RJD2’s two-track production cameo on Aceyalone’s 2003 album Love & Hate stood among that disc’s high points. Fans have plenty of reason to be geeked for a full-length collab. But while Magnificent City’s peaks are as good as expected — the Carter-admin gloss-funk of “Fire,” and the gritty Hammond B-3…
Can you say “mainstream”? Seasoned Phoenix-based rock outfit Fivespeed has officially grown up with Morning Over Midnight, an album packed with alternacore radio hits destined to top sales charts and incite rabid fist-pounding and panty-wetting on a national level. Fivespeed has in spades what mediocre nausea-inducing radio bands like Nickelback…
DJ Drez cemented his impact on the underground DJ scene in 2004, when he dropped his groundbreaking album The Capture of Sound, a whipped-smooth blend of reggae and jazz with hip-hop. Ordinarily we’re a little suspicious of white dudes with dreads, but Drez’s are long enough — and his message…
Doubling up on guitarists is commonplace in the metal realm, but Ed Gein is anything but ordinary. Maybe that’s why instead of having a guitar duo, the Syracuse, New York, grind-metal band opted for a trio of vocalists. Okay, so there are only three people in the band, but these…
For aging punks still enamored of nihilism but tired of playing all those pneumatic downstrokes, the allure of country music isn’t hard to see. After all, three out of four of The Ramones are dead, but those guys in Alabama still rise each morning to kick the shit once again…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is the musical equivalent of stumbling side-by-side with Satan through a surreal horror movie on bad acid and rotten peyote. TKK’s influential 1990 album, Confessions of a Knife, opens with a track called “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” and the first thing the…
Man, I wish they’d had Roadtrip Nation in 1997, when I was fresh out of college and wondering what to do with myself. My roommate and I were scraping by from paycheck to paycheck with entry-level office jobs, and student loan payments on our overpriced educations hadn’t even kicked in…
Tristan Prettyman is difficult to categorize, even though most everything written about her blames her sound on beach party superhero Jack Johnson. That might have something to do with the fact that they both surf like it was a religious experience and perform their stripped-down acoustic pop with the same…
Looks are deceiving. Listen and you’ll hear classic reggae bounce and the toasting rap style of Jamaican dancehall, but glance at the album cover and you’ll note that Matisyahu (born Mathew Miller) is a Hasidic Jew right down to the broadbrimmed black hat and full, untrimmed beard. After initially rebelling…
Singing in a fragile, angelic falsetto, at first blush singer-songwriter Jeff Hanson sounds like folkie Suzanne Vega. But listen closely to the Milwaukee native’s two albums for Kill Rock Stars and you’ll hear familiar echoes of fellow onetime KRS artist Elliott Smith. Like Smith, Hanson’s ambling folk at times borders…
Of all recent cross-cultural collaborations, the pairing of Senegalese vocalist Julia Sarr and French flamenco guitarist Patrice Larose proves to be one of the most refreshing. Sarr, who cut her teeth singing backup for Malian singer Lokua Kanza and Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, jumps into the lead role like she…
What exactly it was that went wrong with J Dilla’s body over the course of the last few years is between him and his doctors, but whatever it was kept him flat on his back for the better part of a year. For creative types, paralysis is a curious paradox:…
In the late ’90s, the suffix “-tronica” could loosely be defined as “pop music to which drum loops have been glued.” It was a goofy movement, one built on the questionable logic that adding a bunch of synthetic clatter to mealy AM acoustic pop somehow makes it less dull. British…
John Fahey was an original, a guitarist with an instantly recognizable style, a conglomeration of ragtime, country, blues, Indian classical music, and electronica. With his usual self-effacing sense of humor, he called his music “American primitive,” but it was a sophisticated kind of acoustic psychedelia that no one has ever…
For the glam-trash rocker set that’s infiltrated seemingly every club in town for at least one night a week, it really doesn’t get much bigger than this: Marky Ramone throwing down on the turntables at Hot Pink. There’s mad competition in the rawk DJ scene these days, and that’s a…
Most of you know the South African brooders in Seether from “Broken,” a song from their debut album that they rerecorded for The Punisher soundtrack as a duet between Shaun Morgan and Evanescence singer Amy Lee. Please refrain from singing “When a Front Man Loves a Front Woman,” as Morgan…
As you’ve undoubtedly heard, now is a good time to be of Montreal — just ask such critically slurped bands as the Arcade Fire, Stars, and Broken Social Scene. It’s also a good time to be Of Montreal, the colorful Athens, Georgia, psych-pop band fronted by ever-clever songsmith Kevin Barnes,…
A cancellation by headliner Yellowcard has booted this Virginia Beach quintet to the top of the bill and brought in local luminaries Lydia for added entertainment value. Mae is an acronym for Multisensory Aesthetic Experience, a study of how our senses perceive information and decipher it for the other senses…
Wasn’t Josh Gracin that country-singing Marine from American Idol’s second season? How did that jarhead land himself a recording contract? Well, actually, it’s a lot easier to understand than you might think: While Simon, Randy, and the eternally narcotized Paula have never really understood the relevance of country music to…
In a previous incarnation, Robinella and her husband, multi-instrumentalist and arranger Cruz Contreras, cut Robinella & the CC Band, an album that blended the swing of Bob Wills and Duke Ellington, with a side of Bill Monroe. Solace is less eclectic and more focused, living up to its name with…
1. Yellowcard, Lights and Sounds (Capitol) 2. Cat Power, The Greatest (Matador Records) 3. The Strokes, First Impressions of Earth (RCA) 4. Panic! At the Disco, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (Decaydance) 5. Rocky Votolato, Makers (Barsuk) 6. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love…
Saturday night is overrated. More often than not, I find myself having the most fun on a school night. After all these years, there’s still a naughty thrill to going out in the middle of the week. Maybe it’s because there are lower expectations and people loosen up. Maybe folks…
