“The greater the disparity, the greater the despair.”#GreedKills #FlipThePyramid
4/3
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: The Storm Trio: Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan
BANYAN LIVE: Space Disco
REVELRY: Bingo w/ Smerks & the Nightmares
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Ronnie Hill Band
4/4
AFROROOTS FEST ISLAMORADA: Pokito
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Los Tereros Muertos
PROPAGANDA: The Night Sky, The Franternals, Good Bison, George Spits
MIAMI BOTANICAL GARDEN: Jazz in the Jungle ft Yissy García, Bandancha
REVELRY: Sandman Sleeps
BANYAN LIVE: Attila, Butcher Babies, DED, Dealer & Nathan James
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: The Flyers
4/5
GRAMPS: Judge, Culture
AFROROOTS FEST ISLAMORADA: Cortadito, Grupo Barrio Abajo
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: La Muchacha w Pascuala Ilabaca & Fauna
REVOLUTION LIVE: Anberlin, Copeland,
Madina Lake
RUST & WAX: Rain Boar
REVELRY: Yacht Lava
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Spiral Light
BANYAN LIVE: Tolkien-it-off Burlesque
4/5-5/24
MTN SPACE GALLERY: Melissa DelPrete: Little Gems & mtn space-ship. Opening reception 4/5
4/6
AFROROOTS FEST ISLAMORADA: Electric
Piquete, Philip Montalban, DJ Supa Kundukta
REVELRY: Burlesqueaversary Show
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: The Floating Brains
GRAMPS: Cold Cave
4/7
KRAVIS CENTER: Old Crow Medicine Show
4/8
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Miami City Ballet Impromptu
4/9
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Los Mirlos
BEING DEAD
by erik kvarnberg
Though formed way back in 2017, Austin, Texas’ Being Dead have just two full-length albums to their name. But these LPs have arrived in quick succession within the last two years, giving everyone just enough time to obsess over the recent output of core duo-mates Falcon Bitch and Schmoofy before they — and this is pure speculation — drop another album soon that will send fans down a Reddit hole of headphone-aided track dissection and discourse on song meanings. CONTINUED INSIDE>>>
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Naughty Iguanas PROPAGANDA: Live Figure Drawing After Dark
4/10
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Perfect Storm
4/11
RESPECTABLE STREET: PureHoney Presents: Shannon and the Clams, Being Dead, Las Nubes
REVOLUTION LIVE: Party 101, DJ Matt Bennett
REVELRY: Camel Toe Funk Band
PROPAGANDA: Burning Glass
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Start Me Up!
4/11-27
LAKE WORTH PLAYHOUSE: The Producers
4/11-6/20
CULTURAL COUNCIL FOR PB COUNTY: 2025 Biennial ft Asandra Asandra, George Bayer, Jerilyn Brown, Maximo Caminero, Jacques de Beaufort, Fiona Drummond, Rod Faulds, Yvonne Fok-Gundersen, Mark Forman, Paul Gervais, Irina Grimaldi, Nestor Guzman, Todd Lim, Hodaya Louis, Debra Robert, Nadine Saitlin, Amauri Torezan
4/12
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Nanpa Basico
REVOLUTION LIVE: Shordie Shordie
RESPECTABLE STREET: Death of a Deity, Sick Fawn, Ta Bien
BANYAN LIVE: Daft Punk Night
PROPAGANDA: Killed by Florida, Goat Rope, Mutiny Act
CULTURE ROOM: Tab Benoit
ER BRADLEY’S: Heidi Merrill
REVELRY: Honky Tonk Night w Dead Bronco
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Frank Zummo (Sum41), School of Rock Boca Raton, Broward, Palmetto Bay, North Miami, Southern Blood
BANYAN LIVE: Steve Marino Comedy – Steely Dan Tribute
4/18
RESPECTABLE STREET: Slothrust ‘Of Course You Did’ Tour
BEACH BANDSHELL: Beach High ’15 Reunion
GRAMPS: Pity Party (Girls Club), Cannibal Kids, Camp Blu, Frogs Show Mercy
REVELRY: Slip & Spinouts Rockabilly Night
PROPAGANDA: The Zappe Cats, Condors and Chaos, Orange Blackhearts, The Scream Queen
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Greatest Decades Of Rock
4/19
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: STRFKR
RESPECTABLE STREET: Traitors, Crown Magnetar, Yosemite In Black
PROPAGANDA: 16 Year Anniv w Horror Business, Sewersidal Distortion, Time Bombed
REVOLUTION LIVE: D’Aydrian Harding GRAMPS: Kool Keith, MC Homeless
REVELRY: Halfway to Halloween Party
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Marcus Johnson
4/20
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Tasty Vibrations
