Artson enters the game with a pedigree: He was a member of the legendary Rocksteady Crew, and his record boasts guest shots by Tash of Tha Alkaholiks, and Likwit Junkie Wildchild. And on a first pass, he passes muster. The production on songs like the album-opening “Who” and the quasi-Latin…
A full five years after the landmark The Unseen, producer/MC/chronic chameleon Madlib once more huffs helium and becomes the high-pitched hooligan Quasimoto. But times have changed and so has ‘Lib, because where The Unseen was a mind-warping fusion of space-age samples and hyperspeed rhyming, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas…
Like its sonic predecessors — jazz, blues and R&B — hip-hop is undergoing a massive assimilation until everything is tinged with, in one way or another, rap. The sheer amount of gimmickry in producing and presenting “original” hip-hop today is daunting, which is why a record like True & Livin’…
The original twist of ’70s glam rock — in its less artsy (and better) form — was the basic contradiction of dudes in outrageously feminine costumes playing aggressive, back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll. To varying degrees, Slade, T. Rex, and Gary Glitter exemplified this angle of the weirdest chapter of British…
Outside the scope of rock and pop, “supergroups” are less heralded. Besides the acclaimed Masters of Persian Music, Arabic folk mergers remain sparse. Niyaz (NEE-az) easily slips into that category, drawing from a thousand years of Iranian and Indian influence and rebooting it with digital charges. Comprising former Vas vocalist…
It’s one of music’s great arguments whether great bands are the product of movements or their creators. Put another way: Had Agnostic Front formed at any other time, would it have been as important? Leader of the mid-’80s NYC hardcore movement, Agnostic Front was one of the first to deliver…
Around your bros, it’s impossible not to sneer at the mawkish sentimentality of Hopes and Fears, the debut from Brit trio Keane. But get those same guys around their girlfriends and wives, and the record takes on this weird power — it becomes . . . beautiful . . …
Rock is like a young Clark Kent still discovering his abilities: sometimes a little immature in the application. Thus rock sometimes feels the need to demonstrate its dominance, slapping its roaring guitar member on the table like a grotesque gavel. But majesty is another form of power, and delicacy can…
Denmark’s Raveonettes are not exactly soulful, but they are soulfully obsessed with pop music’s halcyon past. And unlike most other style bands, Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo sculpt their obsession into something beautiful, not merely fashionable. Pretty in Black, the boy-girl duo’s third and most original album, combines early-’60s…
It wouldn’t be quite fair to call trance kingpin Josh Wink a hippie, but hell, we will anyway, because of his vegan lifestyle and the years he wore his blond hair in long dreadlocks. But then again, hippies aren’t known for being anti-drug — for that matter, neither are trance…
You can’t listen to “Bizarre Love Triangle” or any of New Order’s other tech-pop oldies without marveling that a generation of teenagers thought such stuff conferred sophistication, compared to, say, George Michael. But having never matched the dark romance of their original incarnation as Joy Division, the quartet’s strummy bass…
In the 1980s, when Sunny Ade and other African stars surfaced, critics hoped their “world beat” blend of styles would lead to cultural respect and an international vision of pop music. It didn’t happened on the concert stage, but since the early ’90s, DJs and producers of club music have…
With the exception of Phil Spector, Jack Nitzsche was the greatest arranger, musician and producer of the early rock era. Unlike Spector, Nitzsche didn’t allow himself to get stuck in a musical rut. He kept producing vital work, including soundtrack scores for films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,…
There’s nothing like a dose of yesterday’s flavors to put today’s in perspective. Roughly representative of hard rock from a time when “grunge” didn’t require quotation marks, Local H’s Scott Lucas is not only from the mid-’90s, but of the mid-’90s, ahead of his time only in the minimal guitar-and-drums…
You wonder how being on a wimpozoid emo label like Jade Tree sits with these Tennessee-via-Portland hardcore erupters — and vice versa, where their PR department has to dispatch terms like “bad asses.” Knowing that these brunos could lay waste to the label’s entire striped-shirt roster with a few time…
Perhaps Gratitude vocalist/songwriter Jonah Matranga’s just sick of paying his dues. He fronted emo hopefuls Far throughout the ’90s (preceding the emo explosion by a decade, it’s worth noting) before doing the solo thing as onelinedrawing, a more stripped-down (and frankly better) indie vehicle. Both bands got this close to…
Life in Pictures has been making the trek from Prescott into Phoenix to play metal for a few years now. But beyond making a name in the local community, the band has caught the attention of Tim Lambesis, vocalist for the rising Christian metalcore band As I Lay Dying, who…
1. Mudvayne, Lost and Found (Sony) 2. Mindless Self Indulgence, You’ll Rebel to Anything (Metropolis) 3. Beck, Guero (Geffen) 4. Slipknot, Volume 3: (The Subliminal Verses) (Roadrunner) 5. Mars Volta, Frances the Mute (Universal) 6. The Killers, Hot Fuss (Island) 7. The Bravery, The Bravery (Island) 8. Jack Johnson, In…
Best I could tell from months of listening without a lyric sheet — thank you, Internet — this second disc from the kin of itinerant evangelist Leon Followill had something (okay, everything) to do with fuckin’. You could hear it in singer Caleb Followill’s delivery, the greasy whine of the…
If Ronnie Van Zant had replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath sometime around 1974, the result probably would have sounded a lot like the latest disc from North Carolina’s Corrosion of Conformity. In the Arms of God is a fierce, impressive comeback effort from these guys, and after five years…
The B-52’s for the post-Simpsons era, the five members of Detroit’s Electric Six make dancing not only fun again, but funny. In the proud tradition of the band’s 2003 debut, Fire, there’s an emergency in progress on the new Señor Smoke, and the only solution is to dance as if…
Jason Molina is an itinerant artist, driven to challenge himself and change up his material and approach in search of new “moments.” Molina’s done things such as recruiting players unfamiliar with the songs and recording them as they discovered them, or decamping to an abandoned factory to get the perfect…
