out show Monday, November 4, at the Carefree Theatre. Remember back when the two Uncle Tupelo offshoots, Son Volt and Wilco, would battle for seasonal…
A trail of glitter on the New Times carpet presents irrefutable evidence: Fort Lauderdale’s lovable Noodles paid a visit. It’s not often Bandwidth sees guests during office hours, but something about Noodles’ rambling voice-mail message from the previous day made us realize this was no ordinary local musician pumping an…
There’s nothing wrong with a great songwriter taking someone else’s tunes for a spin — especially since most would agree that Mark Eitzel can often let pissiness creep into his own material. His recent collection of covers, Music for Courage and Confidence, is so full of tongue-in-cheekiness, it’s hard not…
It looked like a powerful dumb idea from the start. How could a band like GWAR — a visual experience more than anything else, a feculent feast for the optic nerve, messier than Gallagher smashing bunny rabbits with ball-peen hammers — possibly perform atop a piddling little stage in a…
If you’ve a hankering for the punishing EBM beats hammered out by long-forgotten outfits such as Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, and A Split Second, you’ll probably think Haujobb (from Germany) and Hocico (from Mexico City) fill the missing jackboots rather well. Hocico, proud to have so far survived the most…
An official announcement from Yume Bitsu: “There are no song titles for this record. It feels wrong and contrived to think of words to fit them. We have chosen to let them stand nude as sonic experiences without, and beyond, the boundaries of the written word. We suggest you address…
Kevin Barnes isn’t from Montreal, nor is he from the Florida subtropics, although he did move from Michigan to Palm Beach Gardens at age 15. But he left when he was 21 and never even glanced back. “I don’t look fondly on those years. I blocked them out of my…
When Robert Pollard was 21, halfway between Dayton high school basketball stardom and a fourth-grade teaching gig and a few years before starting his lo-fidelity beer-drinking rock band, Guided by Voices, he, his brother Jimmy, and some friends would get together. They’d descend their basements steps and spend hours banging…
Got a call from the Lord the other day. Following an e-mail volley, I asked Jesus if I could hear his voice on the phone, and lo, I have been blessed. Jesus is actually an especially effective agent provocateur within the South Florida music community. Two summers ago, the local…
Breakbeat Science, a drum ‘n’ bass record store, an indie label, and presumably a way of life, has all but consumed Reid Speed (born Reid Margolis), who represents the small but loud faction of female junglists. Skillfully blending beats and moods (never too dark or oppressive) into a fluid groove,…
Samuel Beam writes and records his songs at home, in an apartment he shares with his wife and newborn daughter in Miami Beach. The subject matter of most of these songs — searching creek beds for snakes to kill, clearing thorn bushes, selling a car to buy shoes for his…
Where several of Salif Keita’s former musical endeavors have been hamstrung by unneeded guests (like Weather Report alumni) or deadened by pop-oriented dross, the Malian dynamo’s new album, Moffou, is his most successful yet. Returning to his traditional griot upbringing with swirls of Portuguese and Moorish influences as well as…
The lucky bastards around the rest of the country feel the onset of fall’s temperance movement, but down here there’s no hope. A tease of a breeze isn’t enough to stop the sweaty trickles that begin the moment the air loses its conditioner. Stepping outside during the day feels as…
A pretty wimpy Friday-night downpour was enough to keep a crowd away from the Holy Terrors reunion show at Churchill’s Hideaway in Miami’s Little Haiti on September 13. Even Miamians stayed home. It’s a well-accepted fact that Broward Countians hate driving to the big city and enduring the Interstate of…
Who would possibly care that Leif Garrett, fallen teen idol from the avocado shag carpet days, is staging a comeback? Only those who derive pathological pleasure in picking apart his hapless, hopeless attempt. Here’s the deal: Garrett, who has spent the last half of his 40 years outside the music…
Napster’s got x’s for eyes now, and the Recording Industry Association of America is a bunch of idiots. They say file-sharing and CD-burning is killing the music business. They insist that it’s not Limp Bizkit or Muddles of Pud or Linkin Park; that it’s really we music lovers making our…
The self-titled debut from Fort Lauderdale’s FiveSixSixFive bleeds lo-fi ennui and plenty of couch-potato, casual-Friday aloofness. Half of its 12 tracks sound like quickly tossed-off experiments or attempts to test out new synths, samplers, and drum machines; but the quirky pop songs that constitute the remainder make it among the…
The August 30 local premiere of the British film 24 Hour Party People, which chronicles the rise and fall of Factory Records and Manchester’s brief tenure as the sonic center of the universe, was one of the musical events of the year. In attendance at the Friday-evening event in Sunrise…
Bondage — backed by trendy beats — has abandoned downtown Hollywood. The fetish club night at Club Deco Drive called London Ballroom faltered rather than thrived there. Impresario David Cordoves says he fought a never-ending battle to get the venue to comply with his strict agenda. After a few months,…
In a few weeks, 73-year-old Fort Lauderdale millionaire Herschell Gordon Lewis will be in a Cleveland recording studio. There, he’ll sing a new version of the theme song to 2000 Maniacs, the classic gore film he directed in 1964. Members of underground Ohio rockers the Pagans, Pink Holes, Pere Ubu,…
Don’t make plans to hit the final Frannipalooza — the blowout that was scheduled for early September in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Founder Franni Howe-Southern, who recently unloaded most of her overgrown land south of Sailboat Bend, has sniffed out some new digs south of St. Augustine and won’t even be…
Not to be confused with L. Shankar (the violinist famous for his work with Echo and the Bunnymen and Peter Gabriel), vocalist Lakshmi Shankar is the sister-in-law of sitar master Ravi Shankar. Active in India’s performing arts circles since the 1940s, Shankar performs Hindustani songs that are among the subcontinent’s…
