You like funk? Damn right you do. If there’s ever any question of who’s the funkiest jazz band in town, Buckner Funken Jazz (due at Jazz@Jack’s on Saturday, October 1) answers with absolute authority. Rod Buckner, the founder and leader of this act, is flat-out scary on his trumpet. Whether…
Lee Burridge’s DJ career may have begun nearly twenty years ago in southern England, but it was after relocating to Hong Kong that he really honed his craft and became one of the biggest names in the house and trance scenes. That’s also where he met his future collaborator, Craig…
On that night eleven years ago, Uphollow was in way over its head. But you had to cut the guys some slack. It was only their fourth show, and they were still high school freshmen; they looked about as big as action figures on the vast stage of the Bluebird…
“If this really is my last show,” says Leonardo Zayas, aka Leo 7, “that’s what I want to see: happy faces having a good time, not a lame one.” Rubber Planet’s ace timekeeper has been living on borrowed time since his visa expired almost a year ago; in a little…
Naturally. It’s more than just the title of the sophomore disc by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings; it’s a one-word manifesto. Born in James Brown’s home town of Augusta, Georgia, Jones spent decades in church bands and doing session work as a backup singer before joining the Dap-Kings, a New…
Earlier this year, Carlos Santana and his wife, Deborah, handed one of the guitarist’s yes men his walking papers. But it wasn’t because the employee had embezzled thousands of dollars that he blew on hookers and blow, or because he’d pissed in the coffeepot, or because he just couldn’t make…
If you think U.K.-based Funeral for a Friend must have been named for a song from Elton John’s 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, you’ve just dated yourself in the eyes of young Funeral drummer Ryan Richards. Each time an interviewer makes this assumption, Richards figures that he or she…
The Fray is the modern-rock equivalent of Everybody Loves Raymond, a series that approached everyday situations with a shrewd exactitude, managing to be salient without resorting to bawdiness or gimmickry. Even Raymond’s detractors were eventually disarmed by the show’s benign disposition and lack of pretense. The Fray is sure to…
Who doesn’t want to root for the solo outing of rock’s deadpan ghoul of ’80s cool? Nexterday’s opening track, “Crackpot,” with its pelvic, ground-down guitar and Ocasek’s trademark throat-caught strut, sounds damn near sexy, even with a respirator for its backing track. Sadly, that anthemic potential evaporates quickly and quietly…
Once an irresistibly goofy Brit-pop trio with ungainly mutton-chop sideburns, Supergrass has reached a point of maturity where it finally seems more interested in studying the menu than in making goo-goo eyes at the waitress. On their fifth full-length, Oxford’s retro-groovers have outgrown monosyllabic teen anthems to embrace the emotional…
The opening section of “Glósóli,” an emblematic effort by these idiosyncratic Icelanders, mates a deliberate tempo with vocal lines that sound as if they’re being delivered by an especially chilly castrati. But before the tune can be dismissed as an intellectual variation on the recorded works of Enya, its initially…
Funk is a dirty word. And it should be: The style was conceived as a grimy, hormone-drenched reaction to the detachment and abstraction of cool jazz. Sadly, few funk practitioners in the decades since the style’s heyday have retained that gloriously unwholesome essence of lust and sweat. Nothing drives this…
Like, oh, my God! This disc is totally ’80s! And not the ’80s being resurrected by the Killers and Franz Ferdinand! No, these are the perky, thrift-store-chic ’80s that smug comics ridicule on VH1 several times a day! But instead of satirizing this stuff, Kelli*Said plays it pretty damn straight!…
HorrorPops, Bring It On! (Hellcat Records). You can count Denmark’s contribution to rock and roll on one bloody stump. Aqua? Attila Kovacs? Crowded Orifice? Unfortunately, HorrorPops, Copenhagen-bred rockers chasing Debra Harry’s ghost through L.A.’s underbelly, don’t offer any sonic treasure, either. Two doo-wop chicks in straitjackets, a guitarist from Nekromantix…
While We’re From Japan! would have you believe it’s from the Land of the Rising Sun, a far more likely birthplace would be Iceland — specifically, Sigur Rós’s garage. Raising more racket, if fewer goosebumps, than Jon Thor Birgisson and crew, the Portland group still evokes enough glacial grace and…
As long as musicians are on the right side of popular trends, they’re golden — but when such fads run their course, performers need a Plan B. Bassist Dan Schmid and keyboardist Dustin Lanker understand this necessity all too well. The pair were members of Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, a rock/ska…
For a certain kind of person, there’s nothing happier than really sad music. That’s where the National comes in. On the quintet’s latest critically lauded album, Alligator, Matt Berninger comes on like Bill Callahan fronting American Music Club, while brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf provide…
Congo-born Marie Daulne, founder of the beloved female ensemble Zap Mama, isn’t comfortable with being pigeonholed in the category of “world music,” but that doesn’t stop her from stirring the global melting pot on a daily basis. On Zap Mama’s latest effort, Ancestry in Progress, the group’s exotic vocal stylings…
Black Dice makes experimental electronic noise rock that’s been known to draw blood. Infamous for their visceral and assaulting live shows, brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland — now joined by new drummer Aaron Warren — have produced more than their fair share of jarring, disorienting and disconcerting records in the…
The phrase “novelty act” comes with a lot of baggage, but it seems to apply nicely to Architecture in Helsinki. The Australian octet is wont to be wacky, flirty, whiny and twee — sometimes all at the same time. In 2004, four years after forming, the band released its debut…
The sense of unease was palpable at last year’s Franz Ferdinand performance at the Bluebird Theater. Hipster faces awash in confusion hinted at a deep and troubling inner turmoil. The dilemma? How to avoid shaking that ass, thus losing your resigned and superior mystique. Resistance proved futile. By the time…
In the tradition of post-rock outfits like Tortoise, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tokyo’s Mono favors the hypnotic applications of tension and release. Combining aching melodies and dark undercurrents of distortion into a slow-building storm of thundering repetition, the formidable noise quartet seems determined to…
