Tag Archives: rock

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

 

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever

September 9, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

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…”

Continue reading →

Hanni El Khatib’s got a hot hot thing

August 4, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

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.

Continue reading →

Her career is having a moment – again

July 31, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

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.

Continue reading →

Cuban singer gets a little help from a friend

June 13, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

Boston Globe, June 13, 2011

The story of Jackson Browne’s friendship with Carlos Varela – his Cuban singer-songwriter counterpart, locally acclaimed but little-known in the United States – begins, as do so many good Cuba stories, with a bottle of rum.

It happened when Browne and Varela, who were being introduced by mutual friends, found Varela’s plans for a big get-together with friends, family, and a full band thwarted because Fidel Castro was to give a speech that night in the same Havana neighborhood, and the area was shut down.

So instead, Browne says on the line from his home in California, they repaired to his hotel with a bottle of local spirits as libation. There was a film festival going on, and other visitors popped in, drawn by Varela’s presence.

“We were in my room and word got out in the hotel that he was there and that there was actually singing going on,” Browne says. “People began translating his songs to me, and mine to him. We had a sort of spontaneous house concert.”

Continue reading →

“I killed him in a bar fight and claimed his skin” – A fish eyed poet speaks his mind

May 27, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

MTV Desi, May 27, 2011

Not long ago we featured the music of Adam & the Fish Eyed Poets, the one-man project of Chennai rock wunderkind Kishore Krishna, whose angsty sensibility and sharp songwriting are as much post-punk as deep blues. We caught up with Krishna to find out where he got his mojo… and what keeps him up at night.

As a bonus, we learn what a fish-eyed poet is… and whose love child Krishna killed in a bar fight in his dreams in order to take on the persona of Adam. Read on.

So how does a kid from Chennai get into the likes of Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Sonic Youth? That’s a contrast with the standard Led Zeppelin/Rolling Stones/Pink Floyd diet that many young Indians inhale…

I guess its a consequence of good parenting and the Internet. But I feel it’s an important prerequisite for an artist to understand the evolution of his tradition before he can find his place and start, erm, mining. As for the “many young Indians,” cut them some slack, man. There’s enough pressure on them already.

Continue reading →

Indo-Pak ambient project The Eternal Twilight: “We are both real cute and young”

April 29, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

MTV Desi, April 29, 2011

Ethereal, ambient post-rock inspired by Brian Eno, Sigur Rós and Hammock—but made in Mumbai and Rawalpindi by a couple of guys swapping digital files across the Indo-Pak border? Why not—especially if it sounds as good as The Eternal Twilight, whose debut albumEverything Resembles You just came our way.

Continue reading →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.