PROPAGANDA: 420 w Rockstead, Joey Calderaio & TFB, Mad Mellow
4/23
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Piper & the Hard Times
PROPAGANDA: Lovecraft Lounge
GRAMPS: MIKE, Sideshow, Niontay, El Cousteau
4/24
REVOLUTION LIVE: Dogs in a Pile REVELRY: Live Dating Show with The Roast Host
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: PHD
4/25
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Omar Courtz
REVOLUTION LIVE: Cold, September Mourning, University Drive
REVELRY: 180 x Summer Emo Nite
PROPAGANDA: Mindvirus, Eternal Punishment, Sagitta, Rize
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: Disco 54
BANYAN LIVE: Emo Night
4/26
DELRAY BEACH HISTORICAL SOCIETY:
Twilight in the Garden Meander garden paths. Enjoy lite bites and spirits from the areas finest restaurants. Silent auction, music, history exhibits, coastal garden lounge.
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Omar Courtz
RESOURCE DEPOT: 13th Annual Catwalk Student Fashion Show
MIAMI BEACH BANDSHELL: Gold Dust Lounge Miami Color Theory
4/29
FILLMORE MIAMI: Wilco, Waxahatchee REVOLUTION LIVE: The Dead South, Sunny War
4/30
CRAZY UNCLE MIKE’S: An Evening of Billy Joel Andrew Klein
5/6
RESPECTABLE STREET: The Toasters, Matamaska, Fuakata
BEING DEAD continued
After a batch of singles and EPs in their early going, Being Dead sound poised to go on one of those multi-album tears that, in hindsight, represents a band at the peak of its powers. Their newest, Eels, came out in September 2024 and feels timeless already. It would fit on a shelf along the likes of Oracular Spectacular by MGMT, Floral Canyon by *repeat repeat, I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy, and Pacer by The Amps. But it totally stands apart from all of the surf rock, proto-punk, harmonically rich and creatively dense music that anyone may try to compare it to.
The sixteen short tracks of Eels register like steps in a new and improved hero’s journey. The opener, “Godzilla Rises,” is a jangly, infatuated bop whose cinema’s great Tokyo terror, it spiny awesomeness piercing our hearts with help from Being Dead’s girl-group hand claps and weirdo his ’n’ her vocal harmonies. The playfulness between Falcon Bitch and Schmoofy makes their music flexible enough to rival Phil Spector and Pet Sounds for sonic ambition while romanticizing a movie monster.
Being Dead somehow embed every beat of every song with a warm crackle of utopian nostalgia and a mischievous grin. They want you to chase them through the mirror maze at a carnival, or follow them through the pathway of a single — “Firefighters” — about a fire rescue Dalmatian yearning for a life by the ocean. Over a bass line that’s impossible to stay still to, Schmoofy and Falcon Bitch trade harmonies and chants, only to spring a major mood shift in a middle, and an end section that takes “Firefighters” to a very thoughtful place.
This album is like that, all the way through. Musical slapstick moments are matched with lines like the “Goodnight” couplet, “Come with me till the sunrise bleeds, no more constellations,” until the song breaks away from its stargazing Americana sound into a beach flamenco solo, as if they wanted to keep you tossing and turning through your dreams “Rock n’ Roll Hurts,” a two-minute doo wop-induced jaunt, is broken up by recordings of laughter, audience applause tracks, and a brief screeching feedback and distorted guitar section that only lasts 10 seconds and arrives like a serving of dessert.
Eels represents a proper maturation from Being Dead’s debut 2023 album, When Horses Would Run. Among the first album’s highlights: a spacey synth on the title track that suggests a psychedelics-powered search for alien life; and a lounge-y jazz break in “Muriel’s Big Day Off” in between marching surf rock riffs and precariously stacked harmonies.
Recording the follow-up album with Grammy-winning, Steve Albini-trained John Congleton, Being Dead have taken their songwriting to the next level. They had help as well from a third musician, Ricky Motto, who also joins them on tour to fill out the live ensemble. When Horses Would Run is a collection of songs and disparate locales; Eels is a single, 39-minute sonic landscape, complete in every form the idea could possibly take.
