Poncho Sánchez’s reputation as the ultimate Latin jazz party bandleader is quite misleading. The guy has been a top conguero since the 1980s, but his sin was growing up in Laredo, Texas, not in Cuba or Puerto Rico. After he won a Latin Grammy (his first major award) in 2000,…
Gogogo Airheart defies clear description. Hooray, them! But here goes: GGG Airheart is lo-fi, smart-art rock — electrifying and mysterious. Old and new simultaneously, the music is moody and off kilter. You may laugh at the unusual musical fusions upon first listen to their new release, Exitheuxa, but by the…
Children of the Black Sun is an elliptical journey, an invigorating passage through one orbit of Boyd Rice’s vision. It’s an album riddled with clues as to Rice’s intent. To his credit as an artist, however, he leaves the particulars of your voyage unexplained. From the opening invocation of “Arkaö”…
“If you’re getting old, you’re getting old,” says Curt Kirkwood, the 43-year-old former front man for Phoenix’s pioneering Meat Puppets. He may or may not be pissed off, but he does have the green light to rant, and he’s racing: “This is America. We shit on our old people here…
I was in Amsterdam cooking stir-fry for a house full of people when I got the news about Tupac. “Oh my God, they shot ‘Pac! They shot ‘Pac!” What, who, huh? “They don’t shoot people in Amsterdam,” I mumbled to myself in a fog of disbelief. It was true. One…
John Doe shudders at the scenario. It’s the first night on X’s unofficial reunion tour, the seminal L.A. punk band’s boldest attempt at a bona fide comeback in seven years. And somehow, Doe’s asked to imagine, the anarchistic fans his band used to play for have been replaced by what…
With all the music that’s out there in this crazy world, any data beyond a band name and song title might seem superfluous. So give credit to local oddballs Fatigo for giving you even less information. Pero los Chivos!! contains no band data, recording information or even a thanks to…
By now, the story of the Foo Fighters’ fourth album has been well-documented. There was drummer Taylor Hawkins’ near demise from the dumbass cocktail of booze and painkillers last year, the scrapping of four months’ worth of recordings, Dave Grohl’s decision to play drums with stoner-rock kings Queens of the…
Recordings of whale calls aren’t for everyone. Neither is Iceland’s Sigur Ros. But those hooked on this symphonic rock quartet — whose glacial sound mixes Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine and various 4AD atmosphereniks — are unlikely to find another group even remotely similar. With eight nameless songs, crooned in a…
Guys like Delbert McClinton ought to be looked at the way people think of fine wines: Some things just get better with age. The 62-year-old McClinton finds ways to strengthen and sharpen his vision, telling stories that are personal and universal with the same few strokes. The cover of McClinton’s…
Metro Area transports listeners into an alternate universe. It picks up where Prince and Paul Simpson left off, crafting modern disco with enough flair to not be discounted as retro fare. With its 1999 single “Atmosphrique” (included on this album), Metro Area pioneered a new sound embraced by left-field DJs…
Musical royalty can be a dodgy thing — think second-generation Zappa or anyone beyond Hank Sr. But Bobby Bare Jr. appears to be the real deal. Junior is the son of Bobby Bare, who can list among his many musical accomplishment 50 Top 40 country hits. It is clear his…
O.A.R., a five-man band from Rockville, Maryland, by way of Columbus, Ohio, is a jam band for the Napster age. The band, which mixes reggae, folk and agile acoustic rock into what it calls “island vibe roots rock,” arrived at Ohio State in Columbus in 1997, having already attained a…
Kim Nekroman, bassist and singer for Denmark’s punk oddities Nekromantix, barely seems to recognize the strangeness of the facts of his life. For example, as a former submarine radio operator in the Royal Danish Navy, he used to blast campy-punk icons the Cramps on the job. “It wasn’t that weird…
What bubbles through the veins of the online underground eventually trickles into the mainstream, and by the time the New York Times comes sniffing around, the trend is usually past its expiration date. Yesterday’s Brand New Thing is today’s forgotten fad. Seems like only yesterday we were praising Freelance Hellraiser’s…
When James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, its effect on the literary community was incalculable. A sprawling tome loaded with nonsense words and run-on sentences, the novel could only be adequately understood by abandoning any pre-existing notions of fiction. Joyce’s prose operated with its own internal logic, and it had…
Geeky, hyperintelligent, and straight outta Brown University, white-boy rapper MC Paul Barman made quite a splash three years ago with It’s Very Stimulating, his debut EP. The record, produced by hip-hop innovator Prince Paul (Stetsasonic, De La Soul), was wacky, extremely original and very Jewish, and it won accolades from…
Perfecting Loneliness, the third album from under-the-radar veterans Jets to Brazil, sees the band achieve the state of grace that contemporary indie rockers crave. Former Jawbreaker singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach heads up these ’90s pre-emo survivors, playing the role of the enlightened Gen Xer with a good bead on his relationship…
About five years ago, everyone was jonesin’ for that fusion of chilled beats, acid jazz and world beat simply known as “downtempo.” But much has changed since then. What was once cool because it sounded like French porn from the ’60s is now uncool because it’s like French porn from…
Rhett Miller, the voice of Dallas’ Old 97’s, has a new gig. Spurred by an independent, ever-rocking mettle, the front man of the alt-country powerhouse is Hitchhiking to Rhome via a new route — the solo circuit. While The Instigator, Miller’s first solo album, isn’t a dramatic departure from the…
In the last five minutes, after the microcassette recorder is turned off and the interview is over, Nate Ruess, vocalist for the overnight success that is the Format, predicts a humorous Behind the Music ending for the Valley band, equating the songwriting duo with the decidedly un-tragic demise of Wham…
Unmerciful and hella catchy, Westside Connection, featuring hip-hop superstar Ice Cube and protégés Mack 10 and WC, arrived on the scene near the end of the gangsta rap era in 1996, a last gasp of fresh air before the tired genre weezed in a hail of bullets. Bow Down, the…
