In the early Nineties, The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” took cheeky vocal samples and mushroomed them into something stranger and spacier. While rhythmically rooted in house music, Alex Paterson and crew dosed it with stoned dub and UK prog, even goofing on Pink Floyd album covers. This dizzying mixture of…
The pied piper of yellowcake R&B returns to his masterwork, the 35-minute pop opera that brazenly defies dramatic structure, radio formatting, and just plain good sense. Redneck bumpkins impregnated by anatomically “blessed” midgets, Omar from The Wire, and a bloodied brother-in-law are all afoot in what the DVD packaging ominously…
The first lady of Terror Squad knows that leaning back is no substitute for dancing. But she’s also undemanding: Her chorus command to “Put your right hand up, put your left hand up” is easier than the hokey pokey. Swizz’s production imagines Scott Storch in a suit; it’s what happens…
Much more of a street banger than, say, “Killing Me Softly” was, “Take It Easy” marks the Fugees’ forceful return to the scene after almost a decade apart. They’ve been saving up a lot of vitriol for the rampant deception and fake thuggery in the music industry: “Souls controlling robbery/Total…
Bussa Bust has the audacity to say, “‘Ey yo, Swizz, I don’t think they’re ready for this shit,” at the beginning of his very own quiet-tech track, “Touch It.” Oh yeah, we just can’t handle Swizz sampling the vocals of Daft Punk’s “Technologic” over that minimal-harsh dynamic that’s so present…
In the increasing conceptual and spectacle-laden world of indie music, few bands are willing to simply succeed or fail solely on the strength of their songs. Sybris, a strangely average-looking quartet from Chicago, breaks from its contemporaries on its self-titled 2005 debut with a batch of songs drenched in Smashing…
Since its inception in the Nineties, Converge has been on a path frequently dotted with the telltale signs of your average American aggro-hardcore band: blood, sweat, broken instruments/ bones, and a rabid testosterone-fueled following. Taking cues from the finest punk, metal, and hardcore, Converge continues to produce solid albums and…
Go ahead — roll your eyes at Bono’s persistent messianic complex. But maybe the guy’s got good reason to think he’s bigger than Jesus. Don’t forget, Jesus has had 2000 years to firm up his reputation, while the U2 singer has only been alive since 1960. And — sorry, Pat…
Spanish singer Pau Donés and his fusion band Jarabe de Palo prove on their latest album, Un Metro Cuadrado, that thinking inside the box can be as creative as thinking outside it. “It’s important that people have a little space where they can go and be themselves,” Donés explains of…
Cell phone cameras. MP3-playing sunglasses. Laser-pointing, voice-recording, deionizing salad spinners. Thanks a lot, technology — now everything that does anything does something else too. The musical equivalent is, of course, the Benevento-Russo Duo, the Brooklyn-based drums ‘n’ keys outfit that’s the Optimus Prime of genre-crushing hybrid bands. With a well-practiced…
Making a bid for the old/new South, Memphis’s Triple 6 shockingly tones down its shout-heavy choruses and plays everything else the Southern sound was and will be: bounce beats; fresh-to-def stutter drums; lilting and jazzy (pha) soul hooks; string-driven MIDI presets; and, best of all, hopscotch nursery-rhyme flows. No longer…
On its 2003 debut, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, Metric struck a balance between fashionably frayed postpunk and buoyant indie pop, carving out a comfortable niche between two self-consciously arty genres. Live It Out, the band’s sophomore release, stands in sharp contrast to Where Are You Now?, whose…
Orlando’s DJ Baby Anne delivers the breaks end of Assault & Battery, and her fixation on deep, winding Miami bass results in a slightly harder product than Jen Lasher’s electro half. The squealing laser tag bursts of Product 01’s “I Like It Now” are sandwiched by Anne’s own “Freaks Groove”…
Though Mendez might have figured out what he wants to do with his life — the Long Beach native ditched a major in physics to pursue a career in music — he doesn’t appear to have settled on a particular genre just yet. He whiles away Girlfriend weighing his stylistic…
Norwegian singer Annie debuted this year with the breakthrough electro pop album Anniemal. But this mix CD — from the vaunted DJ Kicks series — is an altogether different beast from that pop effort. Annie digs Eighties postpunk groups such as Bow Wow Wow (with the classic “I Want Candy”)…
Hustler’s ambition or gangsta’s therapy? Fiddy’s heart’s on his sleeve: “I need you I need you to hate me,” he admits, his doom-low voice betraying his existential dread by the second. “Niggas around me so cold my heart done froze up.” After flipping 32 hot bars of drug metaphor —…
They harmonize together so beautifully they sound like brothers from another mother, but Jazze Pha and Cee-Lo are really just brothers in smooth soul funk. This is definitely for the ladies, but it swings on a dance floor well, so fellas can appreciate it. Drink in the island vibes of…
With their swooshing synths and stuttering, coked-out drums, Miami production duo Cool and Dre are the latest of hip-hop’s metrosexual beatsmiths-turned-MCs (other offenders include the man in pink — Kanye West — and Gwen Stefani’s new boy toy, Pharrell Williams). “Naomi,” as you might have guessed, is their tribute to…
The misunderstood phenomenon of XBXRX is best explained after a large glass of tequila and a handful of barbiturates. Imagine the creative noise manipulations of mid-Nineties anarchic noisemaster Flammable Child thawed by the artistic impulses of Melt Banana and finally tempered by the technological misuses of the Residents. XBXRX has…
On Carnaval Eletronico, Brazilian Daniela Mercury commissioned electronic DJs to retrofit classic compositions such as Gilberto Gil’s “Amor de Carnaval” with snappy, electro beams. The songs manage to balance sensuous rhythms with complex modern arrangements. “I have always been eclectic,” Mercury says. “Axé is still a genre in development, and…
Los Lonely Boys are a trio of brothers — Henry, Jojo, and Ringo Garza, Jr. — rocking out of the great state of Texas with a tornadolike twist of classic American rock (the Chuck Berry kind), conjunto, country and western, Tex-Mex, and classic Latin American rock (the Carlos Santana kind)…
Think about South Florida’s intimate relationship with Cuba and the Caribbean and the influence it has had on our indigenous music scene. The same sort of cross-cultural, stylistic leg-humping goes on in Southern California across the Mexican-American border, and there’s no better example than L.A.’s Ozomatli. The bilingual, genre-smashing, Latin-funk-rock-rap…
