• Cut it up & eat it: the bloody soul of Le Butcherettes

    January 10, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

    MTV Iggy, January 10, 2012

    If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

    Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

    But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

    Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

    EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

     

  • Best of 2011: Siddhartha Mitter

    December 23, 2011 By in Radio Tags: , , , ,

    Soundcheck, WNYC Radio, December 22, 2011

    This week’s year-in-review special continues with Siddhartha Mitter, a music journalist who contributes to the Boston Globe, MTV Iggy, MTV Desi and other outlets.

    Siddhartha Mitter’s list:

    Three Great Songs:

    • Frank Ocean, “Novacane”
    • Musiq Soulchild, “Yes”
    • SBTRKT featuring Sampha, “Hold On”

    World Music that Isn’t “World Music”:

    • Chamber Music (album) – Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal
    • Tirtha (album) – Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, Nitin Mitta
    • Zuciya Daya (song) – Bez
    • Karibu Ya Bintou (song) – Baloji

    Music for Upheaval:

    • Rayes Le Bled (song) – El Général
    • Into the Fire (song) – The Bant Singh Project
    • Obama Nation Pt 2 (song) – Lowkey ft. Lupe Fiasco, M-1, Black the Ripper

    Rest in Peace:

    • Pandit Bhimsen Joshi
    • Cesaria Evora
    • Gil Scott-Heron

  • World music top albums of 2011

    December 18, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

    Boston Globe, December 18, 2011

    1. SUSANA BACA

    “Afrodiaspora’’ Soulful pedagogy from the sublime-voiced Baca, who this year was named Peru’s culture minister, and here leads a grand tour of Africa-rooted music from Latin America and the Caribbean, including New Orleans, with her customary grace and serene mastery.

    2. MAMANI KEITA

    “Gagner l’argent français’’ A shimmering, just-right set from a Malian woman singer who deserves broader recognition. Also very much a producer’s album, as French arranger Nicolas Repac develops intricate layers of rock and electronic elements, but it’s Keita’s voice that does the transporting.

    3. BEZ

    “Super Sun’’ A superb alternative-soul singer who happens to come from Nigeria – and a male counterpart to that country’s new songstresses such as Asa, Nneka and Ayo. Watch for Bez to emerge in the United States in 2012, starting with a visit to SXSW in March.

    4. BALLAKÉ SISSOKO + VINCENT SEGAL

    “Chamber Music’’ Recorded deep in the night in Bamako, this exceptional Franco-Malian meeting of cello and kora, mostly duets with a few occasional guests, is austere yet never forbidding; rather, quietly joyous and entirely unexpected.

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  • Jazz comes first for all-female Mosaic Project

    December 9, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

    Boston Globe, December 9, 2011

    It shouldn’t be this way, but it’s still the case that when a jazz group forms in which all the players are women, that fact attracts at least as much notice as the music they perform. It’s unavoidable: all-women groups remain rare in a jazz world where most performers, listeners, and critics are male. It’s also annoying, not least for female artists who have worked their way to the music’s heights only to find their work with one another treated as a novelty.

    That is why it is tempting to see the trio of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist Geri Allen, and bassist Esperanza Spalding, who appear at Scullers tonight through Sunday, as simply a dynamite combination of virtuosos with amazing combined breadth and experience, gathered together in a piano trio, one of the music’s classic formats.

    But that would be leaving out part of the story. That’s because Carrington, who initiated this trio (although it’s the buzzed-about Spalding, Grammy winner and featured performer at the White House, who gets the attention in the club’s listing), recently set aside her deep reluctance to highlight gender in her music. And to spectacular effect: “The Mosaic Project,” her new record featuring 21 top women in jazz (with a dash of soul and funk) is a grand celebration, as well as one of this year’s most appealing releases.

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  • Anders Trentemøller, Danish Electro Ringmaster

    December 7, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

    MTV Iggy, December 7, 2011

    His American breakout moment came earlier this year when he tore up the 2011 Coachella festival, in a high-intensity electronic set backed by a full live rock band and a visual show that had breathless bloggers and reviewers proclaiming it the festival’s high point. But in Europe Anders Trentemøller has been a figure to contend with on the club scene for quite some time.

    Some know him for deep, hard house remixes of the likes of Royksopp’s What Else Is There or his takes on Franz Ferdinand, Moby, Modeselektor and more—sometimes spare and fidgety, sometimes opulent and intense—that have made him one of the continent’s prime remixers. Some know him for his own moody, sparse 2006 album The Last Resort.

    Many had their minds blown—whether the 50,000 people in the crowd or many more who’ve watched the video online—by the ultra-high energy and lavish staging, complete with ghostly choreographed armies, wild curtains and glowing parasols, of his “Silver Surfer Ghost Rider Go!” at the 2009 Roskilde festival in his native Denmark.

