Merzbow is like a friend who breaks something every time he comes over. It’s a surprise only the first time; after that, you have to start wondering why you keep letting it happen. Each of his releases is a white-noise assault on the brain and ears, and therefore it’s easy…
This antiamnesiac elixir is a peppermint-flavored treat. In addition to maintaining the red-and-white design theme on their third full-length, the trashy-chic White duo from Detroit again strips bare the rock to find… more rock. With nothing other than Meg White’s two-ton drums and Jack White’s splintered guitar, piano subtleties, and…
In an age where most industrial-rock bands have dropped the anvil and turned in their Craftsman wrenches for “As Seen on TV” tools, the newly reformed KMFDM returns with Attak, the band’s 11th studio effort in its 18-year existence. After disbanding KMFDM following 1999’s Adios to form the short-lived MDFMK…
The music of the Nighthawks is not for home consumption — at least, not without the clink of cocktail glasses and beer bottles, the background banter of bar patrons, the aroma of cigarettes and stale beer, and maybe even a fight in the alley out back. You can hear the…
Psyco on da Bus is an inspired merger of Afrobeat roots and 21st-century technology concocted by Tony Allen, the drummer and arranger for late Nigerian artist Fela Kuti, and Doctor L, an Irish expat known for blunted, dubby downtempo. During the course of their 2000 tour with Afrobeat 2000 –…
Those who spent the past couple of decades wondering whatever happened to Dan Hicks finally got their answer a few years back when Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks released Beatin’ the Heat, their first studio album since 1978. The guitarist, drummer, singer, songwriter, and bandleader first put together the…
“It had to be someone we know,” mutters Zelick, bassist for Miami rap-metal quartet Endo. “Or someone we used to know.” Along with like-minded (and like-tattooed and like-pierced) local brethren Puya and Nonpoint, Endo pumps out angry music that seethes with life-sucks rageism. Now the band really has something to…
“I’m not the kind of person you think I am/I’m not the Antichrist or the Iron Man,” Ozzy Osbourne bleats at the onset of this, his eighth studio effort. And you have to give him credit: After more than three decades of lapping up his own urine and snorting fire…
This final send-off ain’t the half-realized piece o’ pap it could’ve been. In fact, it’s the album that Joey Ramone was destined to make, even if he hadn’t succumbed to cancer: a perfectly agreeable disc of bubblegum punk, not all that different from the last Donnas record or previous Ramones…
With the release of Bionix, the second installment of the Art Official Intelligence troika, De La Soul comes off unpretentious and finally unfettered after previous efforts to escape the Day-Glo handcuffs created by 3 Feet High and Rising, their hugely influential debut. The album is, as its title promises, “better,…
Frankly, if rock writers didn’t have crazed visionaries to waste ink on, you people would get plenty tired of reading about expertly played tambourine tracks and tearful obbligato passages. No, you’d be reading about Bill Clinton’s three-breasted intern in the Weekly World News like the rest of your weak-willed kind…
“We’re taking this on/and turning you on!” Recover guitarist/shouter Robert Mann screams on “Rodeo and Picasso,” the title track of the best debut album in years. This opening assault sends mosh pits all over the nation into an instant free-for-all as the four members of Recover hurl themselves about the…
You know you’re listening to a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool, old-school bluesman when he’s got a cool nickname. Usually, it involves some combination of blindness, geography, size, and instrument of choice, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Broonzy, Little Walter, Guitar Slim, Pinetop Smith, and a host…
Boynton Beach has lost its Orbit. The town still claims a 2500-square-foot club housed in a former Winn-Dixie up there in the Gulfstream Mall, but now it’s going by the name “Club Ovation, formerly Orbit.” The new owners, who took over club operations in January, enjoy the connotations of this…
In its ideal form, reggae is life-affirming, self-aware, and socially conscious. Yet all too often, the genre finds itself in a state of slack. Who better to tighten it up than the all-purpose Screwdriver? Dalton Lindo accepts growth and change but won’t allow anything to overshadow the religious fervor at…
Most South Florida electronica fans fiend for deep house and trance. Up north in Orlando, breakbeats reign supreme. Drum ‘n’ bass (or jungle), with its too-many-to-count beats per minute, enjoys scattered pockets of popularity nationwide but hasn’t been able to carve out a foothold in our sandy soil. As one…
Back in the 1990s, Kathleen Hanna kicked off the riot-grrrl movement and kicked ass on the male-dominated punk/hardcore scene with angry albums from her group’s self-titled Bikini Kill (1992) to PussyWhipped (1994) to Reject All American (1996). Now Hanna is back with the all-womyn electro/punk-rock trio Le Tigre, a group…
With the best intentions, Palm Beach County public radio station WXEL-FM (90.7) has made an offer to fill the classical-music void created by WTMI. That’ll provide drive-time relief in the northern wilds but is unlikely to do much good farther south, where the mighty pirate signal of 90.9, broadcast from…
Almost ten years ago, Shelton Hank Williams made a deal with the devil. Even though the grandson of country-music legend Hank Williams and son of Hank Williams Jr. owed $24,000 in delinquent child-support payments, the self-described long-haired, tattooed slacker with a taste for weed and whiskey was barely eking out…
Not much good happens when East Coasters get to jammin’ in the Rocky Mountain West, but don’t fret: Dressy Bessy’s sugar-pop could stun a Phish phan at phiphty yards. On its second full-length, this gang of Denver candy-coaters matures from popping simplistic gum bubbles to crafting complex and weighty sing-alongs…
Pity that most people’s knowledge of Irish rock ‘n’ roll begins and ends with U2. This week’s Irish Fest 2002 demonstrates that the Emerald Isle has a lot more to offer than grandiose arena rock, particularly Saturday on the main stage, where the evening’s lineup includes the Saw Doctors. Never…
At least WPYM-FM (93.1) general manager Mike Disney can safely answer the phone now. It got pretty bad there for a while after his company, Cox Broadcasting, replaced WTMI-FM, the area’s last remaining classical station, with a pulse-quickening trance and techno tableau of “Party 93.1” on New Year’s Day (see…
