Results tagged “worldmusic”

When the Croc closed last December, Black Mountain was already scheduled to play the venue in early February. Luckily, Neumo's knew better than to leave the druggy psychedelic rock five-piece high and dry - they added Black Mountain to the bill of tomorrow night's show, creating a truly awesome (and diverse) bill. Along with BM's Zep-meets-Sabbath-meets-heavy, acid-laced spacerock, Thursday's lineup also includes the groovy, '70s folk-twinged Americana of Howlin Rain, the tongue-in-cheek electro-pop of the perpetually be-caped MGMT, and the complex polyrhythms and world music-leaning harmonies of buzz band Yeasayer. It's rare you find a couple good performers on a bill, let alone three or four well worth seeing live. Tomorrow night at Neumo's you just can't go wrong. We can only imagine what the crowd's going to be like.

The last time multi-culti multi-genre singer-songwriter Manu Chao hit the Seattle area was at Sasquatch this summer (see above). Singing in French, Spanish, Arabic, Galician, Catalan, English, Portuguese, Italian, and Wolof, Chao fuses a variety of styles, including rock, reggae, punk and ska. So this ain't your grandma's drum circle's world music. There's no word as to when he's headed back to the Northwest, but if you're looking to experience the Spanish political punk in your own home, Nacional Records just released a limited quantity of the double vinyl version of his latest album La Radiolina today, available at Sonic Boom, Easy Street, and Everyday Music.

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."

Do you need any other reason to go see Femi Kuti tomorrow at the Showbox?

Dear Darek,

A few weeks ago we noticed something new in the upper reaches of our Comcast Digital Cable guide. Channels 962-984 now play Seattle FM radio stations: KISW (971), KPLU (966), even KUBE (967).

-Two lovebirds are looking for somewhere in the Pacific Northwest outdoors to consummate their marriage. "We will have a two person tent, sleeping bags, a bit of mosquito netting, bug spray...and many little towels." Hot!

In all the annals of music, it's hard to imagine anymore specific a genre than "gypsy punk." But that's just the sort of cabaret-esque insanity that Gogol Bordello brings to their shows.