Getting the mundane biographical details on Being Dead can be a challenge, and their determination to live their own reality produces an origin story that changes over time. (Schmoofy previously went by Gumball.) This commitment to the bit, though possibly vexing to music journalists, encourages connection with fans. Being Dead might not share their innermost thoughts with interviewers, but they’re the only band that ever painted the sun, moon and earth on their stomachs to simulate the solar eclipse that was happening overhead while they performed live on Seattle’s KEXP.
Being Dead open for Shannon and the Clams w Las Nubes, 8pm Friday, April 11 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach. beingdead.bandcamp.com
Amauri Torezan, Cloud Nine, 2024,
BIENNIAL2025
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Biennial is a highly anticipated the breadth of talent in Palm Beach a celebrated gallerist and curator guest juror. Biennial 2025 features living and working in our incredible Featured
Asandra Asandra • George Maximo Caminero • Fiona Drummond • Rod Faulds
Mark Forman • Paul Gervais
Nestor Guzman • Todd Lim • Nadine Saitlin •
Exhibition generously sponsored by:
Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation
Robert M. Montgomery, 601 Lake Avenue, Lake Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 p.m. palmbeachculture.com/exhibitions
BIENNIAL
anniversary, the Cultural Council’s anticipated juried exhibition highlighting Beach County. Tim Hawkinson, curator from Los Angeles, serves as features a variety of work by artists incredible cultural community.
Featured artists:
George Bayer • Jerilyn Brown
Jacques de Beaufort
Faulds • Yvonne Fok-Gundersen
Gervais • Irina Grimaldi
Hodaya Louis • Debra Robert
Amauri Torezan
Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 75 inches
Rust & Wax Record Shop partner with local youth-lead initiative to work towards a greener future
BluEco SWAPS
BluEco Swaps is a new initiative in West Palm Beach connecting young leaders with local businesses to champion sustainable swaps replacement practices such as reuse, recycling and alternative materials that can dramatically reduce a workplace’s environmental impact Our goal is to stem the tide of microplastics and other toxins that harm our life-giving oceans Our name tells who we are: advocates for an ocean-friendly Blue Economy powered by sustainable swaps
This month we are excited to highlight Rust & Wax Record Shop, an independent record store here in our backyard, for their work streamlining the way towards a Blue Economy
Rust & Wax owners Melanie and Jesse Feldman first opened their doors in 2017 to bring the city of West Palm Beach the best in new and used vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, books, and more Inside their storefront on Florida Avenue, along a compact warehouse row, you’ll discover “a record shop that was designed to provide you with a place to explore and find new music, free of judgement,” Jesse says.
The Feldmans have always looked for ways to make their business more eco-friendly no simple task in their resource-heavy trade They’ve cut plastic usage by stocking paper shopping bags and minimizing usage of plastic outer sleeves on records They recycle and donate as many items as possible
As buyers of personal music collections totaling thousands of used records, rather than letting damaged ones go to waste-
-Melanie and Jesse donate them to Resource Depot a local creative reuse center, or to local artisans such as Tunes Company, where they get upcycled into coasters, notebooks, clocks, and more
“ ”
We
love that the next generation is actively working to better our environment and understands how the choices we make today will impact future generations.
