Nona Hendryx balances soul, conscience

July 8, 2012 By

Boston Globe, July 8, 2012

NEW YORK— Let’s say you formed your first band as a Trenton, N.J., teen in the ’50s. You helped invent funk in a trio, LaBelle, that found cult status in the ’70s. You pioneered sci-fi themes before George Clinton. Later, you forged ahead as a solo artist and in collaborations with everyone from Yoko Ono to the Talking Heads.

You might be forgiven, at 67, for resting on your laurels. But that isn’t the Nona Hendryx way.

“Rust never sleeps,” says Hendryx. “I enjoy using my energy. What else are you going to do on this planet?”

In the cool of her midtown Manhattan studio, the singer strikes a naturally edgy elegance, clad in a form-fitting gray ensemble accessorized with silver jewelry. Gold records and industry memorabilia adorn the wall.

To the world at large, Hendryx is known as one-third of LaBelle, the band with the 1974 hit “Lady Marmalade.” (The one with the saucy French chorus, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”) But here in New York, she’s appreciated for all she’s done since, as a songwriter, creator, mentor, and activist.

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Brazilian’s road album draws from touring, tradition

June 25, 2012 By

Boston Globe, June 25, 2012

The Brazilian singer Céu calls “Caravana Sereia Bloom” — her third CD, which came out earlier this year — a road album. It is meant to capture, she says, “many aspects of the road,” a topic she’s had ample time to reflect on as a touring artist.

“Since my first album in 2005, I started to travel a lot,” says Céu, who plays Brighton Music Hall on Thursday. Appropriately enough, she’s speaking from a tour bus.

“I felt I had to talk about this. Not about a specific trip: Everyone has movement in their lives, and when you have to travel it’s like a parallel reality. You meet cultures, people, food, images, smells.”

And emotions, of course. As countless filmmakers have intuited, the road is about feelings — rupture, nostalgia, anticipation, realization.

For Céu, who first came to US attention when her debut turned up for sale at Starbucks outlets, “Caravana” confirms what her second album, “Vagarosa,” presaged: This is no central-casting Brazilian lounge diva, but a complex poet with raw force and an explorer’s sensibility.

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Malaysian singer-songwriter Yuna finds a home away from home

June 8, 2012 By

Boston Globe, June 8, 2012

Yuna didn’t have to come to America.

Things were going just fine for the young singer-songwriter back home in Malaysia three years ago, when a Los Angeles artist management company started courting her on the strength of the songs she’d posted online.

She had parlayed MySpace popularity into a budding career, garnering TV appearances and winning local music awards. She had earned a law degree, and she was getting set to launch a fashion boutique.

So when faced with the unexpected prospect of setting all that aside to start from scratch as an unknown in the United States, Yuna understandably hesitated.

What tilted the balance, she says, wasn’t America’s inherent appeal, but the chance to use all her material.

“I wasn’t sure,” she says. “I was doing really well in Malaysia. But I felt this might be good for me, because I had written a bunch of English songs. In Malaysia you can only get by doing Malay music. I had about 40 songs in English, and I didn’t want to waste them.”

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

January 10, 2012 By

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

 

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Anders Trentemøller, Danish Electro Ringmaster

December 7, 2011 By

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

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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Just A Kenyan Band of Superheroes

November 15, 2011 By

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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Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever

September 9, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, September 9, 2011

There’s a poignant moment on Cannibal Courtship, the fifth album from the Cambodia-inspired, Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever, that encapsulates what is tragic and urgent in the message of this idiosyncratic band who just as often come off light-hearted.

It comes on a track called “Sister In the Radio.” Singing in Khmer against a slow-paced backdrop that sounds a bit like a surf-rock dirge, frontwoman Chhom Nimol tells a story from her childhood—when she was about 9 years old and living, like many Cambodians scattered by the Khmer Rouge genocide and later political conflict, in refugee camps.

“This is my personal song,” Chhom says, in a conversation before the band took the stage recently at Lincoln Center in New York. “When I was a kid I lived in camps in Thailand. My family had fled. I had no idea if my older sister…”

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Hanni El Khatib’s got a hot hot thing

August 4, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, August 4, 2011

Somewhere on a side street in the vestigial industrial precincts of Manhattan’s Far West side, the rocker Hanni El Khatib interrupts a photo shoot—he was getting portrayed roaming these blocks and checking out the High Line elevated park—and pulls out his camera phone to take a few snaps of his own.

The sight that attracts his interest is a nondescript heap of old car tires, piled up at the edge of an auto repair shop lot. “I just like stuff,” El Khatib explains. “I like piles of s**t, old TVs or electronics. A pile of tires is really cool to me. I don’t know why.”

Clad in black jeans, a blue work shirt with a white undershirt, and a bunch of tattoos visible, El Khatib almost looks the part of a warehouse or parking lot greaser, but not quite. A bit too clean. The beard moderate and trimmed. Most of all, the fresh face with the open, curious look and wide eyes. A 30-year-old manchild checking out random urban materials while rocking a cultivated but sincerely worn style.

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Her career is having a moment – again

July 31, 2011 By

Boston Globe, July 31, 2011

NEW YORK – As a pre-teen, Ximena Sarinana played willful child characters in telenovelas, Mexico’s ultra-popular soap operas. As a teenager she went on to complex roles in feature films. In her late teens she fronted a jazz and funk band, and she even spent a semester at Berklee College of Music. At 22 she was playing festivals and headlining major venues behind the whimsically titled “Mediocre,” her 2008 Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated solo album of moody, inventive rock.

Now all of 25, Sarinana is starting over. Again.

The budding pop star (who dropped out of Berklee to promote “Mediocre”) with the earnest following back home is back on the grind as an opening act, touring the US as the appetizer in a three-act bill, limited to a half-hour set before ceding the stage to Danish singer Oh Land and the headliner, Sia.

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