Cowabunga, dude: Spring Break has returned to Broward County — Sunrise, to be specific. Thankfully, the latest incarnation is a wee bit more cultured than the decades-ago golden age, replacing the cheap beer, wet T-shirts, and mindless party music with microbrews, hula-hoops, and heady party music. This past weekend’s Langerado…
Busdriver belongs to the rapid-firing, über-caffeinated slam-poet school of MCing. While such diarrhetic verbalizing can be numbing, the L.A. artist’s verses prove consistently fascinating, mainly because they’re witty and well-detailed, with a cockeyed surrealism. Much of Fear of a Black Tangent concerns the ridiculousness of the hip-hop milieu — not…
Keyboardist John Medeski is the melodic acrobatic of jazz trio Medeski, Martin, and Wood. Listening to his fingers pirouette across his array of ivoried instruments — piano, Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes, clavinet, melodica, Wurlitzer — is an auditory workout. Medeski can jackhammer his keys with percussive stabs, lean into prolonged…
The catchall term for the stuff is “jam band” music, but that cliché hardly describes the tuneful smorgasbord offered at this weekend’s Langerado Music Festival. For the third straight year, Langerado brings the nation’s top touring bands to Broward County. And once again, the festival has grown: The lineup –…
Tori Amos perfected her ability to combine creative risks with emotional introspection on early discs like 1996’s Boys for Pele, which struck a welcome balance between modern flash and old-fashioned sentimentality. But on Amos’ recent experimental albums, listeners felt curiously removed from the flame-haired faerie queen, largely because their characters…
If Outkast’s Andre 3000 made it safe for hardened hip-hop heads to embrace their inner, sexually ambiguous Prince, will Canadian import Buck 65 open the floodgates for cowboy hats and Hank Williams cassettes? Hip-hop may run through his veins and into his rhythm section, but Buck’s clanky acoustics and gruff,…
In 2002, New York’s Interpol and England’s Doves each made a valiant effort at releasing the year’s best homage to Joy Division: Both Turn on the Bright Lights and The Last Broadcast took gloomy doom-rock atmospherics, gray-sky guitars, and deep-baritone emoting as far as possible without actually covering “Love Will…
Ever meet a jazz snob, the fan or musician who maintains the “obvious” superiority of jazz over other genres? Pianist Jason Moran is the polar opposite — an uncompromising jazz musician unashamed to draw inspiration from areas considered sacrilege by purists. He reimagines works of Afrika Bambaataa, Björk, and classical…
Recalling the sly intimacy of Lou Reed and Maureen Tucker during their quieter moments, the duo of Jared Flamm and Kala Savage provides the serene poetry that makes this Biirdie fly. Though Morning’s dreamy, dusty songs are colored by an array of instruments — rich piano, minimal percussion, wavy synths,…
I don’t know how well you know my songs,” Elvis Costello says over a cell phone that occasionally cuts out as he drives toward Buxton Opera House in Devonshire, England, where he is scheduled to play at the Four Four Time festival. Such knowledge is near-impossible to acquire. Since debuting…
Back with thicker bounce and deeper funk than 2003’s brittle Bazooka Tooth, NYC MC Aesop Rock takes a step toward his musical origins while backpacking ever closer to the perfect flow. Rock’s loopy, wide-mouth baritone is easily one of the most recognizable voices in hip-hop, and its near-manic intensity is…
Six Organs of Admittance is Northern California singer/guitarist Ben Chasny’s long-running solo project that delves into the pagan realm of mystical folk; he also moonlights in psych-rock brutalists Comets on Fire, but this is where he gets his holy glow on. For his eighth album, Chasny recorded in a superior…
I’m not sure why, but when the term progressive is slapped in front of a musical genre, the resulting phrase is instantly rendered trite and meaningless. Some bands, though, push so hard against the envelope that they effectively embody forward motion, building momentum from nothing more than a unique creative…
If you’ve ever checked out any local hip-hop nights from Palm Beach to Miami-Dade, chances are you’ve run into the Secondhand Outfit. MCs Dirty Work and Keenan Smith and producer/DJ Palmeto are staples of the live scene; Dirty Work, a.k.a. Jasper Delaini, also promotes and hosts the regular Rock Bottom…
Tigersmilk is a trio of two Chicago musicians, Rob Mazurek on cornet and laptop electronics and Jason Roebke on acoustic bass, and, from Vancouver, drummer Dylan Van Der Schyff. In the indie-rock zone, Mazurek is best-known orbiting around the Tortoise/Isotope 217 camps, but From the Bottle is far from the…
Rock was looking pretty dead for a second there, and the sound of Broward’s mourning was loud and clear. Within hours of ZETA 94.9 dropping its beloved new rock alternative format and going Hurban — “hispanic urban,” for the Spanglish-impaired — on Friday, February 11, a petition was drawn up…
The 20-year-old Southern rock wrecking ball called Antiseen is one of America’s longest-standing punk rock bands. Its crowd-bashing, whisky-guzzling lead singer, Jeff Clayton, is a man you’d run from in a dark alley (or even a well-lit bar). Arguably even more intimidating is the fact that Clayton filled in as…
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Hailing from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Matisyahu Miller is the original, self-proclaimed “Hassidic Reggae Superstar.” If that sounds kinda fakachta to you, you’re not alone: Time magazine and Carson Daly both found the former Phishhead curious enough to give him some exposure. On his JDub Records debut, Shake Off the Dust…..
Bleubird is not normal. As evidenced by his 2003 release, Sloppy Doctor, the Pembroke Pines rapper is many things — angry, witty, hopeful, hopeless, overstimulated, skeptical — but conventional he ain’t. Check a sampling of the four-minute, post-apocalyptic verbal symphony “When Happening:” “Humans think that they can master telepathy by…
If you’ve never been shaken to the core at a Mogwai show, the perfect consolation is Government Commissions, an hour-plus survey culled from the band’s six best albums, recorded live for the BBC. While a foreign concept here, governmental support of art and culture is common elsewhere, with institutions rather…
If you take the LSD and drone out of the “New Weird America,” you’re left with the prosaic songs of Iron and Wine, the nom de rock of Miami-based family man Sam Beam. Since his musical debut a little more than two years ago, Beam has been more interested in…