Rust & Wax’s commitment to the environment was underlined when they joined forces with BluEco Swaps Working alongside one of our bright Youth Ambassadors, Caroline McCarthy, Rust & Wax has, for their sustainable swap, changed out all chemical cleaning products for biodegradable and eco-friendly options
Most typical cleaning products such as industrial solvents contain volatile organic compounds (VOC), which can be harmless in some combinations but at their most toxic, cause air pollution indoors while contaminating groundwater and contributing to smog formation outdoors, the EPA advises Switching over to eco-friendly cleansers slows the accumulation of VOCs in the environment For Melanie and Jesse, it’s a way to shrink Rust & Wax’s environmental footprint as much as possible and make sustainability an everyday part of their lives
JThrough our efforts, we hope to bring attention to the importance of sustainable use of resources to protect our ocean planet If you are interested in learning more about BluEco Swaps, how to get involved, and how we can help your business, visit us at bluecoswaps.com or write to us at leaders.blueswaps@gmail .com This project would not be possible without the support and mentoring from the City of West Palm Beach Office of Sustainability, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Loggerhead Marinelife Center
Caroline McCarthy BluEco Swap Youth Ambassador
Owners Melanie and Jesse Feldman at Rust and Wax
MR Meyers and Seventh Generation cleaning products offer a sustainable alternative to her previous use of Clorox products
WAXAHATCHEE
by david rolland
Ever since streaming took over for CD’s, it’s been hard to find an album I’m willing to hear over and over again. When the entirety of recorded music is competing for our eardrums and attention, it’s tough to stick with one record and get to know it intimately the way we did when we had to purchase music. But one exception for this writer is Out in the Storm by Waxahatchee
Somehow it’s been nearly a decade since its 2017 release, but it still sounds as fresh as ever while at the same time evoking an early ‘90s heyday of alt-rock female singer-songwriters such as Liz Phair and Juliana Hatfield. On ten tracks of no filler, with every song going all out, singer-songwriter Kathryn Crutchfield emotes every sensation from rage to bliss to boredom.
Crutchfield started performing as Waxahatchee back in 2010, naming herself after a creek she grew up near in Alabama. In the 15 years since, she’s put out six albums, each one having its highlights, most recently 2024’s ode to her newfound sobriety, Tigers Blood. But it’s Out in the Storm that keeps drawing me back.
In a 2017 interview with Nylon, Crutchfield called her fourth release both her rock album and her break-up record: “[I]t’s a lot of things sort of hitting you quickly and sort of packed into 30 minutes. So, it kind of has that stormy feeling anyway. I just like the title because I think being “out in the storm” implies that it’s a moment— that it’s not going to last forever, and there’s hope in that.”
Break-up records have the reputation of being one note while Out in the Storm is anything but, perhaps demonstrating the truth behind the adage that grief has many stages. From the opener, ”Never Been Wrong,” with its aggressive guitar riffs, through the pretty strumming of the closer, “Fade,” the record’s listenabilty on repeat stems from never dwelling on one mood for too long, always catching you by surprise even when you have it memorized.
Waxahatchee opens for Wilco 7:30pm Tuesday, April 29 at The Fillmore Miami Beach.
LOS MIRLOS
by tim moffatt
Select audiences are currently obsessed with alternative adult contemporary easy listening; consider it the Great American Songbook for Generation X and elder millennials. Bands including Khruangbin, Glass Beams, Menahan Street Band and Surprise Chef are making music informed by worldbeat, ‘70s funk, jazz and soul, but refracted through a sensibility that comes with having spent one’s teens and 20s listening to hip-hop, punk rock, and alternative music of all stripes. This format for grownups, AAC, is all those things and none of those things combined, which makes it so intriguing and fresh sounding.
And that brings us to Los Mirlos. Formed in Moyobamba, Peru, in 1972, Los Mirlos (The Blackbirds) have been has putting out cumbia tinged with funk, soul and jazz-rock since the 1970s — a prodigious 33 records, plus a 2022 documentary, La Danza de Los Mirlos. If ever a band belonged in the AAC canon without even meaning to, it’s Los Mirlos.
With their surfy, psychedelic cumbia amalgamation, copious output, and Rolodex of past members, Los Mirlos have stuck it out this whole time doing what they love, and that tenacity and passion are now being rewarded. They’re celebrated as a major musical influence in their native Peru, whose natural sound palette is an abiding feature of Los Mirlos’ music: Most songs start with a bird whistle, as an homage to the band members’ Peruvian Amazonia origins.
Los Mirlos are on an album anniversary tour commemorating one of their early releases, 1975’s Los Charapas de Oro, which was remastered and re-released in 2018 and helped bring the band to the attention of a certain maturing generational cohort up north.
With people today sporting ’70s Zamrock band tees and listening to time-traveling global music apps like Radiooooo, it turns out that the smirky hipsters and petulant audiophiles — which many of us are — were on to something in their Internet-enabled quest for music that might have otherwise escaped their notice. Whether age spurs people to seek out new (to them) culture or solidify their bad taste, one thing is certain: surf-psych cumbia will live forever.
Los Mirlos play the Miami Beach Bandshell 8pm Wednesday, April 9th.
