The nom de plume The Mighty Sparrow has proven apt for Slinger Francisco. The singer’s birthplace — Grand Roy, Grenada, a country village better known for crops than calypso — is as unassuming as his winged namesake. But once Sparrow moved to Trinidad in the Fifties, he spread his wings…
Though it’s usually overshadowed by rap, an earlier form of black music is still alive in the classic twin cities of soul — Detroit, where singer Dwele resides, and Philadelphia, home to poet/DJ/producer Rich Medina. Dwele’s 2003 debut, Subject, produced a minor R&B hit with “Find a Way” — a…
Impulsive! is anything but, slowly incubating a few years after Madlib’s Shades of Blue plundered the Blue Note catalogue. While the Note trafficked in cool crooners and hard bop, Impulse’s jazz was as fiery and dark as its orange-and-black color scheme suggested. RZA doesn’t match the swagger of Charles Mingus’s…
Don’t fret if you’ve got no bloody idea what draped up and dripped out means; it’ll soon be clear. By then, this Houston legend will already have you reciting the chorus and throwing elbows high in the air as he puts out another song of pride for Texas rap and…
Jennings’s bittersweet tale of a vicarious romantic will make married women swoon and lonely men cry. Sure, the music is syrupy-slow R&B schmaltz, but you have to give it up to Jennings for making the point that a good woman will be there “even when those twenties stop spinning.” Ladies,…
Can they kick it? Yes, they can. Picking up from their last time working together (Stefani’s massive cheerleader-funkin’ “Hollaback Girl”), Pharrell concocts an ultrasaucy slice of pop for Stefani’s extra-girlie vocals. It’s all very dumb — dumb meaning smart, not dumb meaning dumb…
Felix Da Housecat never met a trend he didn’t want to shack up with. Thanks to its churning guitar and hi-hat clatter on the downbeat, “Tweak!” rocks and stomps. But mostly it sucks — call it the house of a jealous producer. We’re supposed to marvel at this endlessly tweaked…
Trent Reznor has tantrummed his way back to the charts with “The Hand That Feeds,” the fiercely in-form single from Nine Inch Nails’ five-year-plan album, With Teeth. But the NIN experience — fostered equally by Reznor’s obsessive attention to visual detail and a rapaciously devoted online fan base — is…
Yeah, prank calls and shock jocks go together like Fred and Barney, peanut butter and jelly, or Bush and bullshit. But you gotta give El Zol 95.7 DJs Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero their due: No one else can claim to have called Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez while pretending to…
French DJ Caroline “Miss Kittin” Herve gained notoriety in the late Nineties/early Aughts for her droll, stilted delivery on swaggering collaborations with Swiss producer the Hacker and electroclash-associated DJs such as Felix Da Housecat. Her cocaine catcalls and limousine fuck-fests captured an urban Zeitgeist that was exhilarating, if not exactly…
Attending an Aimee Mann show is no different from flipping a coin. Some nights she’s on — clouds part, angels sing, and souls are saved; while others … well, you’re left scratching your head as to why you didn’t just order Thai take-out instead. Let’s hope the recent release of…
Sure, Larry David can’t classify Broadway as “fierce” with a straight face, but that lame adjective develops a braking system of italics before the cocaine-crazed metal god that is Death from Above 1979. It’s simple really: One bass player and one drummer from Toronto duck under the equal sign, siege…
You’d be forgiven for assuming Steve Lawler is a bit of a drama king. The pioneer of a dance music subgenre known as twisted house, Lawler has developed a sound that is shifty and mercurial — morphing from the make-no-apologies swagger of disco to wiry knots of tech-house before settling…
In the annals of geezer rock, nothing matches the Rolling Stones’ reputation for sex, scandal, outrage, and sheer offensiveness. Long before bullshit blowhards like Noel and Liam Gallagher, the Sex Pistols, and Marilyn Manson began posturing and pontificating, the Stones set the standard for decadence and debauchery. For more than…
Lil’ Kim’s Naked Truth makes a bold move: no breasts on the cover. In light of all her drama, the gimmick comes easy: lustful to lyrical; hustler to humble; Coco Chanel to Dave Chappelle. Forget ashy to classy — this Cartier bustier millionaire went from honey to money to funny…
While New Orleans works to rebuild itself, one of its most legendary sons — Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, who was among the primary architects of the city’s vibrant musical culture — has been resurrected via this astonishing seven-disc, 128-track box set. It’s a fully restored, remastered, and complete version of…
With seven albums and fourteen years under their belt, the swashbuckling Aussie bandmates of Dirty Three have finally found their land legs on Cinder. Always adept at conjuring the heaving swells of oceanic drifts and tides, Dirty Three has hedged its extended instrumental sprawls so as to hew closer to…
What do you do when everyone’s counting on you to rouse intelligent dance music (IDM) out of its years-long slumber? If you’re the beloved Scottish duo Boards of Canada, you sit cross-legged, strumming your guitar or tapping on a dusty drum machine. Although they’ve never been as Exacto-happy as their…
Smart: Mary’s command at the beginning of her take on Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” — “Gimme that guitar, like the original joint” — is obeyed. Not smart: The cover eschews the disco 4/4 beat for a wafer-thin break that sounds geriatric compared to the adult-friendly (albeit brilliant) original. Mary,…
He might not have Taye Diggs’s abs, but producer Rich Harrison gives Toni Braxton exactly what she needs to get her groove back on “Take This Ring,” which counts as her best track since 2000’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough.” Against subdued go-go that would befuddle Amerie, Brax takes off her…
Shania (speaking for some Desperate Housewives), frustrated by the inscrutability of men, condemns them to objectified accessorial status, her laughter over this revelation barely disguising her contempt. Mutt Lange is like a pair of glass slippers, I reckon…
A jingling keyboard, courtesy of Eddie Kendricks’s “Intimate Friends,” is a fine thing on which to base a song; TV-as-lovespeak wordplay (“Stay tuned!” “Technical difficulties!”) is not. A creepily gleeful Alicia Keys does both on the pretentious “Unbreakable,” unconvincingly casting herself as a nonceleb who mulls over modeling her relationship…
