Things you need to know about Mexican singer and actress Pilar Montenegro: She recently set a record in the music world by topping Billboard’s Latin charts for eleven consecutive weeks with her hit song “Quítame Ese Hombre” (literally, “Take That Man Away From Me”); her album Desahogo (Release) is a…
Love Jewel. Hate Jewel. Fear her manipulative mom. Laugh at her poetry. Give her props for not fixing that snaggletooth. Marvel at her staying power. Almost seven years ago, I interviewed the fresh-from-Alaska Jewel Kilcher, before she’d sold many copies of her first album. At the time, she’d just parked…
It’s the challenge DJ Simply Jeff loves. Perhaps the leading authority on the dance-music genre known as breakbeats, the California native just won’t let electronic music sink in a 4/4 sea. Instead the prolific DJ spreads around the recognizable styles of house and techno and slices the known into a…
“Andan Diciendo por Ahi” (“They Go Around Saying”), a guaguancó written by Albita Rodriguez, denounces gossips and affirms the Cuban singer/songwriter’s resilience despite speculation by busybodies about her professional and personal life. Funny and menacing, the rowdy rumba chastises liars with the threat “I’ll cut your tongue off” and warns…
If you don’t believe that underground hip-hop is enjoying a serious renaissance, just listen to El-P’s brilliant solo debut. Maybe “enjoying” is the wrong word: The oh-so-appropriately-titled album doesn’t make it sound as though it’s enjoying much of anything, save for the ruin of listener-friendly mainstream rap. In the midst…
Oh, what haunted places some songwriters wander. Smog, Cat Power, Sparklehorse — these artists’ songs sound as though they were carried over by a skip on the river Styx. You can add Nina Nastasia to that list. The Blackened Air is a frightening and gorgeous piece of work, notes from…
Arlo is a band of the kind of back-porch rockers that speed through a 30-minute set on One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer night at your local club, so it makes sense that the group is named for its Tuesday-night soundman back in L.A. Arlo’s second LP, Stab the Unstoppable…
Close your eyes and you can picture the scene. Ominous piano thunder rolls as the musicians approach their instruments, dank amber silhouettes. Electronic sparkles signal the drums and ignite the rhythm. Bright white house lights pop and flood the room, synchronized with the guitar melody. “Words,” the opening track of…
Last November, when the Argentinean government blocked access to everyone’s bank accounts and the national economy collapsed, rock band Los Piojos still managed to fill a 40,000-seat soccer stadium. It should come as no surprise, then, that the rockeros whose name means lice played to sold-out crowds of Argentinean expatriates…
In 30 years the Argentine audience will end up signing autographs, predicts Ratones Paranoicos singer Juan Sebastian “Juanse” Gutierrez. The emotional crowds who greet every Argentine artist who ventures to the United States will become stars in their own right, he insists, not only in Miami but across the globe…
Okay, so there wasn’t an overwhelming shout-out over the music on Memorial Day weekend; maybe the eclectic mix for the second annual Soul Beach Music Festival this weekend will ease some eardrums. The list of performers runs the gamut from Cameo, Luther Vandross, and Morris Day and the Time to…
“When you’re playing music that has some humor to it, you can make all the mistakes you want,” offers Chris DeAngelis of the Miami band Avenging Lawnmowers of Justice. “With serious music, one mistake and they hate you.” By that yardstick, the ‘Vengers should be allowed more than their fair…
With songs like “Martian Martians,” “I’m a Little Aeroplane,” and “Abominable Snowman in the Market,” it’s hard to believe that troubadour Jonathan Richman played such an important role in the burgeoning punk movement of the 1970s. But the Talking Heads, Television, and even the Sex Pistols (they covered the Richman…
J.G. Thirwell creates a new moniker for each of his musical outings — Foetus for the pioneering whipsmart industrial urges, Baby Zizanie for the electric and eclectic, Manorexia inadvertently scoring the sequel to They Live, the synopsis of which still resides just behind John Carpenter’s left eye. And now Thirwell’s…
If Fritz Lang were still alive and doing straight-to-video work, he might choose Slowdeck to score his films. Not that Slowdeck executes at a B-level, but there is something cinematically subterranean about this sound. Even the LP’s title, Multiple Offenses, invokes visions of desperate thugs escaping down chiaroscuro alleyways, trench…
It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, the former guitarist of the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, join forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and…
All five members of this Seattle-based band — whose best reference point might be Blondie meets At the Drive-In — have roots deep-seeded in punk rock. Bassist-vocalist Derek Fudesco played with the Murder City Devils for more than five years, and lead singer Andrea Zollo, his girlfriend, sang in Death…
Did you ever blast the transistor under your pillow loud enough to risk your mom storming in? How long has it been since you’ve heard a hit? A tune so hot it can even make you believe you’re devastatingly attractive screaming it at the intersection? If you can’t remember, fire…
Mexico City’s Los De Abajo is a good old-fashioned ideologically in-your-face punk band. Case in point, “Screw,” where The Downtrodden come with a confrontational politics that exposes the death-squad/drug-dealer thug as the face of the government on the ground. All this is set to a rapid-fire ska-flavored beat. Except upon…
Once the Goths get enchanted with you, they never let you go. Loyal and a tad masochistic, Goths love their icons till death, even if their icons don’t love them back. Which is why Peter Murphy can hide out in Turkey reading Rumi, release albums only sporadically, have those albums…
It sure feels like genuine 1970s nostalgia as Geraldo Pino testifies, “Get down you people. We’ve got a brand-new gal in town.” The organ burbles heatedly in the foreground. The Fender bass bounces a melodic riff off a wah-wah rhythm guitar. But as the song grinds on, it might not…
A boy gets tired, it’s true. Boys grow up, get older, move on. But not Bambi. Her blond hair always shines. Her baby-doll eyes always glisten. Her soft voice soothes, sweet-talks, seduces. And her curves — as impressive as the Montana peaks and valleys where she was raised — well,…