IRON & WINE
by david rolland
Though the low-volume singer-songwriter known as Iron & Wine has called many places in the South home — Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, Tallahassee — it was in Miami that a crucial part of his origin story unfolded. By day Sam Beam was teaching cinematography and film history at the former International Fine Arts College. At night, at home, he wrote and recorded the music that would become his 2002 debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle
The peaceful, easy feeling that suffused the album’s eleven tracks was the product of a demo, but the recordings as they were felt fully formed to the indie record label Sub Pop, and quickly film education’s loss became music lovers’ gain.
Perhaps Iron & Wine’s largest dose of fame during his two decades-plus music career came when his cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” popped up in the beloved 2004 flick, Garden State, where its morose tone mirrored the alienation of the movie’s two young protagonists. Fitting for a cinema scholar, Iron & Wine’s songs have appeared in over two dozen other films and TV shows soundtracking everything from Twilight to Friday Night Lights
Iron & Wine will bring his guitar and tunes for first South Florida show since 2017 is part of the Light Verse Tour named after his newest full-length album. ”I’m kinda mining the territory of the early ‘70s, where the folk writers were playing with jazz musicians,” Beam told Grammy.com in an interview last year, crediting Van Morrison’s acclaimed Astral Weeks album as an inspiration.
The work on Light Verse started in Memphis and then headed west, where reinforcements included a line-up of top-flight L.A. musicians, a 24-piece orchestra, and Fiona Apple as a duet partner. Beam’s recording rounds also took him to the ‘60s-‘70s music mecca of Laurel Canyon. It’s a far cry, and a long way in years and miles, from The Creek Drank the Cradle, but Light Verse sounds just as quiet even with all the extra production.
Iron & Wine, with Jobi Riccio opening, performs 7pm Monday, April 14 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. ironandwine.com
by tim moffatt
When midwesterners Uncle Tupelo split up in 1994, ending a brief but noteworthy run as avatars of alt-country, what happened after that was normal, even expected: one band became two; Uncle Tupelo’s Jay Farrar moved on to a new project in a similar vein, Son Volt; and some of Farrar’s ex-comrades regrouped as Wilco.
It’s what came next that we’re still talking about today. Wilco, led by singer-guitaristsongwriter Jeff Tweedy, evolved, shedding their No Depression roots and bar-band inclinations with each new album to become something else — a smart and musically ambitious band hailed by critics and, eventually, scorned by their own record label. Executives at the legendary Reprise Records vetoed the album that Wilco submitted for approval in 2001 and suddenly, your cool cowboy hipster friend’s favorite Americana band was a cause célèbre. The feud went public, band and label divorced, and Wilco landed on another branch of the Warner Music family tree, finding a home at the more avant-garde Nonesuch imprint.
If you know anything about the disputed album, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, you know who prevailed. Wilco have made several more acclaimed records, but YHT was their Big Bang. It transformed them into alt-rock icons, and its strange, wandering, sometimes dissonant spirt opened up new possibilities for other bands. It lives on in reissues and best-of lists, and one can only guess what became of the record executive who let them get away.
A textbook case of self-belief and defiance in pursuit of a creative vision, Wilco are proof that greatness doesn’t seek approval, it attracts it through a willingness to struggle and learn from repeated failures until the work comes out right. Some people call this insanity — doing the same thing over again expecting a different result. Artists call it practice.
Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt, the sole original members, have since revived Woody Guthrie with pub-punk Billy Bragg, explored rock’s limits of listenability (2015’s Star Wars), and circled back to their alt-country roots (2022’s Cruel Country). Their latest, 2023’s Cousin, finds them closer to the reveries and experimentation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Wilco and Waxahatchee play the Fillmore Miami Beach 7:30pm Tuesday, April 29.
WITH DJ MONTICAT 8:30PM-11PM EVERY FRIDAY
STRFKR
by olivia feldman
STRFKR plays 7pm Saturday, April 19 at the Miami Beach Bandshell. strfkr.com c
If you were lucky enough to be of college age in the 2010s, you were lucky enough: synth pop filled the airwaves and your iPod headphones. Groups like Passion Pit, The Naked and Famous, and Foster the People weaved emo lyrics with hopeful melodies suitable for stargazing and air-punching simultaneously.
STRFKR (the disemvoweled version of their original, profane moniker) didn’t quite reach the fame-and-fortune heights of some of their peers but absolutely stood on the same tier, musically. Joshua Hodges founded the group in Portland, Oregon after he decided to make, in his words, “dance music you could actually listen to.”
