At the end of each Storm Tour concert, headliner Aceyalone, Miami natives ¡Mayday! and Wrekonize, and the rest of the backpacker road show’s roster take the stage and freestyle. “All the artists come onstage and we have a big jam session,” says ¡Mayday!’s MC Bernbiz. “It’s a good vibe.” Founded…
By 1985, New Wave music was on the decline. With the rise of jangle-pop and hair metal, teenagers who once proudly waved the New Romantic flag were driven back to the pale shelter of their Hello Kitty-theme bedrooms, where they could listen to synthpop in peace. Then, suddenly, across the…
Let’s be honest: Despite the perceived sensitivity injection (courtesy of tear-stained emo and indie artists), radio is no more welcoming to female musicians — at least those of substance — now than it was during the days of frat-mook nü-metal. Save for Kelly Clarkson and KT Tunstall, modern airwave starlets…
Now that’s what I’m talking about — an album title that gets to the point. Thing is, Cex (the perpetually transforming solo project/group/something helmed by Rjyan Kidwell) misleads: AF’s toned-down slew of breakbeats, synths, and poppy guitar melodies sounds more like sonic foreplay than Kidwell’s former albums, which previously concentrated…
Cohead of and A&R man for Brooklyn’s Embedded label, DJ ESE shares his humble digs with the eloquent Cool Calm Pete, Junk Science, and other independent hip-hop outfits. The Side: Two compilation gathers competent Embedded MCs and friends for a selection of stunning cuts over ESE’s multifaceted, lethargic productions. Babbletron’s…
As a teenager, John Lee Hooker Jr. was a featured player in John Lee Sr.’s road show and then spent the next twenty years fighting the demons of drugs, drink, divorce, and jail. Given his troubled past, you might expect Junior’s music to be even more dark and dangerous than…
Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin gets old-timey on Cold as the Clay, an unplugged sophomore solo LP that mixes original songs with similar Deadwood-era tunes like the finger-pick murder-hoedown “Little Sadie.” Graffin plays traditional music as convincingly as he handles punk. He’s no Mike Ness, though the disc will probably…
“I’d rather fuck who I want/Than kill who I am told to” are the first words Peaches (a.k.a. Merrill Beth Nisker of Germany) hollers, like a petulant schoolgirl, on Impeach My Bush — a false sign that the schoolteacher-turned-electroclash-vixen has traded in porno for politics on her third album. Again…
“What now?/What now?/What now?/What now whaaaaaaaaaat?” wonders this Brooklyn boy’s choir, ethereal and cosmic, from a rosy, wavering Radiohead/Beach Boys howl of a sunset. The answer, apparently, is the state where Hunter S. Thompson spent most of his complicated life and eventually ended it — but Grizzly Bear may be…
All over her self-titled debut, Tam sings like she’s loaded or a few hours removed from that state, and the music is just as drunk — a colorless Ax UPR speeding up a ramp to the proper RPM at the outset, only to reappear later (tumbling and then ramping and…
Although the issue of selling souls tends to come up in church and in movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the act of marrying a soul is difficult to come across, making Jaguar Wright’s latest album, Divorcing Neo to Marry Soul, even more labor-intensive. Compared to Aretha Franklin and…
Naeem Juwan, better known as Spank Rock, has a debut album called YoYoYoYoYo, and his hit single is about an “ass-shaking competition champ.” It’s pretty clear that Spank Rock is absolutely insane. And considering other songs on the album deal with everything from the abilities of his tongue to the…
With an album titled Stars Invited Me to Fly Through Time, it isn’t surprising that Dyslexic Postcards are a tie-dye rock band. “The basis of all of our sound just comes from psychedelic rock,” says singer and guitarist Ely Bacoy. “But there’s also a bit of a punk rock edge…
After two years of attending Miami Sunset Senior High School, Jordan Davis dropped out to make music. Two years later, he has nine hip-hop albums and his own record label, and, oh yeah, he’s in college. A Magic City native now living in West Kendall, Davis recorded and produced his…
It’s almost endearing that Sascha Funke seems to be so uncertain on his installment of Bpitch Control’s Boogy Bytes DJ mix series. It is, after all, his first officially released mix, and so the anonymity he displays with run-of-the-mill electrohouse selections on the disc’s first half is understandable. He just…
Venice Is Sinking may seem like a less than descriptive moniker for this Athens, Georgia quintet, but the overcast melodies that pervade the band’s full-length debut do project a clear sense of despair. Nevertheless an undeniably haunting sound is etched in these sad, sweet songs, as manifested in the forlorn…
Most of Moorer’s songs have always explored life’s darker side, which is understandable; when she was a teenager, her father murdered her mother and then took his own life. On Getting Somewhere, Moorer takes her demons for a walk in the sun, and although it’s not all sweetness and light,…
Boston-bred folkie Susan Werner vies for contention via a new American anthem, one reflecting the sad state of our nation. With a theatrical delivery bolstered by solo piano and a swell of strings, Werner laments a country that “tilts sharply to the right, with our leaders straight and white,” where…
The insistent bomp of crunk meets a disco beat and is tempered by techno’s distanced cool. Green Velvet shares the anthemic tendencies of label mates Tiefschwarz, but this stylistic smashup, though still dance-floor suited, has just enough burr and blur to be reminiscent of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fuzz-out…
Few musicians create such universal music as does Kenny Garrett. Throughout a nearly 30-year career, multi-Grammy nominee and alto saxophonist Garrett has performed with jazz greats like Miles Davis and Art Blakey, as well as rockers Sting and Peter Gabriel. Garrett’s spin on jazz has allowed him to work in…
You can imagine how seriously Demonic Domain’s songwriter/guitarist takes his death-metal band when you find out his name is D. Mon. But maybe, as a member of a barely two-year-old group with street teams in most major cities, he has the right to. “We’re kind of amazed at the attention…
Bandleader, singer, composer, trombonist, Grammy winner, political activist, and living legend Willie Colón has done it all. He cut his first album, El Malo, at the age of seventeen with vocalist Hector Lavoe, another man with a now-legendary resumé. El Malo helped define the “New York Sound” — known today…
