Metal isn’t back. And it isn’t new (nu?). And it was never meant to be happy or poppy or goofy or heartfelt or bubble-gummy like half the digestible metal acts the music industry is packing into kids’ lunches each day. But somehow, metal has become ironic, and its apocalyptic and…
To boldy go… where no man ever really wants to unless he’s trying to get out of trouble or into your pants. That’s where Air Supply leaders Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock have staked out their creative territory for nearly 30 years. Call them anything you want — softies, saccharine…
Inside the Miami Shores home where Sam Beam, better-known as Iron and Wine, writes and records, he generally secludes himself from the rest of the city. The house is small, the kind a struggling musician might live in: beds without box springs, furniture without cushions, and lawns for driveways. There’s…
John Hughes really needs to come out of hiding, because Volcano, I’m Still Excited!! has orchestrated a debut album that has all the basic ingredients for a Hughesian soundtrack: unrequited love, heartbreak, desperation, and sweetly raging hormones. The New York-based band’s penchant for catchy, pretty pop songs reinforces this theory,…
On the phone, Michelle Russo is a salt-of-the-earth Italian girl, the daughter of a detective with a little bit of Jersey in her voice. In person, she¹s the beautiful blond whom snowbirds go clubbing in South Beach to see. And she can sing too. Russo is half of the pop-rock…
As the great Steve Perry once said, ³Don’t stop believin’/Just hold on to that feelin’ “; A truly inspirational phrase from an inspirational band. But it’s hard to keep believin¹ when the only feelin¹ you’ve got to hold on to is, say, the catharsis of hearing Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation…
If you really want to learn about the street slang all the kids are so hip to these days, it helps to go straight to the source. Not MTV. Not Carson Daly. I’m talking about the dangerous urban jungle known as Fort Lauderdale beach during spring break. Some people are…
Hot damn! Another concept album. With recent releases like the Mars Volta’s De-Loused in the Comatorium, Cursive’s The Ugly Organ, and Racebannon’s Satan’s Kickin’ Yr Dick In, the gears on this idea are starting to get stripped — as if they weren’t already eroded enough in the ’70s. What saves…
So good it’s, ahem, illegal. The Beatles’ White Album meets Jay-Z’s The Black Album on the way to the courthouse, where EMI’s lawyers lie in wait with cease-and-desist orders to protect copyright holders who want to fuck up what a bedroom DJ funked up on a Christmas Eve lark. The…
Westside Connection — the hefty rap trio of Ice Cube, Mack 10, and WC — re-emerges with Terrorist Threats, arriving seven years after its bold and brutal debut, Bow Down. Shit done change since 1996, when Cube’s West Coast gangsta paradise of swaying palm trees, fine-ass hos, and souped-up lowriders…
The liner notes to TV on the Radio’s debut album credit multi-instrumentalist/producer David Andrew Sitek as “music-maker.” Not “guitarist” or “singer” or “beat-maker” — “music-maker,” as simple as that. This accurately describes how this post-punk/dance music sounds: not just simple but deceptively simple. Based in Brooklyn, the trio uses its…
In 1947, American bop luminary Dizzy Gillespie and his big band performed with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo as a featured guest. Though rightfully cited as a significant pivot point in the evolution of the form known today as “Latin jazz,” this moment is one of many in which jazz and…
“I don’t care to do the traditional things a band does, like playing 1,000 shows,” says See Venus vocalist Rocky Ordoñez, who, along with three band cohorts, sits in her Kendall apartment, which is decorated college dorm-style using bits and pieces from anything salvageable. “We started [the band] to make…
In a small, cramped room in his Lake Worth home, Scott Marino is digging through his collection of old punk cassettes with a smile, and it’s no wonder. The tapes read like an obit of SoFla bands: Jack Off Jill, Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa, and Radiobaghdad. In addition to a maze…
The Casual Dots sound exactly how you would expect a group associated with incestuous indie stalwart Kill Rock Stars to sound — which is both good and bad. Their debut’s jumble of angular guitar shards (“Derailing”), wobbly country torch songs (“I’ll Dry My Tears”), and slack-jawed strumming (“Flowers”) maintains the…
Ohio is known more for Camaros and acid-washed jeans than a wealth of musical diversity, but when Ohio native Maggie Green tired of studying classical piano and the works of old, dead dudes like Mozart at Michigan State, she turned her attention to jazz, which in turn led to learning Portuguese jazz standards. That¹s right — she¹s not afraid to sing a Brazilian samba, folks. She even dipped into Russian opera in college, which is way more impressive than perfecting a keg stand. Her group, Canto Poetico, has performed across the Midwest, and now she brings her solo show to South Florida. Check her out at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 21, at Alligator Alley (1321 E. Commercial Blvd., Fort Lauderdale). Admission is free. Call 954-771-2220. — Audra Schroeder
There was a time, back in the day (³day² meaning two or three years ago), when you couldn¹t turn over your pet rock without seeing the name the Dillengers. But the West Palm Beach-based surf-rock trio finally got the heck out of Dodge and headed for the smoggier pastures of…
One from the Heart stands as one of Hollywood’s most famous disasters. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola as an “antidote” to his Apocalypse Now, it was his only musical and was almost universally panned upon its release in 1982. It vanished from theaters in less than two weeks,…
Recently, the venerable Rolling Stone published a list of its top 500 albums of all time. Slayer’s Reign in Blood did not make it, nor did any of Slayer’s ten other albums or EPs. Everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion/asshole, but honestly, no Reign in Blood? Peter Wolf (who?)…
Existence, according to Henry Miller, is an ovarian trolley, a runaway treadmill full of yolk-like crap that could care less how it gets incarnated. Birth, identity, and death are inconsequential; it’s the motion itself that has any chance of meaning anything. On As the Eternal Cowboy, Tom Gabel of the…
Cee-Lo Green’s freakadelic solo debut may have established him as a latter-day George Clinton, but he still has the common sense he was born with. A line from his follow-up to 2002’s Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections summarizes his new philosophy: “You’re most likely to go broke if you…
We don’t rehearse,” deadpans Black 47 leader Larry Kirwan. A rowdy bar band if there ever was one, Black 47 is an audaciously vibrant, politically charged, gurgling hodge podge of Celtic and American folk, country, swing jazz, reggae, and hip-hop. As Kirwan suggests, the band likes its edges rough, even…
