The mother ship has landed. Or at least it’s hovering over Atlanta, where the hip-hop duo Outkast is based and where its terrific fourth album, Stankonia, was conceived. And if master funkster George Clinton isn’t piloting the ship, he’s at least guiding the eternal funkmusicmachine in spirit. Loaded with jejune…
Thoughts of birds and whatever cloud my brain. I can see some through the window. The birds are getting to my brain through my ears, and they’re getting there through my headphones, which are whispering the songs of Ágætis Byrjun, the new album by Icelandic quartet Sigur Rós, to me…
You’ve finished your record, designed some sweet cover art, and thanked all your friends and supporters in the liner notes. Now it’s time to throw together a package with a photo and a bio and perhaps some press clips and send it off to some third-rate, penny-ante, frustrated musician with…
Here’s how ballsy Martin Sexton is: His traditional concert encore is “Purple Rain.” That’s right. Prince’s “Purple Rain,” a song that requires entry into the blessed soprano realms where white men fear to go. His voice is surely the most remarkable instrument in rock today. Sexton’s sound — as evidenced…
The dichotomy is almost paralyzing. But for Mark Kozelek, singer-songwriter for Red House Painters, it’s a badge of courage to fess up to a love of vintage AC/DC. He feels perfectly at home singing elegant, unplugged versions of “Up to My Neck in You,” from Powerage, “Love at First Feel,”…
There’s a line in the sand — sin on one side, redemption on the other. And David Eugene Edwards has been caught on both sides. Through three albums with his band, 16 Horsepower, he’s put forth a sort of Flannery O’Connor stance on morality: Even bad guys can be good…
Gadzooks! Can the tribulations of Fort Lauderdale’s beleaguered nightclubs get any worse? The venues are running scared, unsure of whether they’re going to be raided, busted, or forced to close. (The third looks likely in the case of Atlantis Night Club.) Yet for one brief, shining moment last week, the…
Dance music remains painfully short on personalities, but U.K. jungle has managed to produce two bona fide superstars, Goldie and Roni Size. A menacing yet ghetto-fabulous Darth Maul to Size’s reclusive, inscrutable Obi-Wan, Goldie revels in his fame, collecting magazine covers and celebrity pixies (Björk, Kate Moss) like he does…
John Coltrane Olé Coltrane (Rhino/Atlantic) John Coltrane’s music calls out to the heart and the mind with roughly equal volume, but his records, especially the ones that jazz guides decorate with five stars, can be downright intimidating. These two reissues, the most recent in Rhino’s repackaging of Atlantic’s jazz catalog…
In just a little more than a year since its inception, See Venus has generated more buzz than most local bands do in their entire careers — and thanks to the Internet, the band has done it without performing a single live show. Thirty-year-old founder and guitarist Christopher Moll has…
If South Florida were like other major metropolitan areas around the country, we who live here would enjoy our live music in a renovated old movie house with velvet curtains, cushy seats, an in-house sound board, and so on. But alas, we’re not, and we don’t. So, spoiled nonnatives (yes,…
With its third album, London trio Morcheeba undercuts its importance as a trip-hop band by meandering too far afield. Moving beyond the narrow confines of any genre is all well and good, just as long as you don’t forget where you came from. Missing for the most part on Fragments…
Some brave souls may take up the musical saw and coax a few warbling, wobbly whines from it, but Kev Hopper really understands the instrument. He can make it swoon and scream like a whiny theremin or quiver like the lower lip of a crybaby. Though the saw — played…
From fuzzed-out hillbilly drone to mutant surf-pop to greasy-fatback country-soul, the past 15 years have seen an amazing transformation for Southern Culture on the Skids. Some of the changes have been obvious, as when guitarist Rick Miller, bassist Mary Huff, and drummer Dave Hartman added keyboardist Chris Bess two years…
You’ve heard the sound of drum ‘n’ bass. So has your grandma. She probably just doesn’t realize that, as she’s glued to the TV, her Chihuahua on her lap, the music playing as the fancy new Ford Focus rounds the corner of the oceanfront highway during that cookie-cutter car commercial…
Artistic control is a beautiful thing, especially when an artist gets to tweak the record execs, give them something to get nervous about, and confound the professional pigeonholers in the marketing department. Radiohead has always been good at this. The quintet first garnered airplay and notoriety by riding Kurt Cobain’s…
Like the earliest Warner Brothers and Max Fleischer cartoons, the screwball charm of Devo’s early home-baked recordings has held up amazingly well over the decades. And make no mistake, Devo was nothing but a cartoon, from its silly-ass theory of de-evolution to the yellow suits, flowerpot hats, and plastic pompadours…
It’s not easy being Death Becomes You. The shock-rock troupe from Coral Springs has a tough time earning respect in South Florida, where its antics are often viewed as subMarilyn Manson silliness. As if that weren’t bad enough, a long-running dispute with a local club owner recently culminated in a…
Say what you will about the ’70s, but the decade was a time of almost psychotic diversity. The charts were regularly peppered with every imaginable style of music, from hard rock to light pop to folk to Motown to funk to chemically calibrated amalgams of any or all of the…
Drums line two walls at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s exhibition “Ritmos de Identidad: Fernando Ortiz’s Legacy and the Howard Family Collection of Percussion Instruments.” They fill the cases that sit in the middle of the room and cluster about the door. Batá drums, the sacred instruments transported to…
When Brian Wilson brought his ten-piece band and 55-piece orchestra to Sunrise October 18, the outstanding performance finally cashed Pet Sounds’ postdated paycheck. Though the venue was only half full, the rapturous crowd was half in awe of Wilson, half afraid as he shambled on stage uncertainly like a doddering…
When Dirty Walt Kibby helped to assemble the funk/punk/ska unit known as Fishbone back in the mid-’80s, he unleashed a bottled musical genie that has run rampant in the decade and a half since the cork popped. Fishbone has moved through nearly every conceivable contemporary genre with a gritty passion…