They debuted in the bloghouse days and gained wide exposure thanks to a Target commercial in 2009 using “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second,” a two-steppy jaunt from STRFKR’s self-titled debut album. The follow-up, Jupiter, featured a cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which truly did justice to the Cyndi Lauper original. It’s become a staple of their live performances, where they’ve arguably outshined their recorded music. Dedicated fans can attest that every STRFKR show is a grand, boppy time, with colorful lights that spin and twirl overhead while the band digs into its grooves.
Followups Reptilians and Miracle Mile showed their synth-y musical prowess, and their sound took a more brooding and introspective turn with Being No One, Going Nowhere. Released during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ambient 1 embraced a calmer instrumental side that emerged when shut-ins were the norm.
STRFKR’s most recent effort, Parallel Realms, is them coming out of their pandemic shell. Although the essence is still synthpop, their indietronica roots shine through, with breakup ballads and existential tunes fit for the 2020s. “Always/Never” masquerades as a bright and shiny opener until an uncertain lyric takes hold: “I want some way to feel again/I wanna live in another time/With my back up against the wall.” But even in the midst of the self-doubt and longing, the upbeat electric guitar and keyboards will remind you who you’re listening to and make you smile.
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TODD ALCOTT
by kelli bodle
The pianist Glenn Gould famously declared that the correct ratio of artist to audience is “one-to-zero.” Not so fast, says PureHoney artist of the month Todd Alcott. “I wouldn’t go that far, because the marketplace has its rules,” Illinois-born, Los Angeles-based Alcott says in an interview, “but being true to your own interests is key.”
A creator of comic designs that echo mid-century modern periodicals, and a remixer and updater of pulp magazine covers, Alcott has no issue with finding audiences. Besides having a popular Instagram, he’s also a bona-fide Hollywood screenwriter, with credits across 30 years including Antz and The Hudsucker Proxy. But he speaks more fondly about his visual output.
“It was so incredibly difficult to find any artistic satisfaction in being a screenwriter, where I would spend months or years working on screenplays that never got produced,” Alcott says. “It was wellpaying work but incredibly hard to get a job and then no guarantee that any of my work would ever see the light of day. With the visual art, I could make it at my desk, post it on the internet, and sell it immediately, which was so much more gratifying.”
Alcott has landed on a Don Draper-esque aesthetic that he now practically has to himself. “My father was in advertising during the Mad Men era, so mid-century design is very much my childhood. That whole era, from, say, the end of World War II to the election of Ronald Reagan is a time in American history when anything seemed possible, and so much was going on, culturally, in so many different directions. So that era of design has a strong nostalgic pull for me.”
Two more nostalgic elements inform Alcott’s work: vintage typography and pulp fiction. The pulp art, interestingly, begins with songs, primarily classic rock: Alcott picks a track he loves and then visualizes it as a vintage magazine or book cover. So David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” inspires an eerie paperback visual straight out of the classic Avon and Ballantine sci-fi catalogues. For “Rid of Me,” PJ Harvey is a detective-story femme fatale.
“I got attracted to pulp art because of its drama and immediacy,” Alcott says. “The artists doing these magazine and book covers were creating pieces that had to compete with hundreds of other covers on newsstands. There was no television to compete with so their only competition was with each other.”
Those artists “had to keep making their illustrations more dynamic, weirder, more extreme, more sensational, and more lurid,” he adds. “The sensationalist aspect of pulp illustration gave me an entrée to pop music’s emotional side, which is, ultimately, what the pieces provide: an emotional resonance on the part of the viewer that helps them to see the song from a new and different angle.”
Hence, “Help Me” dramatized as a comic book cover with Joni Mitchell and her guitar plunging Vertigo-style off a roller coaster. Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” ventures outside of pulp romance and into packaging design: the ubiquitous Morton Salt girl in the yellow dress, strolling through a squall.
Alcott’s exquisite hand lettering completes the effect. “Almost everything I do is based on an existing piece of design — a magazine cover, book cover, movie poster, advertisement, something,” he says. “And font choice is the key to making a piece specific.” Fonts, he says, represent particular time periods and moods — “and the viewer hopefully gets that without having to know all the history,”
Years ago as a kid in art class, Alcott had an assignment to create a poster. For inspiration, he turned to an ad from 1974. “I remember looking at the font in the advertisement and thinking, ‘Why does this font make me feel a certain way?’ and then being frustrated at how difficult it was to match my lettering to theirs.
