Robi Draco Rosa is best known among Anglos as the co-writer of Ricky Martin’s breakthrough hit, “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” But even though he’s spent most of his adult life trying to bury the Menudo curse, we Latinos know the truth: He once belonged to the most insufferable “band” in…
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 a small one, the kind a struggling musician might live in: beds without box springs, furniture without cushions, and a…
A handful of fans peers into the backstage area of the Pepsi-sponsored main stage at the Calle Ocho 2004 street festival. A light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in her mid-thirties sits in a wheelchair, beckoning along with her companions to a young black man in spiffy urban street wear standing near…
On Friday afternoon, March 19, I sat on a bed in an Omni Hotel room in Austin, Texas, and picked up my cell phone, preparing to call Murs. For the past two weeks I had been trying to arrange an interview with the L.A.-based MC, who just released a new…
The surprising thing about Seventies progressive rock was its popularity. Epic rock operas laden with poesy, costumes, keyboards, and attempts to appropriate jazz and classical music through guitar and drum solos were topping the charts. Everyday people bought into this willfully pretentious music of ideas. They were proud to call…
Stargazing, the third album from Corin Dingley and Andy Jenks, a Bristol, England-based duo who initially debuted on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label, sees them delving into their classic songwriter roots. Less of a trip-hop affair than their previous records, Stargazing (Special Edition) — a revamped U.S. version of the original…
So what guarantees the perfect pop hit? A riveting refrain? An irresistible beat? Perhaps a dazzling arrangement, insightful lyrics, or a captivating chorus? In fact there’s no definitive formula. If there were, they couldn’t build enough banks to stash the cash spawned by those reaping its benefits. That said, Owsley’s…
Led Zeppelin was a truly mystical band. Nobody else mixed up decadent, witchy lyrics with overdriven guitars and pastoral folk influences such as Pentangle and Incredible String Band so well. The Japanese collective Ghost understands this cosmology and has applied its knowledge to Hypnotic Underworld, one of the heaviest psychedelic…
For numerous indie bands, Bee Hives, recorded between Broken Social Scene’s cerebral debut Feel Good Lost and its pop-friendly followup You Forgot It in People, would be a masterstroke. But for these Canadians, still glowing from last year’s breakout success, it’s simply a stretch of sometimes enchanting songs recorded with…
It was so easy to despise the Vines when they emerged like creatures from the garage lagoon back in 2002 with Highly Evolved. The Australian-turned-Los Angeles quartet was jammed down our throat ad nauseam; they had a nitwit, room-trashing poseur of a frontman in Craig Nicholls; and they unabashedly ransacked…
If dads in the Midwest knew what some of their daughters were doing on South Beach, their meta-seismic cardiac arrests would cause tidal waves across Lake Michigan. Every adventure for the throngs of college students hitting our beaches this month will assuredly end in a bedroom romp or rounds of…
On the evening of Saturday, February 28, as the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, braced itself for a possible rebel attack, and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide defiantly clung to power for a few more hours, a small and peaceful demonstration took place in Miami’s own Little Haiti. Dozens of protesters marched on…
They’re changing the DJs at the annual Ultra Music Festival, held on Saturday, March 6. Sweat soaking through the seat of his khaki pants, Sander Kleinenberg gets ready to give up the decks at 4:45 p.m. to his pal Pete Tong, one of several big-name DJs scheduled to take the…
The word “remix” almost invariably implies radical surgery that drastically alters the cosmetics of a performance. But every once in a while the procedure turns out to be surprisingly noninvasive. Take Tangle Eye’s re-envisioning of eleven classic Alan Lomax folk recordings that were recently reissued as part of Rounder Records’…
The postpunk revival is the new grunge. Not since the early days of Nirvana and Soundgarden have a group of bands seemed so intent on cultivating a retro aesthetic. There’s nothing wrong with wearing your influences on your sleeve, but these revivalists — led by the Strokes, Interpol, the Rapture,…
The Cooper Temple Clause, a six-piece touted as yet another “next big thing” from the U.K., may actually live up to the hype. Their second full-length, Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose, is the first to be released domestically, just in time for a reprieve from…
90 Day Men make great piano-centralized rock colored with vocals reminiscent of Mike Patton’s Tomahawk coming down on a grandmother’s couch in broad daylight. The Windy City quartet resembles few bands, except for TV on the Radio, and only because both combine stark and dodgy originality with slightly unsettling introspection…
Goodbye skronky art-noise, hello lush dream-pop! Such a makeover worked wonders for Mercury Rev, and now Blonde Redhead has fully embraced its collective inner softie on Misery is a Butterfly, the band’s sixth studio album. The transformation might not be quite as jarring to steady followers of the New York-based…
When TV on the Radio dropped its 2003 EP Young Liars, music magazine junkies witnessed a pause in the incessant splurge of cool tagging. Here was a band, from Brooklyn no less, that sidesteps this decade’s music/fashion death-race with a calm, thoughtful maturity that manifests itself equally well in ink…
When It Falls sounds like an extension of a theme first explored on Zero 7’s acclaimed debut, Simple Things. The electronic soul, produced by Sam Hardaker and Henry Binns, vibrates with warmth, and the vocalists, Sia Furler and Sophie Barker, burn slow elocution over it until the music becomes a…
I woke up in a strange bed last week on Wednesday, surrounded by empty baggies, wondering where the last five days of my life went. That’s a sign of a good Winter Music Conference. But as fun as it was, this year felt like a routine compared with others. For…
Humberto Guida is missing in action and presumed bedded. Our “BuzzIn” columnist was last spotted just after midnight outside the V.I.P. area at the Ultra Music Festival, the official opening party for the sixteenth annual Winter Music Conference. Guida’s pupils were the size of Frisbees, and he repeatedly brandished a…
