In the early Nineties human beings became interesting again. After the tumultuous trends of New Wave prophylactic pop, hair metal, and glitz-drenched superstars of the Eighties, audiences began turning their attention toward musicians who oozed honesty and fallibility. In multiple arenas of expression, many artists shifted their focus away from…
The tall woman with the leonine mane is wearing black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a teal sleeveless shirt. She leans forward a bit as she lugs two guitar cases and a backpack that appears to be bursting at the seams. She’s not a roadie, but a musician: Amy Carol…
Blondie No Exit (Beyond) 1. Start with a joke: If this isn’t the most anticipated album of the first half of the year, then I’m Amelia Earhart. 2. Follow with dense critical sentence heedless of its own unwieldy syntax: Twenty years after their hip, smart, and pile-driving fusion of rock,…
There’s an age-old joke that MCs at open-mike nights trot out before a particularly torturous act takes the stage. It goes something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, this next act has suffered for their art. Now it’s your turn.” It’s a bit like being a Bob Dylan fan. His Bobness…
Ed Matus has been performing as part of Miami’s music scene long enough to have seen plenty of live-music venues rise and fall. Mostly fall. The 25-year-old guitarist started playing out with his ornate hardcore band, Subliminal Criminal, in 1991. The trio found a home at spots such as Washington…
Hi Fi Killers Jamaica (Loosegroove) The Hi Fi Killers are a duo of DJ/instrumentalists from Seattle. Their 1997 debut, Loaded, and their 1998 followup Possession, combined hip-hop drum loops and turntable scratching with organic brass-section breakdowns and solos. The music strutted and bounced like the soundtrack to an old blaxploitation…
It is late afternoon, Christmas Eve, in Havana. While many of the city’s residents are gathered in living rooms and on patios, awaiting a holiday meal of roast pig, a hearty group of musicians and sound engineers are spending the day at work. They have crowded into the small sound…
Just like the year’s new records, 1998’s rock-and-roll reading found small pleasures in unexpected places, while the much-touted “big events” were ushered in with a resounding plop that echoed throughout the lavatory. As we’ve been doing every year since, ah, okay, 1999, New Times will forgo the usual best and…
Yeah, sure, if you actually remember the Sixties you weren’t really there. True for any era worth remembering. But as long as the person doing the retelling has some idea of what’s important, the results should be okay. It takes real talent to make sex and drugs a dull read…
As the film world’s foremost peddler of nostalgia-driven baby-boomer romanticism, Nora Ephron is acutely aware of the crucial role that music plays in selling her three-hanky tales. The soundtrack to her 1993 megahit Sleepless in Seattle not only enhanced that film’s sentimental mood, it sold more than two million copies…
North Mississippi blues guitarist R.L. Burnside’s new record, Come on In, features drum programming, loops, samples, and remixes by hip white producers such as Alec Empire, Beal Dabbs, and Tom Rothrock (who is credited as main producer on the recording). It sounds like a collision between Burnside’s rural blues drone…
Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs Pharaohization! The Best of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (Rhino) “One, two … one, two, tres, quatro!” It’s one of the greatest, if not the greatest, count-off in rock- and-roll history, an intro so nutty that following it with equally nutty music would…
It’s 2:00 a.m. at Zanzibar. The club’s few attempts at exotic decor: a totem-pole-like wooden sculpture with carved faces, a couple of bar stools covered in zebra-striped upholstery, and two banners suspended from the ceiling, one depicting a caricature of a black man, the other a black woman. Just out…
The Pine Valley Cosmonauts The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills (Bloodshot) Sure, the tribute album is a dead dog. But as long as record labels large and small are gonna keep trying to revive the damn thing, here’s hoping they come off as well as this…
The new Busta Rhymes album arrived in stores with the fanfare traditionally reserved for a royal wedding. Titled ELE (it stands for Extinction Level Event, and it’s nicked from the comet-meets-Earth film Deep Impact) Busta’s third album finds the flamboyant “Strong Island” rapper delivering a series of goony, cartoonish raps,…
The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; She’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your…
The Cardigans Gran Turismo (Mercury) This disc has been getting a lot of negative reviews, all undeserved. The Cardigans are from Sweden, have a cute, blond female singer, and scored a big international hit with the airy “Lovefool,” included on the teenybopper soundtrack to 1996’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet…
It seems like forever ago that R.E.M emerged from Athens, Georgia, looking like art-school students who drove pickups to class (except for Michael Stipe, who probably rode his bike). What has it been now, seventeen years, since the first single? How time flies when you’re having no fun at all…
Having a producer or four helps a lot on the new Jon Spencer Blues Explosion record, Acme. Although no single person is credited as a producer, there are no fewer than ten people listed as “mixers” of individual songs, and there are six different studios listed as recording sites for…
Here at New Times we think of our Top Ten lists as a time-honored tradition. For our third annual CD poll we reached out to the musical community yet again, in search of the best, or at least best-loved, albums of 1998. This time we asked local musicians and composers…
Afghan Whigs 1965 (Columbia Records) On the Afghan Whigs’ sixth album, singer Greg Dulli showcases his fascination with hip-hop and R&B by quoting Puff Daddy, Mase, Nas, the Temptations, and Marvin Gaye. It’s not that Dulli isn’t capable of coming up with his own words — his twisted-love narratives are…
After almost two years in hiding, Eric Knight, ex-leader of Vandal, has returned with a solo CD and a new backup band. Fans of Vandal’s pop-tinged hard-rock sound should enjoy Near Life Experience. Knight himself is simply happy to have released the disc. Not long ago he figured his days…
