Word: ska
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...month-old son Jakob and a host of might-have-beens. The group's final album, titled simply and aptly Sublime (MCA), was released last week and might have been the band's ticket to becoming the hottest new act in the music industry. Nowell might have been to ska what Kurt Cobain was to grunge--a big, blazing talent who introduces the mainstream to a new musical world. Nowell, however, played the Cobain role a bit too well, and Sublime, like Nirvana, will be best remembered as a band with history-making potential that perished before reaching its full...
...year so far. Like such cutting-edge performers as Beck, Tricky and Rage Against the Machine, Sublime draws confidently on the group's new CD from both alternative rock and avant-garde hip-hop, creating a sound that is sharp and soulful. The band also tosses reggae and ska (a faster, jerkier reggae precursor) into the sonic mix, resulting in songs that are hard to categorize and harder still to resist. While much of today's pop wallows in recycled schlock rock from the '70s (Kiss) and rehashed alternative rock from last week (just turn on the radio), Sublime offers...
Nowell's last gift to everyone else is this outstanding album. The first song on it, Garden Grove, features a scratchy, staccato guitar riff, characteristic of ska, along with sampled snatches of sound and music. The result is a feeling of restful introspection coupled with an underlying sense of urgency. On April 29, 1992 (Miami), the band combines an itchy ska beat with a kind of enlightened gangsta-rap attitude to capture the incendiary, anarchic mood on the streets during the nationwide Rodney King uprisings. Nowell is not just channel-surfing through these emotions and genres...
...H.O.R.D.E., which has built a reputation over the past four years as a haven for tie-dyed twentysomethings, has a solid lineup featuring Blues Traveler and Lenny Kravitz. Meanwhile, the scrappy, year-old Warped Tour has won a following among the particular set of youngsters who enjoy punk rock, ska and skateboarding. Next week the House of Blues will launch an R. and B. tour, and in August, Perry Farrell, the progressive rocker who hatched Lollapalooza, will inaugurate a new venture: the tree-planting, obscure band-booking, alternative-to-alternative ENIT festival. Ticket prices vary from tour to tour...
...tour is homonymously called "Skavoovee," a reference to the title of an older album, released by another ska group after Natchez's group had been assembled...