Finally, a reason to break out those checkerboard creepers that have been gathering dust in the back of your closet since the mid-Nineties third-wave ska revival! New York City’s The Toasters are honest-to-goodness American ska pioneers, and they’ve stayed true to the genre’s Jamaican R&B roots while many of their…
Buoyed by contributions to the best-selling soundtracks O Brother, Where Art Thou and Cold Mountain, Alison Krauss and Union Station not only gained recognition as one of America’s hottest contemporary bluegrass bands, but also helped nurture new interest in roots music in general. Still, Krauss and company’s approach is far…
For a city weaned on ultrahard and percussive club music, the soft, earthy productions of Andy Caldwell can sound as if they’re from another planet. And they are — San Francisco, to be exact, where deep house never died and locals pride themselves on nurturing a positive and supportive dance…
Seguenon Koné, a master balafonist from Ivory Coast, once toured with Jimmy Buffett. Now he’s the creative director of Le Ballet Ivoire Spectacle, an African music and dance ensemble that currently performs five shows a day at Walt Disney World in Orlando. His new disc, Afro Beat, showcases traditional rhythms,…
Fridays and Saturdays, Soho Lounge Ryan Evans is one of the signature personalities in the downtown/Design District club circuit, a DJ/scenester spreading the rock-dance gospel. Starting out at Revolver, he has spun New Wave hits at Vice, landed a few gigs at Rokbar last year, and has journeyed out to…
In my most recent column (“Bits and Pieces,” January 20), I wrote about Richard Larralde’s efforts to revive The Alley, a rock club in Little Havana. After closing the place in October, he brought in Jason Lobel and Leo Valencia, and subsequently threw a handful of shows in anticipation of…
I have a new thing,” Pee Wee Ellis, the legendary sax man and bandleader of James Brown’s JBs for much of the Sixties, rasps over the phone from his home in England, where he works with fellow legends such as Van Morrison and Oumou Sangare. “It’s called ösmunk,'” he says…
With the release of 2002’s lavishly produced opus Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Conor Oberst, a.k.a. Bright Eyes, reaped a flood of critical kudos and a sales breakthrough that led some to dub him the golden boy of the indie legions. He rode the momentum with last…
With the indie rock generation coming of age, it is only fitting that its standard-bearers would advance from the aggressively intellectual postpunk screeds of youth to the grandiose postgraduate statements that come with maturity and hubris. But …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead has always been…
On Push the Button, The Chemical Brothers’ stylistic pendulum swings away from “psychedelic” towards a “party” vibe, with mixed results. Q-Tip’s lethargic cadence sinks the dynamics-challenged “Galvanize,” and the token Eastern chug of “Marvo Ging” reeks of so much rote experimentalism that it begs for a vicious remixing. Yet group…
The UK’s Lemon Jelly (Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen) debuted in 2001 with Lemonjelly.ky and instantly became favorites of the post-raver era. But its album (following 2002’s Lost Horizons) is an express ticket out of its typically snoozy, mellow groove territory into something more electric. Confined to sampled sounds from…
With songwriting partner Nicolas Fromageau, Frenchman Anthony Gonzales composed 2003’s highly lauded Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, an album of supernal, keyboard-filtered, foot pedal-chipped, postrock hymnals. Fans of My Bloody Valentine, Jean Michel Jarre, and Parisian children’s choirs could all find something to appreciate. Now Gonzales sans Fromageau…
Since 1979’s harrowing Broken English, the latter phase of Marianne Faithfull’s recording career has been marked by a coarse, confessional approach. But her first new effort in three years is a somewhat easier pill to swallow. With contributions from Nick Cave, composer/arranger Hal Wilner, Blur’s Damon Albarn, and PJ Harvey,…
Once infamously dubbed (s)Low, the decade-old Duluth, Minnesota, trio Low may well flummox you with its seventh album. Whereas its overriding impetus was once plaintive and austere, The Great Destroyer holds firm under the sway of what you’d expect from a tightly coiled lion: menacing and wiry while generating enough…
For the past ten years, Buck 65 has been a B-boy, confessional rapper and hip-hop bluesman while gathering acclaim in his native Canada and, now, here in the States. This Right Here Is Buck 65, however, introduces him to Americans as the “talkin’ honky,” bypassing other works to begin at…
First the bad news: Local Latin alterna-rockers The Green Room are no more. The good news is they’ve been reborn as Mejia, named after frontman Jorge Mejia, and are introducing their latest album, Allá En El Monte, with a show at Power Studios (yes, that place) that’s being filmed for…
As a card-carrying member of Germany’s Sonar Kollektiv, Steffen “Dixon” Berkhahn spins and makes the kind of soulfully blissed-out jams fans of Jazzanova have come to expect. But unlike that better-known group, he champions four-to-the-floor grooves, remixing artists such as Fauna Flash and Atjazz into Rhodes-inspired beats that reverberate with…
Say what you will about roots rocker Steve Earle; his reputation as an irascible insurgent is well-founded. In a career spanning nearly two decades, he’s been labeled an outlaw and renegade on one hand, a musical savior on the other; a melding of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, and Hank Williams…
In a recent issue of Rolling Stone, Snoop Dogg was portrayed as a brand, a man who uses his persona to sell all kinds of products, from adult DVDs (Girls Gone Wild) to Internet providers (AOL). It’s probably the most accurate allegory for the multiple roles any successful artist must…
For all the acrimony and backbiting The Iconz’s demise caused, the once-ascendant conglomerate continues to yield prospects. Luc Duc was the first, debuting with In My Own World back in 2002. That album didn’t perform up to expectations, though, so he’s back on the grind, issuing mixtapes and building up…
Mondays, The District The Brass King is virtually synonymous with the Miami soul scene. Best known as the resident DJ at the Funk Jazz Lounge, Bekay has defected to Mello Mondays, the hot new spoken-word event at The District. He has also been spreading his collection of exclusive tracks, rare…
Every year, music editors around the nation settle down to the same task. They construct a list of “hot” artists to watch. And every year, that freshly minted crop gets ready to make it big, just like everyone said they would. Then what happens? They line up like sacrificial lambs…
