Some songwriters spend their entire careers hunkered over a keyboard or a guitar, scribbling words and fiddling with melodies in hopes of obtaining that most elusive of songwriting trophies — the standard, the kind of song that worms itself so deeply into the fiber of the pop-cultural subconscious that it…
Iggy Pop Naughty Little Doggie (Virgin) Wayne Kramer Dangerous Madness (Epitaph) As punk rock’s generational cycle spins ever onward, with last week’s angry young thing replaced by this week’s rabble-rousing shaver, it’s reassuring to know that two of the music’s fortysomething architects are still around spewing bile and caustic protest…
Billy Mann figures he’s lost more day jobs than the average person will hold in a lifetime. He’s delivered pizzas, hawked futons, worked as a photocopier, and during an early-Nineties stay in Miami he sold classified ads for this newspaper. Despite the crushing realities of the nine-to-five work week, Mann…
DJ Muggs is tired of talking about reefer, so if you don’t mind could you give it a rest, please? With an unmistakable hint of exasperation, the turntable whiz and musical mastermind behind Cypress Hill says yes, the members of the Southern California rap trio smoke pot — a whole…
Aimee Mann I’m With Stupid (DGC) Aimee Mann has been hauling her dented and dinged heart around for more than a decade now, pulling it out of a box for show-and-tell on three albums by her old band ‘Til Tuesday, and on two solo records, 1993’s remarkable Whatever and now…
Veteran punk group Antiseen has been described as ugly, revolting, and obscene. (Hey, thanks for the compliments!) Since 1983 the North Carolina quartet has been performing what they call destructo rock: straight-ahead punk loaded with chain-saw guitars that’s delivered with a woolly sense of humor in a Southern twang. During…
As the Derek Cintron Band hits the final note of its deceptively buoyant “Song for Nothing,” most excellent squeals and screams and whoops erupt from the dozen or so votaries, more than half of them young women, sitting at the large table directly in front of the Churchill’s Hideaway stage…
Answering a musical question that few have asked, Rhino’s Youth Gone Wild begs for an explanation. Even those with the longest of cultural attention spans are not yet leaping at the opportunity to revisit the still-twitching corpse of pop metal, as documented on this three-disc compilation featuring 42 of the…
Five snare drums, each of them precisely tuned to a different pitch, are positioned around a grand piano in the Center for the Fine Arts. When composer Alvin Lucier hits certain notes on the keyboard, the heads of one snare drum or another rattle in discord. This was among the…
The woeful state of mainstream country music was a hot topic among the artists who took part in the recent HighTone Records Roadhouse Revival. The package tour showcased the Oakland-based independent label’s roster of new-country trailblazers, including Buddy Miller, Dale Watson, and former Blasters’ guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin, all…
Dread Zeppelin No Quarter Pounder (Birdcage) According to official legend, Elvis Presley once remarked, “I may not be Led Zeppelin, but I can still pack ’em in.” This was in the mid-Seventies, when Led Zep was the biggest band in the world and Elvis was, well, big. The twin ocean…
“Who’s that freaky old man?” “It’s Jethro Tull!” “No, no. It’s Aqualung, the guy in the song. Snot is running down his nose!” Truth be told, you can’t actually see any snot on the cover art to Jethro Tull’s fourth and best album, from 1971. But my friend Mike, who…
Bill Orcutt is on the phone, sounding perplexed, bemused, and slightly exasperated. “We’re like the 2 Live Crew of noise bands now,” complains the guitarist and vocalist who makes up one-third of Harry Pussy, the lords of Miami’s small but noisy avant-garde underground. He’s just found out about the hubbub…
Curtis Mayfield People Get Ready!: The Curtis Mayfield Story (Rhino) Although this lavish three-disc set is devoted to the musical achievements of one man, it also acts as a kind of rhythm and blues history. As much as James Brown, Curtis Mayfield has helped chart the course of the music…
Nil Lara doesn’t know where he is. He’s not even quite sure what state he’s in. “Nevada?” he screams into the phone when pressed for his exact location. “California?” This is what it’s been like recently for Lara, who, it turns out, really doesn’t know where he is during a…
Sixteen years ago record company executives scoffed at the idea of marketing the work of genre-fusing acoustic guitarists Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah. So after one too many rejections, the duo decided to release their first album themselves. Now, after seven Strunz and Farah albums on a host of labels,…
Three television camera crews, about a dozen radio DJs and print journalists, and some bilingual college students convened in a hospitality room at the Miami International Airport Hotel early one morning in February to await the arrival of the Argentine rock group Soda Stereo. Dressed in stylish grungewear and sporting…
Striding across the polished marble floors of the lobby of the posh Hotel Inter-Continental in downtown Miami, miles vocalist Tod Oenbrink sticks out like a sore thumb. Tall and lanky, decked out in a flannel shirt and long cutoffs, with a shock of platinum-blond hair and fingernails painted electric blue,…
Pay attention everyone/To play son/You don’t need to be strident/Or make too much noise/If you mark out well the beat/With rhythm and with harmony/You’ll see that you’re playing son/With joy, in the Cuban way. “El Orgullo de los Soneros,” Septeto Habanero Like King Curtis offering the musical ingredients of his…
The Mermen A Glorious Lethal Euphoria (Mesa/Bluemoon) The Aqua Velvets Surfmania! (Mesa/Bluemoon) The problem with most of the latest generation of surf revivalists isn’t only that they inevitably must suffer in comparison with the very-much-alive and active Dick Dale, the guy who invented the stuff. It isn’t even that most…
Surveying the landscape of today’s rock and roll underground, it seems hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t any surf music around. Once the twangy, reverb-soaked, early-Sixties commodity that drove Frankie and Annette bonkers as they rode the Hollywood celluloid surf, the music these days is found at all…
The Repilicants The Replicants (Zoo) You belong to a fashionably obscure band, yet you’re yearning for more press. What to do? How about joining forces with a bunch of like-minded alt-rockers and releasing a disc of quirky covers? That’s what the Replicants decided to do, and its members — drawn…
