Washington, D.C.-based trumpeter Michael Thomas brings his smoking-hot quintet to town for a night of blistering hard bop meets Philly swing. After graduating from Grambling University, Thomas performed with Frank Foster, who was directing the famous Count Basie Orchestra at the time. He sharpened his chops and technique playing with…
Minus the Bear’s latest record, Menos el Oso, is the sound of hardcore kids growing up. Known previously for comical song titles like “Hey, Wanna Throw Up?” and impressive rock resumés, the highly technical, versatile quintet has finally produced the record we’ve always known it could. Jake Snider’s lyrics have…
Going through the motions: We’re all guilty of it. But Montreal’s Wolf Parade seems incapable of sitting still and sucking. On its recent, self-titled EP and Apologies to the Queen Mary, its upcoming Sub Pop full-length, the band is grabbed, shaken and propelled from within by some kind of wind-up…
With his latest CD, No Earthly Man, Scotland’s Alasdair Roberts (no relation to either me or Julia) has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He’s made the most depressing album in the history of recorded music. No joke. Compared to this collection of death ballads from the British isles, Beck’s Sea Change,…
When a golfing oil baron masquerades as a national leader, someone’s got to do something to help out the folks in Louisiana and Mississippi. Now transformed into a benefit for hurricane relief, the End of Summer Outlaw Music Festival, slated for Saturday, September 10, at the Ogden Theatre, has broadened…
Heavily dreadlocked and impossible to pigeonhole, New Zealand nu-breaks pioneer Freq Nasty (Darin McFadyen) helped set the stage for dance music’s genre-bending resurrection in the new decade. His music also helped yank electronic music out of the creative mire it was — and arguably still is — in. In Freq…
The Minstrel Show is a reference to the form of entertainment from the late 1800s, early 1900s, where you had white performers performing in blackface and essentially making a mockery of black culture,” says Phonte, explaining the concept behind Little Brother’s new album. “We use that as a metaphor for…
“Looking back,” Donovan Welsh allows, “it took balls or stupidity, knowing what we know now.” That’s how the bassist, just back from a third stint on the Vans Warped Tour, explains how his band, D.O.R.K. , first finagled its way on to Kevin Lyman’s roving punk-rock caravan in 2003. Welsh…
“I’m a dad first and an artist second,” Alice Cooper declares. Yet the former Vincent Furnier isn’t bothered in the slightest that he has to watch twenty-something daughter Calico Cooper get mauled during each stop of his current tour. On the contrary, he’s as proud as he can be that…
No one’s particularly fond of playing the desultory “sounds like” game when it comes to music, but whatever. In Particle’s case, an A-meets-B-meets-C type of comparison is warranted. This middle-aged California-based quartet really does resemble a sonic collage comprising the Grateful Dead, Roy Davis Jr. and the Chemical Brothers as…
All hail that doe-eyed siren known as Fiona Apple. Though she can be pretentious and sometimes seem unstable, these are faults we can forgive. No, we do not fatwa Apple, even though her last album title had twice as many words in it as a standard Ramones song. We like…
Sophomore albums are made to be trashed, especially when they follow hugely successful debuts. And there may be no artist in pop-music history who seems to more richly deserve such a trashing than Kanye West. To call West’s behavior over the past year “insufferable” fails to do it justice; to…
Rock and roll is always funniest when it’s not trying to be. The problem with Apollo Sunshine’s self-titled sophomore album is that, instead of letting the laughs fall where they may, it attempts to pry grins out of your face with a crowbar. Not that these dozen songs aren’t tunefully…
For a bunch of British and Welsh expatriates who never meant to be a band, the Waco Brothers have just issued their seventh disc for the same label — a feat deserving honorable mention in today’s age of drive-thru weddings and duplicitous record deals. Unfortunately, the sardonic country side project…
Imagine that you are the son of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane. Now picture the size sack it would take to not only play the same instrument as your father, but to do so in a four-piece combo similar to the one he led for years. On In Flux, Ravi Coltrane’s…
From its up-front Allen Ginsberg nod to the behind-the-scenes assistance of Grammy fave T-Bone Burnett, Howl practically begs to be taken more seriously than BMRC’s previous recordings. Such overt pleas for respect are often mixed blessings, and that’s sometimes the case here. But if the disc’s rootsy approach can feel…
Just because vocalist Felisa Herrera shifts effortlessly from Spanish to English and back again doesn’t mean she focuses exclusively on the reggaeton style. While the propulsive “Esta Noche” sports the requisite chants and raps, much of the other material on Sacrificios is flavored with more R&B than hip-hop. By any…
On its debut, Last of the Cellophane, Redline Defiance sounds like Incubus — a lot like Incubus. Nonetheless, anything the disc lacks in originality, it compensates for with impeccable production: Distinct separation between each instrument and colossal-sounding drum and guitar tones augment vocalist Mike Kellogg’s cunning melodic sensibility. At times,…
Public Enemy, Power to the People and the Beats: Public Enemy’s Greatest Hits (Def Jam). Not even bad reality TV can pull the punch of prime Public Enemy. Finally, after two criminally lackluster best-of packages, someone got it right. But even if this disc contained nothing more than outtakes from…
Devotees of bass guitar and roots music will no doubt rejoice when Oteil Burbridge lands on Colorado soil for a string of performances beginning in Boulder and wrapping up in Aspen. Burbridge made his name with the Aquarium Rescue Unit in the early ’90s before moving on to the Allman…
This Tulsa, Oklahoma, three-piece brims with contradictions. First off, “Jacob Fred” doesn’t exist; the name is a pseudonym invented by pianist Brian Haas, who shares membership in the group with drummer Jason Smart and ultra-melodic bassist Reed Mathis. Second, “Jazz Odyssey” is a reference to a Derek Smalls song that…
Chicken-fried metal gets a fresh coat of grease from the four fiery West Texans in SuperHeavyGoatAss. These Lubbock-bred headbangers straddle the barbed wire between ZZ Top’s shit-kicking boogie and the stoner sludge of Black Sabbath. Ear-splitting, unaffected riff rock with ominous bass tones patch together extended meditations on Lone Star…
