Tag: Vol. 33 No. 46

Black Dice drummer Hisham Bharoocha, who’s since left the band, was the malfunctioning safety valve on the steam boiler: if a particular passage of corrosive abstraction grew too unruly, he was equally likely to ground it in a fixed beat or explode it with a wild spaz-out. But he’s barely present on the new Creature […]

Hip-hop antiheroes have pillaged the tropes of the comic-book heavy with a vengeance–maybe because both MC and archfiend traffic in outlaw charisma, eloquent scorn, and menacing aliases. Rap’s foremost evil genius remains the leering Dr. Octagon–Kool Keith’s splice of doctors Benway and Octopus–but if he’s got a rival, it’s MF Doom, aka Daniel Dumile, whose […]

Though he’s best known as a painter, Roger Brown produced three-dimensional pieces that expressed his saucy, often biting satiric views even better; that work is surveyed in this excellent retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Brown famously preferred advertising to high art, and Galvanized Temple is both more solid looking than classical architecture and amusingly […]

A veteran of Puerto Rico’s mighty El Gran Combo and bands led by Ray Barretto and Ruben Blades, timbales master Ralph Irizarry formed his first ensemble, Timbalaye, in the mid-90s. While the group’s arrangements, tunes, and extended solos are all squarely within the jazz tradition, you can still hear the influence of those juggernaut Latin […]

The second of Hefty Records’ bimonthly Immediate Action nights at Sonotheque is an event of note for electronic music enthusiasts. Fresh off a lap around the European festival circuit, Telefon Tel Aviv anchors the bill; since the duo of Josh Eustis and Charles Cooper last played their adopted hometown (opening for Amon Tobin at the […]

Gary U.S. Bonds’s early-60s hits–“New Orleans,” the epic “Quarter to Three,” “Dear Lady Twist,” and a few others–exemplified the rock aesthetic at its most jubilantly unhinged. As the band brayed deliriously behind him, Bonds rasped, mewled, and bellowed tales of debauchery and lust, the rough production muddling his vocals to the point of semicoherence. Thankfully, […]