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  • Amália Hoje brings new life to fado’s strongest voice

    December 2, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

    Boston Globe, December 2, 2011

    From the start, it doesn’t feel like fado. Nor does the players’ entrance fit the norm for Lisbon’s hallowed style of melancholy song. It is not the genteel Portuguese guitar but a sharp synthesizer beat that ushers the artists on stage. There are not one but three singers – a woman and two men, sporting tattoos in lieu of the customary black shawl. Behind them, a full rock band, and behind that, a string orchestra.

    But the song that launches this show, held in 2009 at the Coliseu in Lisbon and captured on a live DVD, is one the crowd recognizes. It is “Com Que Voz,” the title piece from a great 1969 album by fado’s empress, Amalia Rodrigues. And this band, Amalia Hoje (meaning “Amalia Today”) is a special project commissioned to honor Rodrigues, who died in 1999.

    Now, behind the runaway success in Portugal of their studio album, live recording, and concerts, the Hoje team (minus strings, but plus a video art component) are bringing their pop approach to the Rodrigues songbook for two concerts in the United States. They visit the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday.

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  • She puts the world into her music

    November 19, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

    Boston Globe, November 19, 2011

    NEW YORK – In the course of five albums, the singer Kiran Ahluwalia has blended the Indian classical and folk forms that are her specialty into collaborations with Portuguese fado musicians, the Celtic fiddle of Natalie MacMaster, the Inuit throat singing of Tanya Tagaq, and more. For Ahluwalia, such partnerships across genre and culture aren’t an experiment, or a social commentary on our times, or a producer’s cute idea, or a pitch to gain new listeners.

    They are a personal necessity.

    “The needing of collaboration comes because we ourselves are collaborations of culture,” says Ahluwalia. “We’re not pure. I collaborate in the kitchen: I make Japanese soy bean curry, Indian style. I think in English, or in Hindi – or French. Our lives are collaboration, because we don’t belong to one culture.”

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  • Just A Kenyan Band of Superheroes

    November 15, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

    MTV Iggy, November 15, 2011

    It took a superhero to bring Just A Band back from the future.

    His name: Makmende. His look: Blaxploitation chic—sharp tan jacket, flared trousers, broad-rimmed shades, Afro pick. His modus operandi: Appears in the streets of Nairobi to beat down miscreants, send robbers fleeing, fight off masked kidnappers, rescue a lady in distress and leave her swooning as he coolly walks away.

    These heroics—complete with fabulous comedic touches, like when Makmende swipes his opponent’s necktie and refashions it into a bandanna—unfold to the beat of “Ha He,” a catchy electro-pop delight off 82, the second album by Just A Band. The Nairobi trio are filmmakers, animators and comic-book buffs as well as musicians, and when they gathered some friends to perform in a video for the song, they looked for a fun storyline and came up with Makmende. The name was inspired by an old street-slang term, of obscure origin, to describe foolhardy or adventurous behavior.

    What they didn’t expect was that Makmende the superhero would become a cult figure days after the video’s March 2010 YouTube posting. And in so doing, turn Just A Band from an ironically-named, arty purveyor of avant-garde sounds to Nairobi hipsters into something like a national pop sensation.

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  • Palestinian hip-hop inspires a different kind of political party

    November 13, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

    Boston Globe, November 13, 2011

    So a woman and a man enter an elevator. She is Israeli, he is Palestinian; she is going up, he is going down. But as it turns out, no one is going anywhere. The elevator is stuck. While they wait for something to happen, they talk.

    That’s the premise of a new song in English that the pioneering Palestinian hip-hop trio DAM, who usually rap in Arabic and occasionally in Hebrew, are trying out on their current US visit. The tour brings them, together with British-Palestinian MC Shadia Mansour and American guests including M-1 of the activist duo Dead Prez, to the Middle East in Cambridge tonight.

    “It’s a funny song, a sarcastic song about the struggle in Palestine,” says Tamer Nafar, who makes up DAM with his brother Suhell and Mahmoud Jreri. “It’s me and this beautiful woman, and we get to talk. It’s a love story; the delivery is not political at all.”

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  • From Seattle, with a clean slate

    November 4, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

    Boston Globe, November 4, 2011

    Their new album’s title is a shout-out to 1930s Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, born of their fascination with film studies. The songs are oblique tributes and reflections inspired by film stars, activists, political prisoners, Barack Obama, and … weedhead comic Tommy Chong. Two tracks are eulogies of a kind: one for Oscar Grant, the young man killed by a police officer on an Oakland train platform; the other for the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team, which folded and moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.

    Welcome to the kaleidoscopic world of Blue Scholars. For nearly a decade the duo of MC Geologic and DJ Sabzi has been spinning rhymes that are at once national, even global in their social scope, and hyper-local, an engagingly detailed and affectionate guide to their hometown, Seattle.

    In the process, they’ve become leaders in that city’s fertile but long-unheralded hip-hop scene, and its ambassadors to a nation of beat and rhyme aficionados in need of some renewal and inspiration. “Cinemetropolis” is their third full-length album (they’ve also made a flurry of EPs), and their strongest. It has earned them their first national headlining tour; they visit the Paradise on Thursday.

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