Author Archives: Michaelangelo Matos

House-music producers have long put nostalgia up front–sampling songs from their parents’ childhoods, often tweaking them with low-pass filters, the audio equivalent of sepia tint. But Detroit’s Kenny Dixon Jr., who usually records under the name Moodymann, makes it the whole point of his work. Take the 1996 Moodymann 12-inch “The Day We Lost the […]

Sonic Youth do nothing on Sonic Nurse (DGC) they haven’t done before. Kim Gordon is still yelping hoarsely about celebrity, this time on “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” (originally titled “Mariah Carey and…”), where she asks, “How was your date with Eminem?” The guitars still swell and ebb and clink and approximate […]

Leonard Cohen must be huge in Scotland. Scottish indie-pop bands like Belle & Sebastian, Ballboy, and Arab Strap all nick something from Cohen’s brooding melancholy and chamber-pop arrangements. But “Your Picture,” the fourth track on Camera Obscura’s sophomore effort, Underachievers Please Try Harder (Merge), sounds so much like the early, acoustic Cohen that the old […]

Few musicians are as synonymous with their genre as guitarist Diblo Dibala is with soukous, the rippling, heavily melodic Congolese rumba. The late bandleader Franco, one of Dibala’s early bosses, codified the direction of Congolese guitar playing in the mid-50s: pealing, billowing leads that sound simultaneously forceful and relaxed, highly rhythmic but with every note […]

You have every reason to be skeptical of a jazz-electronica fusion, particularly one from the Ninja Tune label, which seems to specialize in goofy, frustratingly bland trip-hop. But Jaga Jazzist, a ten-piece Norwegian band led by composer Lars Horntveth, pulls it off: its music doesn’t feel engineered or synthesized so much as happened upon. On […]

You might wonder why the latest release from Brother Ali is called Champion EP–at 39 minutes, it’s not much shorter than the new full-length by PJ Harvey. The designation makes some sense, though: rather than a fully realized follow-up to the Minneapolis MC’s superb Shadows on the Sun (Rhymesayers, 2003), this nine-track set reads more […]

The he’s-back hosannas that have greeted Musicology (NPG/Columbia), the 25th album of new material Prince has made available in record shops (still more are available online), seem out of proportion to the modest, skillful funk and pop it contains. It’s enough to say that the disc is his most straightforward and song-focused since 1996’s Chaos […]

The most shameless moment on Ginuwine’s “In Those Jeans,” the hit from last year’s The Senior (Epic), isn’t the chorus, in which the song’s title finishes the phrase “Is there any more room for me…?” It isn’t the bridge, a roll call of popular denim brands (“Levi’s, Prada, Baby Phat, I love them / Love […]

Detroit’s Matthew Dear became a techno MVP in 2003, on the strength of excellent material he’d released under three different names: Jabberjaw (the Perlon 12-inch Girlfriend), False (a self-titled album on Plus 8), and of course plain old Matthew Dear (Leave Luck to Heaven, on Spectral Sound/Ghostly International). Each disc has its own distinct identity: […]

“Half the crowd is calling out for ‘Born to Run’ / And the other half is calling out for ‘Born to Lose,’” roars singer-guitarist Craig Finn in “Barfruit Blues.” As front man for the Hold Steady, and previously for the late great Minneapolis postpunk band Lifter Puller, Finn has always split the difference: his lyrics […]

Nostalgia seems to run in ten-year cycles, so it’s no surprise that old-school jungle, the breakbeat-driven dance genre also known as drum ‘n’ bass, is undergoing something of a hipster revival now. Violent Turd, a subdivision of Kid606’s Tigerbeat6 label, led the charge last spring with Wired for Sound, a DJ-mix CD by Detroit’s Todd […]

Even in this era of greatly reduced vocal expectations, it’s usually not a good idea for dance producers to sing. Most of them simply don’t have much in the way of chops, and Aksel Schaufler, the German producer-DJ who records as Superpitcher, is no exception. But on Here Comes Love (Kompakt), his debut full-length, his […]

Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti made his name in the late 90s with a series of noisy ambient dubscapes–and though several of them were credited to Conoco and Sistol, that name was Vladislav Delay, the entity to which production was ultimately attributed. Then, in September 2000, he released Vocalcity on Forcetracks–a subdivision of Frankfurt’s conceptual techno […]

Achieving diva status means trimming away anything that might get in the way of your showbiz destiny. For Beyonce, that includes not just her surname but also Destiny’s Child, the R & B vocal group she began her career in–though they’re allegedly still together, it wouldn’t be a bit surprising if they never recorded another […]

With all due respect to Chicago, the most fertile spot on the planet for dance music right now is Cologne, Germany. The main reason: it’s the home of Kompakt, the label chiefly responsible for codifying the wriggling sonic minutiae and serene emotional overtones that have come to be bunched under the term microhouse and the […]