Hot Hot Heat, a foppish quartet from the tiny island city of Victoria, British Columbia, finds itself riding the wave of rock ‘n’ roll resurgence t hat thrust the Strokes and the White Stripes into mass consciousness. With a new LP, Make Up the Breakdown, released on the fabled Sub…
The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs is often quoted as having said that the last real hope America had for a revolution would be if Elvis became Che Guevara. Imagine Elvis as some radical rockabilly martyr who one day decided to turn Graceland into a compound, surround himself with dozens of…
Upon hearing this marriage of band name and album title, folks may ask, “Is this some bizarre combination of goth rock and Brazilian tropicalia?” And the answer would be, well, yeah — and even more. The Black Heart Procession’s fourth full-length album marks an ambitious departure, and not just because…
Throughout his solo career, Peter Gabriel has walked a line ably between the accessibility the pop audience demands and the drawn-out artsiness his inner prog-rocker craves — recall that he fronted Genesis in its pre-“No Reply at All,” Jolly Green Giant-suited phase. His 1986 electronic pop masterwork So continues to…
Born in Tijuana, Fernando Corona lived most of his life in Ensenada, a small port town 80 miles south. He spent his early years playing all kinds of music, from acoustic rock to experimental stuff. Eventually, he became a member of Tijuana’s much-hyped Nortec Collective, that raucous band of musicians…
From Brooklyn to the Dirty South, Fabolous runs the hip-hop gamut with his minimalist East Coast grooves and “gentleman with a touch of street” Southern attitude. Put on the map when DJ Clue signed him to his label Desert Storm, Fabolous filled New York’s need at the time for hip-hop…
There’s a lull in the schedule in Miami, and Paulina Rubio doesn’t like it. “Open the curtains,” she says across the back of the couch. “Let’s do something. Let’s practice yoga. Turn on the television. Anything.” This should have been a good day; the first interview wasn’t scheduled until after…
Hip-hop is dead. So sayeth the aged b-boy, so sayeth the flock. Well, it’s not really dead, just different. Most of the people who pine for the Eric B. and Rakim, KRS-One salad days can’t seem to stomach today’s mainstream hip-hop. “Hip-hop died in the mid-’90s,” they claim. Most hip-hop…
Tom Petty’s as pissed as a millionaire gets, meaning you’d best take this, ahem, concept album about rock ‘n’ roll corruption with a grain of salt the size of Mike Campbell’s hair. What happens when this album, financed by a multinational, gets airplay? Will it be considered victory or surrender,…
Armed with only a battered melodica, Damon Albarn set off from his London digs two years ago on a Malian sojourn. There, in the capital city of Bamako and its satellite villages, Albarn met and jammed with local musicians, both pro and amateur. Eventually, he compiled 40 hours of tape,…
In country music, as in rock, the line between commercial and alternative has become fuzzy, as indie-oriented artists found Nashville hungry for good new songs, and smaller labels strove to grab rising talent. The husband-and-wife duo of Buddy and Julie Miller could be the poster children for this phenomenon. Five…
It’s been three years since we last heard from Underworld, the popular Brits who successfully combine elements of techno and house with vocals and melody. Having a singer (Karl Hyde) out in front of the stage undoubtedly helped them gain a foothold in the United States in the mid-’90s, when…
The Athens, Georgia-based duo Jucifer — an alt-metal combo comprising Amber Valentine on guitar and her boyfriend, Ed Livengood, on drums — mixes up a lethal cocktail of punk, heavy metal and plain ol’ buzz-saw rawk, redefining “Southern gothic.” The couple self-released a debut album in 1998 titled Calling All…
When Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz was 14 and living in Ukraine, he caught wind of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown from BBC Radio. Moments later, he and his family prepared to flee. “I’m trying to think very hard which records I should take with me out of the thousand that I…
This ain’t the way your brother’s indie band made its way. Don’t indie bands play basement parties and warehouse blowouts until all hours, move a lot of merch to the under-21 crowd and become famous on their own terms? Tonight, Dave Jensen, lead singer of Before Braille, is feeling less…
Even though the band has been making music for a decade, people still wonder whether the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is for real. No matter how hard the band rocks, the same questions linger: Are they making fun of the blues? Are they making fun of punk? Are they making…
On stage, Cephalic Carnage’s Zac spends most of his time swinging his head and guitar, sweating, screaming and abusing listeners with the brutal bombast that issues from his instrument. But today, sitting in his publicist’s office almost 2,000 miles from his home in Denver, there is little evidence of that…
The Apples’ antsy retroactivity has ping-ponged back and forth so many times over the last nine years, it’s become downright dizzying, from ’60s pop to ’80s jangle and ’90s indie. By the time the band released its fourth studio album, 2000’s Discovery of a World Inside the Moone, the Apples…
Unlike many soundtracks that pale creatively in comparison to their celluloid counterparts, 24 Hour Party People more than matches the spirit of the film it accompanies. More impressively, it captures the feel of a bygone era in British dance music. At 18 tracks, this compilation approximates the energy and underground…
Reviewers seldom gush over discs that remind them of albums made by lousy artists from the past — hence the dearth of notices praising Shakira for introducing a new generation to the genius that is Charo. But the opposite proves true when it comes to CDs that recall the long-ago…
Richard Patrick of Filter might be a good moderator for a music-conference panel: “The Hit Single: More Harm Than Good?” The band’s 1995 release, Short Bus, produced a major hit with the single “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” but its overexposure on MTV and commercial radio did not come without a…
