VP’s Reggae Gold 2002 compilation is a blend of all the right ingredients: a selective combination of powerful producers, talented artists, and radio-poised hits. “Give It to Her” by the talented team of Tanto Metro & Devonte strikes that perfect balance of party funk and soulful contamination. Devonte’s heart-wrenching voice…
Though the band members dis critics — even those who give them good ink — on their Website, I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is the best record of 30footFALL’s nearly decade-long career. Granted I haven’t heard any of their eight previous releases or approximately twenty…
Given the current craze for anything in a mop-top and skinny tie, it will be no surprise if Kindercore Records’ the Agenda becomes the next MTV mod-revival darling. The music industry is gaga for garage rock, and the Agenda fits the bill (dollar signs were visible between the lines of…
Whatever you call the Damn Personals, please, please don’t refer to them as the saviors of rock and roll, even if their retro indie rock is the stuff that makes lazy music critics sling the clichéd term at bands like the Strokes, White Stripes, and the Hives. Working their way…
Beneath the shimmery dresses and couture suits, Miamians are social animals driven into the night by the basic need to connect. No one really likes to be at home on a city weekend, thumbing through old high school pictures. It’s just that lavish fêtes and glamorous grand openings now fulfill…
Ruben Blades has always made music that is a record of his time. In representing the soul of a marginal Latin American culture that has since moved into the mainstream, his great albums of the Seventies and Eighties were catalysts for both the global popularization of salsa and for contemporary…
“I’m like the only Latin woman in hip-hop,” declares radio personality/rapper Angie Martinez. Hmmm, what about fellow Puerto Rican rapper Ivy Queen? “Maybe this will make it easier for her,” Martinez concedes. “Her time hasn’t come yet.” Martinez believes in the importance of role models, so maybe that’s why she…
It happens to the best of us. Jerry Rivera, the onetime salsa wunderkind famous for singing about his baby face (and for exclaiming in a petulant tone “Baby!”), is not quite so babyish anymore. “A little kid called me sir,” he exclaims in shock. Still safely under 30, Rivera is…
The last time Gonzalo Rubalcaba played for a South Florida audience, conditions weren’t exactly ripe for a good performance by the classically trained jazz pianist, born in Cuba but based in Coral Springs since 1996. And we’re not talking politics this time, or inclement weather. It was a little more…
A new Levi’s commercial shows a couple plunging their car into murky water to the tune of Air’s “Playground Love.” Techno duo Orbital makes a cameo appearance in this summer’s action film xXx. Though electronica has penetrated every living room in the nation, the electronica scene doesn’t have much to…
It’s 4:25 a.m. when the nightlife vampires stir. The time between late night and sunrise is no place for the faint of party. The weak and weary have already retired their dancing shoes. Only the hard-core remain clubbing. The downtown traffic on NE Eleventh Street thickens. Those not willing to…
The gliding ease of Specialist in All Styles doesn’t even hint at the long and tortuous road that led to its arrival. Orchestra Baobab no longer existed when World Circuit label founder Nick Gold decided that Senegal’s seminal band deserved an album of new material following the success of 2001’s…
Is there something in your eye? Oh, it’s just Carlos Vives, singing “Let me in through your gaze” — you know, the windows to your soul and all that — a lyric from the song and album Déjame Entrar (Let Me In) that earned the Colombian soap-star-turned-vallenato-singer two Latin Grammys…
Hello Miami’s Playboy Mansion, that tribute to all things decadent and carnal. Be it the seductive music and food, the fashionista parade, or French Riviera ambiance, Nikki Beach wants to perpetually swim in a drunken state of glamour. Even on a gray, overcast September Saturday afternoon there’s still a sinful…
Physically finding Manu Chao has never been easy. He’s everywhere, and not. He’s so proud of his ephemeral nature that he even sings about it. In “Desaparecido,” one of the more popular songs he recorded in transit for his 1998 breakthrough album Clandestino, he lets us know, “I’m never there…
In a small room in his Miami Beach home, with an open mike and eight tracks, Sam Beam laid down lush acoustic plucks and whispered vocals, songs capable of rocking you into sweet dreams on the front porch. With lemonade. And if his demo had never ended up penetrating the…
Singer Mayra Caridad Valdés is familiar to international jazz and Cuban music followers from her appearances with Irakere, her famous piano-playing brother Chucho Valdés’s band. With La Diosa del Mar, Mayra Valdés should now cease to be known as “sister of Chucho” and be recognized as a prominent artist in…
Not as raw as Hell’s Kitchen, not as bouncy as Human Condition, the latest offering from Junkyard DJs Ming & FS, Subway Series, is a funky, flexing display of free-flowing hip-hop and quirky subconscious breaks that waxes poetic through a mechanized playing field. The New York natives maintain mainframe traces…
Buried within the diseased vocals and bloodstained cover art of Everything I Touch Falls to Pieces, the debut album from Chicago hardcore quintet Dead to Fall, are pleas for the right and vengeance for the wrong. While many things fall to pieces on this LP — love, Earth, the band…
Most intelligent men have resigned themselves to the reality that they won’t find their next wife in clubland. The probability is slim to none. Going to Spin, Rain, Jump, Skip, Hop or any other monosyllabic nightclub won’t yield anything at the end of the evening except an expensive bar tab…
An emerging guitarist from Texas, Hadden Sayers bares his knuckles and jabs with powerful blues hooks on his latest Ultrasonic release, unveiling licks that aren’t so much fast as they are tasty and rich, and a voice that beams a maturity extending beyond his years, both lyrically and sonically. Formed…
Many musical theorists squeeze every last synonym and simile into the debate over whether good rock can be irreverent, or irreverent rock good. To this conundrum, one should check one’s hips and lips, and if both are moving, who the fuck cares. Chicago’s OK GO has tortured purists by performing…