“I sat down with a pencil and a ruler to try to figure out how making a letterform thicker or changing a curve slightly changed the whole effect of the font. Those things have always been important to me. Fonts are important because it’s the first thing people see, and if the font feels right, the viewer trusts that you know what you’re talking about.”
THE TOASTERS
by abel folgar
When the world gets turned upside down, when loyalties realign, when everyone expects conformity: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. The Toasters, New York City’s seminal ska band, have lived by this maxim since their founding in 1981 by sole constant Robert “Bucket” Hingley – even if those words waited until 1997 to appear (in the classic bastardized Latin) on a Toasters album of the same name.
Formed in an older, grittier NYC, The Toasters lit the fuse on the American ska explosion — the U.S. crest of ska’s second, U.K.-bred wave, following the genre’s birth a generation earlier in Jamaica. At the center of it all was Bucket, a British expatriate working at the Forbidden Planet comic bookstore who simply missed the 2 Tone ska sounds of his homeland. With little scene to speak of, he did what any self-respecting rude boy would do—he started his own band and he hasn’t stopped, wave or no wave.
“Whether or not the mainstream media is paying attention to the genre is no real barometer about how well it’s doing,” Bucket tells PureHoney. “And this ‘wave’ theory of ska is just a nuisance because it’s just one wave that started in 1955, depending on who you listen to, right?”
The Toasters’ early days were pure DIY hustle. Unable to find a label interested in their supercollider of ska, punk, reggae and New Wave, Bucket founded Moon Ska Records in 1983. Moon Ska would go on to become the Toasters’ home and the epicenter of ska in the U.S., launching dozens of bands. The label folded in 2000 but The Toasters have racked up over 6,000 live shows as new recordings became distant images in the rearview.
Bucket sees more value in touring, the part he considers the most fun. “You have to be a little bit crazy, I suppose, but that works because I’m crazy as shit. I prefer to buy air tickets and go around the world and play shows,” he says. “That’s a much better delivery of the product right now.”
The Toasters, with Matamoska! and Fuakata play 7pm Tuesday, May 6 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach. thetoasters.band
HAPPY HOUR
MON THRU FRIDAY 4-7P
JUDGE
by erik kvarnberg
Schooled on the likes of Agnostic Front, The Abused, Cro-Mags and Kraut, the band Judge was a child raised by the village of the prime New York hardcore scene, with Washington D.C.’s Bad Brains as co-parent. Mike “Judge” Ferraro spent formative years in the ’80s traveling from New Jersey to New York’s legendary CBGB, absorbing the sounds and the culture of a restless city until his turn to step forward.
Ferraro started out as the drummer for Youth of Today. A trip to Florida while in another band launched his transformation into Mike Judge. As Ferraro told Noisey in 2016, he found himself on the road, lying in a van in a junkyard, lyrics spilling out of him, and realized he needed a different outlet. He and fellow Youth of Today member John Porcell formed Judge, and the quiet guy behind the drum kit found his voice, igniting and influencing hardcore crowds of his own through the band bearing his adopted his name.
The sheer force of Judge’s music misleads many into believing they are a militant group. Ferraro told Noisey that Judge’s lyrical style came from “Drug Free Youth” by The Abused, which taught him that the only way not to self-destruct was to yell about it to himself: “So a lot of the things you hear in Judge where people thought I was being militant and telling people how to live; it was basically me trying to tell myself how to live.”
Judge disbanded in 1991, notably after a Judge crowd became too violent for all the wrong reasons. Rumors spread, but no, Ferraro didn’t join the Hell’s Angels. He pursued other projects and a life outside of music, and revived Judge with Porcell in 2013. The songs haven’t changed — the Judge discography, aside from reissues, stops at 1991— but they have lasted. In 2025 Judge is topping a bill in Miami with younger kindred acts: West Palm Beach-Gainesville hardcore legends Culture, South Florida powerviolence group Lethal Injection, South Florida thrash metal-hardcore crossover group Agitate, and midwest heavy hardcore group No Grave. Judge perform 7pm Saturday, April 5 at Gramps in Miami. @judge_nyhc
