Chrystal Hartigan had been on the job a scant three months when the Allman Brothers changed her life forever. The year was 1990, and she had just started working as an office manager at Tel-Air Interests — a TV- and film-production company that leased space at North Miami’s legendary Criteria…
The fliers started fluttering around downtown Fort Lauderdale about a month ago. Neon pink and fetchingly petite, they promised a flavor of fun heretofore unknown in these humid parts. “Pavement, Pixies!” they shouted. “Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie… and more.” What’s this? Have the 21st-century modern-rock…
Renaissance man Chris Knox is all over the place. The 47-year-old directs his boundless energy toward film and video production, cartooning, writing, and criticism, as well as several music projects. His seminal lo-fi work with the Tall Dwarfs laid the groundwork not only for the fledgling New Zealand pop scene…
Pinback’s eponymous 1999 debut found two ex-members of Heavy Vegetable and Three Mile Pilot dicking around with a four-track, making studiously and intentionally low-fidelity recordings and playing cut-and-paste with the results. Some Voices, the group’s new four-song EP, is heavy on the noise gates, looping software, and ProTools wizardry, which…
“We are revolutionaries, y’nuh,” says Bob Marley, early in Rhino’s video recollection of the creation of Catch a Fire. True in a double sense: The Wailers were emphatically political, while most reggae bands of the day were not, and they were the first aggressively to construct a crossover album with…
Throw a stick and you’re apt to hit someone who thinks the current pop scene is the worst ever. And who, other than nine-year-old white girls, could argue with that logic? Britney Spears and Celine Dion, to name just two, seem more like actors portraying musicians than the real thing…
What’s Fort Lauderdale’s nightlife going to look like when we kick out all the underage kids? Skip Murray of the Chili Pepper sees it turning into a “faceless condo hotel earlybird special” kind of place now that the city commission has resurrected — and appears ready to push through –…
Rickie Lee Jones It’s Like This (Artemis Records) He’s the son of Richard and Linda Thompson — hence the no-shit review, because Teddy’s the heir to more than three decades’ worth of giddy accolades and piss-poor sales — and dear ol’ Dad shows up on five of the debut’s ten…
Samantha 7 Samantha 7 (Portait/C2 Records) The main difference between these discs is that one doesn’t suck nearly as badly as it ought to, while the other does — and then some. In the mondo-suckage category, Bon Jovi’s latest proves nothing except that the purveyor of some of the ’80s’…
Cut from the same digital cloth as its predecessors, Pole 1 and Pole 2 (the only true reference points of any value here), Pole 3 is more minimalist future dub from German eccentric Stefan Betke. Ghostly echoes and thickened bass patterns form the skin of each piece, with the skeletal…
D.H. Lawrence’s short story The Rocking-Horse Winner is a cautionary fable about greed. It ends with the death of a child, his toy horse transporting his soul to the hereafter. In the case of the suburban Broward band of the same name, the arrangement is slightly different: souls may well…
Though she’s been at it for years, Victoria Williams is probably better known as a celebrity with an illness than she is as a visionary writer and performer. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1992, Williams first caught massive media attention when Lou Reed, Pearl Jam, and a slew of other…
On paper it is, at best, a dubious concept: a Latin dance combo covering German avant-garde pioneers Kraftwerk’s repetitive back catalog. It would seem that the two types of music, both of which possess a somewhat limited appeal, would probably hold allure for almost no one when merged together. In…
Mid-August at the posher-than-thou Power Studios in Miami’s Design District: A well-dressed throng sips expensive drinks as the lights are slowly dimmed and the velvet curtains part to reveal local act Sunday Driver. Technicians make sure guitars are tuned and cymbal stands are correctly positioned. Without warning, the quartet blazes…
At first blush, Tim Rutili’s five-song EP about disaster, grace, dumb luck, and fear of machinery might seem like a cynical prayer for peacenik John Lennon: consider the hollow-sounding, resonating piano of the disc’s opener, “Electric Fence,” and its narrator’s vocal resemblance to the Fab Four’s often acid-tongued martyr. “Jesus…
“I entered the music business when it was much more of a cottage industry and now it is a corporate industry. There are advantages to corporate industry…. That’s just the way it is. It’s not going back.” — Sting, America OnLine chat, December 7, 1999 Sting has benefited greatly. He…
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Kevin Gordon has never fit in with the Nashville program. He’s simply too talented, too ambitious, and too ornery to make do with the prefab platters dished up by Music City denizens. And that’s a damn good thing. It’s been a good long…
Give or take an occasional oddity such as For a Few Dollars More or The Godfather, Part Two, sequels seldom work as well as their predecessors. The stories they offer are generally nothing more than mere embellishments of an already established theme; the worst of them are utter travesties conceived…
Although it’s truly a tiny space, Fort Lauderdale’s Shed Records is doing a big service, providing a mellow, easygoing, and extremely hip scene in a community weighed down by festering strip malls and pervasive corporate record-store tyranny. Now, every Wednesday evening, owner Duncan Cameron is opening the store as a…
The marvelously twisted Mael brothers, known in pop circles as Sparks for the past 30 years or so, are living proof of the adage that if you stick around long enough, eventually you’ll be back in style. Sparks began life as a slightly more than standard power-pop band, with Russell…
It’s a Sunday afternoon on Fort Lauderdale beach, where a brief thundershower and an onshore breeze have temporarily tempered the muggy scorch of August. On the patio of the beachfront Atlantis nightclub, bare-chested men and barely dressed women sip beer and frozen drinks to the strains of reggae classics like…
764-HERO, while still at peace in the relative obscurity of the underground, is no longer the sort of new phenomenon that can be judged one release at a time. After two full-length albums (Salt Sinks, Sugar Floats and Get Here and Stay), an EP (We’re Solids) and a brilliantly conceived…
