The sitar is one hell of a difficult instrument to play, much less to master. With up to 21 strings, it is an unwieldy beast; a player must be pretty limber just to hold it properly. Generally, players treat the instrument and its music with deep respect, often announcing pieces…
Afu-Ra sits somewhere in the center of a triangle. Its points are Gang Starr, whose beatsmith DJ Premier exec-produced both of Afu’s albums; his onetime mentor Jeru the Damaja; and the Wu-Tang Clan. However, Afu-Ra brings a versatile, if a bit thin, voice and a good range of flows while…
If Blink-182’s last record, the surprisingly maudlin Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, was like a pinch of novocaine in the Vaseline, the debut from Boxcar Racer (a side project featuring Blink singer-guitarist Tom Delonge and drummer Travis Barker) is even more numbing. Listening to this disc — with its…
Art Techno or Future New Wave? In the past year, many buzzwords have surrounded the underground electronic scene, as analog synthesizers and old-school drum machines have become the norm. The new monikers reek of the same ignorance that surrounded Aphex Twin and Warp records when critics dubbed their sound “intelligent…
Throughout his career, trance-pop producer Brian Transeau, aka BT, has proudly worn an “I AM NOT A DJ” T-shirt. This may lead some to consider his upcoming DJ set at the Cajun House a strange aberration. Just think of it as a reminder of the man’s general influence in shaping…
If rap music is the CNN of black America, dancehall reggae is the equivalent for ghetto youth in Jamaica. Since first emerging in the late ’60s, Jamaican DJs (the reggae version of hip-hop’s MCs) have offered their rude-boy spin on the goings-on of politicians and drug dealers in their communities,…
Weird things happen around concrete in Athens, Georgia. Last April Michael Stipe caused a stir when he loudly protested the city’s installation of speed bumps on his street, calling them “idiotic, selfish and inappropriate.” Now if he can only get rid of those superfluous stop signs and speed limits, the…
In the past year, many independent record labels have been battling a phenomenon we like to call “emo-profiling.” This sinister cousin of racial profiling involves the assumption by the record buying public and the media that, because a couple of bands on a label sing nothing but breakup songs or…
Mark Covert, owner of Tempe club Nita’s Hideaway, never thought he’d look back with fondness at having a porn shop for a neighbor. He was cordial with the manager of the place, sure, but he threw all-ages rock shows next door — what could be less conducive for business than…
Sharon Jones is the consummate late bloomer. The 45-year-old New Yorker had long since withdrawn her hopes of a career in the music industry, and it wasn’t until a chance encounter with Daptone honcho Gabriel Roth in the mid-’90s that she finally found her way onto wax. Today, with a…
For a white boy, Dan Auerbach sounds as black as Art Modell’s heart. The Black Keys front man sings as if he was sired by Jimi Hendrix, weaned on Wild Turkey in T-Model Ford’s shotgun shack, then mentored by Mountain’s Leslie West. The latter would explain why “Leavin’ Trunk” sounds…
A few years ago, Keoki Franconi took a look around his Manhattan dominion and said, “I’m a superstar DJ,” saw that it was good, and that was that. Having conquered the fickle New York DJ/party scene in the early-’90s heyday of all-night raves and happy hard-core clubs, the flamboyant Keoki…
Illinois Jacquet led the charge of the tenor saxophone freaks of the 1940s. Initially famous for his adrenaline-driven solo on Lionel Hampton’s 1942 hit recording of “Flying Home,” the Louisiana-born, Texas-bred horn blower mixed swing, blues and a hint of bebop into riff-rich improvisations, which, on up-tempo numbers, inevitably culminated…
If you don’t believe that underground hip-hop is enjoying a serious renaissance right now, just listen to El-P’s brilliant solo debut, Fantastic Damage. Maybe “enjoying” is the wrong word: The oh-so-appropriately titled album doesn’t sound like it’s enjoying much of anything, save for the ruin of listener-friendly mainstream rap. But…
Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock has never been reticent about his psychoses. He’ll freely talk of the demons in his head that speak to him, and allude to his confrontations with the devil. He’s something of a neurotic visionary, clinically sane compared to notorious alt-rock weirdoes Daniel Johnston or…
“This is not a film about Vietnam — this is Vietnam,” Francis Ford Coppola famously boasted upon returning from the South Pacific after the harrowing shoot for Apocalypse Now. The Cajun-metal supergroup Down can relate, having experienced firsthand the same drug-addled pandemonium that blurred the line between fantasy and reality…
When Florida’s DJ Icey throws on a record, expect forceful, syncopated grooves to quake from the bass bins, not the straightforward metronomic thumps most often associated with dance music. For Icey’s name is synonymous with breakbeat, a somewhat nebulous subcategory of electronic music that’s based on hijacked and often roughed-up…
Kori Gardner, 27, and Jason Hammel, 25, went to Tahiti after their wedding last summer, but their real honeymoon didn’t start until they got back to their hometown of San Francisco. That was when the duo, better known as Mates of State, loaded their Yamaha Electone organs and drum kit…
On the cover of his first solo record, Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, Thomas “Cee-Lo” Callaway — flanked by a church-style pipe organ and wearing a psychedelic top hat — looks a little like a diabolical Buddha, or maybe a shaman, putting on a fun-house magic show. Light refracts…
It’s hard to pinpoint the particular appeal of Julieta Venegas. She’s sexy, sure — in a cute kind of way. She’s also got a certain artistic rawness — just two albums into her solo career, there’s plenty of room for growth, which makes her oddly vulnerable. And there’s that voice…
There are three standard reasons a rock act would refuse to do interviews: 1. The Freddie Mercury Royal Snub. This occurs after an artist gives unlimited access to a press community that still winds up vehemently hating him. Before the King of Queen stopped doing interviews, he granted an exclusive…
It’s about noon in Lawrence, Kansas, on a recent Monday — the day before the Get Up Kids release their first new album in three years, On a Wire. Get Up drummer Ryan Pope is not long out of bed, tousling his hair, bumping Dre’s Chronic 2001 and casually blabbing…
