Review Playboy.com July 2007 Link The Pitchfork Music Festival embraced its music snob roots by booking iconoclast Yoko Ono. But the three-day celebration of sonic diversity — which spread 39 acts over three stages in Chicago’s Union Park — was more populist than its reputation suggests. Nothing made that more clear than Saturday night’s closing […]
Review Playboy.com July 2007 Oxnard, California producer Oh No is no stranger to the offbeat concept album. His previous, well-conceived full-length was made entirely of samples taken from the music of Hair composer Galt McDermot. The instrumental Dr. No’s Oxperiment was constructed from a similarly limited, unlikely and exotic source. All the samples originated from […]
Review Playboy.com May 2005 Rating: Three of Four Bunnyheads It’s a bad sign for a politician when animated monkeys dis your war record. That’s the state Dubya finds himself in with the release of Demon Days, the latest album from the virtual hip-hop collective Gorillaz. On the smoldering track “Dirty Harry” — which starts out […]
Music Review Playboy.com January 2005 In any class covering hip-hop history, the prof will undoubtedly devote much of the semester to Bronx B-boys and L.A. gang members. But Run the Road, a British rap compilation hitting U.S. shores this month, may be the most cogent argument yet that overseas artists aren’t merely copying U.S. styles […]
Concert Review Chicago Tribune November 2004 Though many rappers rely on flashy diamonds and street credibility to get attention, underground rap kingpin Daniel Dumile needed just a mike and a metal mask to rock the Abbey Pub Monday night. Performing as the mysterious MF Doom, a character named after a Marvel comic book antagonist, Dumile […]
CD Review Playboy.com October 2004 Rating: 3 of 4 Bunnyheads A Tom Waits album is like a rowdy juke joint take on Dante’s Inferno, brimming with more sinners than a tent revival preacher’s sermon. On Real Gone, Waits once again mines that dark territory most of us would rather forget, painting portraits of the weird […]
CD Review Playboy.com September 2004 Rating: 3 of 4 Bunnyheads The idea of these seminal ’90 pop-punkers making a concept album might sound like a big pile of Dookie, but Billie Joe, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool’s song cycle about growing up suburban is more dramatic than you might expect. Broken up into a dozen […]