House music may have originated in Chicago, but it was New York City’s Deee-Lite that put it on the map. A trio comprising vocalist Lady Miss Kier and DJs Towa Tei and Dmitri, Deee-Lite dropped their début “World Clique” in August of 1990.
Best known for the hit single “Groove Is in the Heart,” featuring Bootsy [...]
March 10, 2010 at 8:24 am | Share |
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Not only is their second album a delightful leap forward, She & Him is bringing it to you live with a handful of shows at SXSW that come as part of a spring tour.
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward have outdone themselves on “Volume Two” (due March 23 on Merge): the vintage-style pop songs are catchier [...]
March 9, 2010 at 7:30 am | Share |
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Danish rock reaching U.S. shores in recent years has ridden a vintage sound, be it the stylish fuzztone songs of the Raveonettes or the garage-rock rave-ups of the Blue Van.
Choir of Young Believers seems to have an eye on the future with its music — essentially folk-pop songs with lush, soaring arrangements and dreamy, almost [...]
March 8, 2010 at 8:41 am | Share |
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The buzz that surrounded the Strange Boys at last year’s SXSW has only grown stronger, and the teenage garage-rockers just released their sophomore album, “Be Brave,” on super-cool indie label In The Red in the U.S. and Rough Trade in Britain.
Listen, Dammit, saw them play last year in a packed tent on a sweltering night [...]
March 6, 2010 at 10:03 am | Share |
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There was a buzz last week when word filtered down that Big Star had added a show at SXSW. It’s going to be mobbed, of course (we’re glad we saw them last year in Brooklyn), but they’re not the only Ardent Studios band hitting Austin: Star & Micey will be there, too, with Big Star [...]
March 5, 2010 at 11:48 am | Share |
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With this year’s South by Southwest festival less than two weeks away, it’s time to start picking some bands to see in Austin. First up, Kaiser Cartel.
The Brooklyn duo describes itself as “low-fi, song-driven, harmony-heavy,” which sounds about right when you add that the pair is equally at home with a hazy, ’60s California-pop sound [...]
March 4, 2010 at 10:03 am | Share |
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Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe in which Nirvana’s “Nevermind” was a critical favorite that didn’t sell particularly well outside of the small niche audience interested in the Seattle “grunge” scene.
In this universe, the reaction to the combination of ’80s American punk rock and “Paranoid”-era Black Sabbath popular in the Pacific Northwest was a [...]
March 3, 2010 at 8:00 am | Share |
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Los Angeles in the ’80s was the site of two very different music scenes.
The hardcore punk rock scene that included Black Flag, the Germs, X, Fear and Circle Jerks was famously documented in Penelope Spheeris’ film “The Decline of Western Civilization.” The sequel to that film focused on the glam-metal bands, like Poison, Ratt, Faster [...]
February 22, 2010 at 8:00 am | Share |
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If Public Enemy was hip-hop’s answer to punk rock — and last week we argued that it was — then Fugazi was punk rock’s answer to Public Enemy. If the dynamic between Guy Piccioto and Ian MacKaye wasn’t quite the same as that of Chuck D and Flavor Flav, the energy they brought to every [...]
February 9, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share |
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Before Flavor Flav hawked cell phone plans for Sprint and got roasted on Comedy Central, before Chuck D debated Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on CNN, before mainstream hip-hop was taken over by an endless stream of Auto-Tuned gangsta wannabes, there was Public Enemy.
“Yo! Bum Rush the Show” introduced Public Enemy to the hip-hop [...]
February 1, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share |
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