Breathe Carolina takes a side trip with the Vans Warped Tour

You can hear Breathe Carolina’s music pretty much everywhere you go these days. You’ll find it in all the expected places, of course — on alternative radio; on TV, on shows such as The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and MTV’s The City — but it’s also managed to infiltrate…

Ministry

Ministry started in Denver at a time when synth-pop was just starting to get off the ground in a meaningful way. But Al Jourgensen wisely moved to Chicago when the Wax Trax label was starting up and more or less creating the influential Chicago electronic and industrial sound that would…

Jimmy Cliff

One of the most soulful voices in reggae, Jimmy Cliff has had an influence on the course of popular music that cannot be overestimated. From his handiwork on gems like “Vietnam,” “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “Many Rivers to Cross,” you could almost say that he’s…

Ume

Guitar shredding used to be a males-only club. But Lauren Langner Larson, the blond pixie guitarist and vocalist of Ume, is doing her part (along with players like Marnie Stern and Oranthi) to change that. Langner Larson started playing in punk and thrash bands with thirty-second songs when she was…

Who should write a new national anthem for our country?

The 1997 Detroit Red Wings post-season was an awesome thing to behold for a fifteen-year-old in West Michigan. That’s when the Wings shut out the loathsome Anaheim Mighty Ducks — a hockey team named for a Disney movie about a fictional hockey team led by Emilio Estevez — and ended…

Myke Charles & DJ Chonz

Lift Off, the latest effort from Myke Charles, is better than good. In fact, it’s probably one of the best projects to come out of the scene this year. DJ Chonz is Charles’s collaborator on the cuts, mixing and magically sewing each track together with scary precision. Check for the…

SHIRLEY

With the release of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew more than four decades ago, Miles Davis paved the way for jazz-rock fusion. And while trumpeter John Lake’s project SHIRLEY borrows from those albums, the forward-thinking quintet takes things in a slightly different direction, incorporating electronic music, funk, computers…

Greencarpetedstairs

Neil Ewing has long created some of the most innovative and adventurous hip-hop around. This self-titled album (due for release this Friday, June 15, at Rhinoceropolis) on Ceschi Ramos’s Fake Four imprint probably wouldn’t sound like a hip-hop album to most people. But Ewing’s synthesis of noise, hip-hop, electronic pop,…

Catch Bees

Catch Bees is one Philip Waggoner, a Fort Collins resident and multi-instrumentalist, but on his new release, Newman’s Open Choir, his dreamy chamber pop is strained through roughly ten other players. No instrument was denied entrance at the door: Throughout thirteen tracks, the songbird and his sound team rotate through…

GRiZ bears all at the Sonic Bloom Festival

Grant Kwiecinski grew up in Detroit, the American breeding ground for finer electronic music, and home to the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Having been mentored through classes with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Kwiecinski found his sound in the alto saxophone and has managed to hybridize it with hip-hop samples and…

Audio Injection socks it to you at the Would Shop II on Friday, June 15

Between his work with Drumcell as Cell Injection, his lauded underground early-’90s sets in Southern California (at the age of fifteen, no less), his current status as a resident at the legendary Interface warehouse parties in Los Angeles, his other collaborations with Droid Behavior/Droid Recordings and his productions on assorted…

Japandroids

Since 2006, Vancouver’s Japandroids have been purveyors of a raw post-punk. Not the kind that became de rigueur in New York at the turn of the century, but rather the sort that is more sonically resonant, with the spiky, urgent melodies of Hüsker Dü and the free-flowing catharsis of the…