On his first solo album in ten years, our Canadian of the Sorrows pulls off a ton of ambiance, calls in some prestigious cameos, and ultimately delivers too few real songs. This is a collection of moods more than melodies, and even though Emmylou Harris and Bono help out on…
For British house music duo Freaks (Luke Solomon and Justin Harris), there’s something wrong if you’re on the dance floor without a smile on your face. And not one of those ironic smiles that says, “Aren’t we trendy and retro?” either. They’re looking for one of those unconscious wide grins…
Boasting one of the worst band names in history, Lickgoldensky bucks tradition by being not just a good band but a truly exciting band, one whose T-shirt you’d be proud to wear if its name weren’t Lickgoldensky. It is, though. Why, God, why? You wait around years for a band…
Artists are funny people. There are the struggling, the certifiably insane, the eccentrics, the faux-eccentrics, the drunks, the pretentious fops, and those ubiquitous “starving” artists. Then there are the artists who catch you off-guard by creating a collage of new beats out of old sounds at once genuine, poetic, and…
Carlos Calderon is feeling a little under the weather. It could be the beginning of a cold — hopefully nothing more serious than that, considering this whole SARS thing. However, with only two days of rest before his next live performance, lemons, honey, and Sudafed will probably be on his…
Back in 1982, the group Monsoon had a British top 20 hit with the charming “Ever So Lonely,” a then-novel reinvestigation of the ’60s phenomenon known as “raga rock,” a fusion of Western pop/rock sensibilities with the folk and classical music of India. The best-known exponents of this genre were…
You might think a band named after a Herschell Gordon Lewis slasher flick would engage in some corny, blood-splattered stage show. But the Gore Gore Girls are too damn cute for that. Guitarist/singer Amy Surdu, bassist Melody Licious, and drummer Cathy Carrell drop the slash but keep the sass on…
“Hey,” the friend on the phone said, “Nina’s dead.” Normally, I’d have to stop for a moment to guess “which Nina?” But I remembered this particular caller from Miami’s Gusman Theater when Nina Simone came to call back in late 2001. Remember? Simone insisted to us that she was only…
Funny thing about being a mentor: The young genius you help today may be nipping at your heels tomorrow. No need to tell that to storied R&B producer Teddy Riley. Riley, in his umpteenth entry into the black-music market, has re-formed his doo-wop group Blackstreet, choosing to release its latest…
There are two reasons to buy Saddle Creek 50: First off, it’s good. With two tracks from each of the 11 bands on Nebraska’s independent Saddle Creek label, this double disc covers electro-clash, emo-pop, and soft Southern folk with the understanding that things go unwell for everyone but they go…
Big Midnight is yet another band with shaggy hair and bad attitude joining such luminaries as the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Vue, Warlocks, the Agenda, and Richmond Sluts in the retro-as-if-retro-never-happened category. Everything for the First Time will have you jumping around doing air-guitar moves while draining every bottle in the…
Imagine Ravi Shankar jamming with Big Country. Add an electronic backbeat and you’re pretty close to the title track of Ocean Birds from Nataraj XT. The title rings of New Age, and there are hints of such sounds here: the downtempo trippiness and weepy slide guitar of “Space In…”; the…
During a downtown blues festival in a Midwestern city, Kelly Joe Phelps is giving an afternoon performance. The summertime breeze is absent, replaced by a furnace-blast of superheated desert dryness imported from Phoenix. There’s no shade at all; the outdoor concert is held on the blacktop of an elementary school’s…
If you’re going to say something, make sure you have something worth saying. More to the point, decrees the title track of Talkatif, the latest release from the politically minded Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, is “Diarrhea mouth/Constipation brain/No more talking.” The big band, whose members wield instruments like weapons of peace,…
“I just came outside, and there’s the most beautiful sun beaming down on me,” says singer Alana Davis. Newly a Los Angeleno, she’s comfortably navigating life in a new city — waking up at 6 or 7 a.m. because of jet lag, running errands before some workmen arrive, giving autographs…
For industrial-rock aficionados, the name Pigface conjures up the image of a bandit collective. At some point, personnel from most of the genre’s heavyweights have taken part in the controlled chaos led by drummer Martin Atkins. And maybe this has been the group’s greatest limitation: With so many ideas going…
New Times statistical data from the 1980s indicates a sharp rise in pregnancies during the months when Lionel Richie tunes regularly resided in the top five. So far this year, the ceiling-dancin’ man has judged American Idol, teamed up with Rob Zombie and Trina for a refurbishing of the Commodores’…
Do columnists lie? With most, it’s hard to tell and certainly difficult to prove. But I’m willing to bet the Miami Herald’s television critic, Glenn Garvin, snuck in a doozy last month. Though most readers can appreciate how generally misguided Garvin’s column resonates regarding TV — or at least his…
In every musical movement, there are innovators — the acts that introduce stylistic breakthroughs — and there are popularizers, who co-opt the new genre’s freshest elements, homogenize them, and feed them back to the public in an accessible, easy-to-digest form. As a result of this process, popularizers often outsell the…
It’s funny how #1 is finally receiving a proper U.S. release, now that the electroclash backlash is raging. The album’s songs actually have been circulating since 2000, appearing in different versions on Germany’s International DJ Gigolos and England’s Ministry of Sound labels. The New York-based troupe (its membership can swell…
After Autechre’s Sean Booth and Rob Brown issued Confield in 2001, many fans wondered if the British duo had lost its mind in a labyrinth of software plug-ins and hallucinogens. That disc and its follow-up, 2002’s Gantz Graf, set new standards in antisocial digital-sound splatter. Those releases also polarized the…
The complaints about hip-hop’s clichés have become every bit as hoary and tired as the clichés themselves. Yes, the genre wallows in senseless violence, misogyny, and bigotry, we know that. Yes, yes, it obsesses over money and guns and sex, and, uh, money. It does all of those things –…
