Before he discovered house music and the rave/club scene, Chicago’s Bad Boy Bill was a hip-hop-based battle DJ. That experience as a turntablist has given him an edge that most dance-music DJs don’t have. Any track he plays becomes his own, as he applies battle-jock techniques — scratching and cutting…
Some reasons to get out and party: Quixote’s True Blue has finally reopened in its new home next door to Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom (2637 Welton Street); the grand-opening party on April 12 featured performances by members of Banyan, Particle and Fishbone. Since leaving its spot at 7 South Broadway in…
I have a rare disorder called offstage fright,” Scot Livingston confesses. “It’s much easier talking about stuff in front of strangers than it is one-on-one. If I were to admit to a capital crime or murder, it would probably be on stage, in front of a bunch of people I…
I’ve got this idea for a video,” says Craig Macintosh, “of me in the middle of the street taking a shit and picking my nose and pissing all over the place. It’s so important to do. I feel like I have to do that.” Macintosh has some issues with fame…
“No, sir, I can’t even play a freaking flute,” reveals Wayne Quigley. “And what’s that thing called — a recorder? My kids blow me away on the recorder.” Back in May 2003, Quigley — Big Q, as he’s known around town — didn’t have any experience with homegrown music, either…
Z-Trip has always been on some next-level shit. Mention mash-ups, and his name will invariably come up. While it’s debatable whether he was the first DJ to mate tracks from unlikely sources, he is definitely the best. Uneasy Listening Volume I, the widely bootlegged mix CD he did with DJ…
Cellos, dub shivers, disco lubrication, avant-garde detachment — sounds like a recipe for Arthur Russell’s revolutionary proto-house of the early ’80s. But it’s also a shopping list for the throbbing tones of Out Hud’s Let Us Never Speak of It Again. Sharing three members with funk-deconstructionist outfit !!!, the quintet…
Before some dickhead lawyered up, Caribou (Dan Snaith) used to be known as Manitoba, an artist whose debut, Up in Flames, sculpted the soft white noise of My Bloody Valentine into electronic songs with elaborate Escher-like architecture. The Milk of Human Kindness, the act’s latest effort, perpetually evokes construction analogies…
On 2001’s scattershot Faithfully, Evans played second diva to production heavyweights who yanked her from style to style until she lost her identity. The former Mrs. Biggie Smalls has plenty of name-brand help this time, too, but Lady is a cohesive package that proves there’s more to her than celebrity…
No, not Jim Bakker. This one isn’t a disgraced televangelist, but a keyboardist whose intriguing new album comes courtesy of Delmark, a Chicago firm that’s among today’s most underappreciated indies. Although Delmark also puts out modern blues CDs and classic reissues, the imprint’s at its best when keeping the spirit…
The Cars’ Ric Ocasek is a pop genius. His songwriting skills enabled the Boston-based band to become an indisputable rock-radio success story and resulted in a cavalcade of simple, catchy tunes, as Substitution Mass Confusion: A Tribute to the Cars displays. With the exception of Butch Walker, who takes the…
Hardcore rap tends toward redundancy because far too many of its practitioners feel that the only way they’ll be accepted by their peers, not to mention by fans, is to imitate the subject matter and language of pretty much everyone who’s come before them. Fortunately, the S.P.I.C.S. — the acronym…
Does the phrase so smart, its dumb mean anything anymore? If so, you couldnt find a more perfect example of it than Sexyharrasment, the debut full-length by an enigmatic Broomfield duo known as Lint! Swinging blindly between remedial electro-pop and Negativland-esque noise collages, vocalist/programmers Arlo White and Jason McDaniel (a…
If you believe what critics have written about Hopesfall’s debut, the quintet is the brutal, sonically ambitious spawn of Obituary and Radiohead. While The Satellite Years established the band among the smartest of the screamo set, its followup, A Types, left the death-metal posturing behind, flexing melody and emotions more…
In 1994, the Wonder Stuff broke up. Now, twelve years after the act’s last album, the UK pop-rockers have released Escape From Rubbish Island, a sturdy, energetic set of radio-friendly alt-pop. Original members/founders Miles Hunt and Malcolm Treece recruited a new rhythm section and set out to prove their enduring…
Like a troupe of wayward minstrels lost in the woods en route to Canterbury, circa 1369, Faun Fables spins a fairy-tale romance that combines pagan imagery with wildly costumed musical theater. As if that wasn’t weird enough, Dawn “the Faun” McCarthy delivers her unsettling allegories about magical mice and bloodthirsty…
Hip-hop feuds have always been good money-makers, but in the past, many of the people who cashed in were rappers’ relatives, since the MCs themselves had already been perforated. Today, in contrast, rhymers such as the Game, né Jayceon Taylor, have found a way to capitalize on beefs without dying…
With his witty self-deprecation, weirdly wordy narratives and odd rhythmic pacing, Pigeon John (above) is one in a long line of underground superstars to emerge from the legendary Project Blowed, a weekly hip-hop workshop on the notorious Crenshaw Boulevard that helped birth the West Coast underground scene over a decade…
The first line of Slipknot’s record-company bio says the band was “born of the near-desolation of Iowa.” Since the act was actually founded in Des Moines, which isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is hoarded and children prefer eating their pets to playing with them, this description is patently…
Three words: Bono for Pope. Seriously. I mean, what other job would interest this guy? Some folks honestly suggested him as a candidate to head the World Bank, but such a menial task was clearly beneath him — and as proof, consider that the post eventually went to Paul Wolfowitz,…
At their last performance, the band was billed as “Flowbots” on Herman’s Hideaway’s marquee, but if this high-energy rap act keeps stealing the thunder from the headliners like it did that night, the Flobots shouldn’t have that problem again any time soon. After existing for years as a sort of…
Trance-music don Christopher Lawrence is arguably the best-known name in dance music to come from the United States, a country with no shortage of top-notch DJ talent. Consistently ranked alongside the U.K.’s hottest jocks in DJ Magazine’s annual poll, in 2004 Lawrence checked in at number seven, placing higher than…
