By Jordan Melnick | February 22nd, 2012 | No Comments
Spearheaded by filmmaker and Animal Tropical/PLAINS drummer Jorge Rubiera, Can’t Stop is playing alongside Sumsun, The State Of, and Honey Train in our tri-county showcase at the Electric Pickle on Saturday night (RSVP on Facebook). Rubiera released the excellent debut Can’t Stop LP, Neighborhood, at the beginning of 2011, and is now working on an EP called Free Tom Petty that will be packaged, naturally, with a Tom Petty mask and feature a remix by ANR singer-guitarist John Hancock. Recorded by Rubiera in his home studio and mixed and mastered by PLAINS frontman Michael McGinnis, “Feel Strange” is “a naive realization that human relationships are complex,” Rubiera says. It’s also a funky, falsetto-fueled hint that Free Tom Petty and the full-length album Rubiera is also working on will both be damn good. Here’s the track.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 21st, 2012 | No Comments
The Abbey Brewing Company, at 1115 16th Street in South Beach, has reopened. -- photo by Robby Campbell
Many was the night in the last what-feels-like-forever that I wished The Abbey Brewing Company, located in South Beach, would finish its expansion and reopen. Finally, according to Thrillist, it has: “… the formerly minuscule beer haven has returned as a whole new Abbey after the owners tore apart the former digs, then carefully pieced them back together to create a much roomier, refurbished wood-lined interior they claim ‘brings it up to the 21st century’.” The building expansion is welcome news, as is the menu expansion to include whiskey at the previously beer-only watering hole. To learn more about the Abbey’s intoxicating return, check out the Thrillist post.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 20th, 2012 | 7 Comments
As if pioneering specialty coffee in Miami weren’t enough, the proprietors of Panther Coffee are two of the nicest people you’ll meet and good Wynwood neighbors to boot. Their reward? A slathering of a tar-like substance across their building’s facade. One simple question: Why? Ponder it while having a cup of coffee there this week.
– photo by Andrew Foster
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By Jordan Melnick | February 19th, 2012 | No Comments
On Saturday, Feb. 25, Beached Miami is presenting a tri-county showcase on the Electric Pickle’s soothing back patio with Sumsun from West Palm Beach, Can’t Stop and The State Of from Miami, and Honey Train from Fort Lauderdale. DJs Rich Medina, Tim Green, Brad Strickland, and William Renuart will also be on hand to man the decks indoors. For full details on the show, visit the Facebook event page. Here are a few words about each of the bands.
Sumsun: Spearheaded by West Palm Beach native Judson Rodgers, Sumsun creates electronic soundscapes with a chillwave palette that transport listeners to a land where the rain is warm and everyone dances. In 2011, Sumsun opened for Neon Indian and Sleigh Bells.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 15th, 2012 | 37 Comments
With 50+ international contemporary art exhibitors and hundreds of artists under one tent, Art Wynwood will launch its inaugural fair on Thursday night in Midtown with a VIP reception. The sister fair of Art Miami, Art Wynwood aims to distinguish itself on the ever-growing listing of Miami-based art fairs with “cutting-edge, contemporary, and modern artwork by both emerging and established artists,” including many represented by Miami galleries. The fair opens to the public on Friday at 11 a.m. and runs through Presidents Day Weekend until Monday at 6 p.m. To enter to win a pair of full-access VIP passes, simply leave a comment on this post. We will announce the winner in the early afternoon on Thursday.
– “Desire Obtain Cherish” from Unix Fine Art
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By Jordan Melnick | February 14th, 2012 | 1 Comment
While most of us had to enjoy our music on land over the weekend, photographer Monica McGivern was one of the lucky passengers aboard the Bruise Cruise, a three-day “tropical rock’n'roll vacation” from Miami to Nassau and the Bahamas and, sadly, back. This year’s lineup featured Fucked Up, Thee Oh Sees, Vockah Redu, and DJ sets by Jello Biafra and The Vivian Girls, and McGivern was there for all of it. To peruse her photos from the cruise, visit the Beached Miami Facebook page.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 9th, 2012 | No Comments
Between now and Sunday there is a festival’s worth of worthy live music in Miami, including day two of the Bruise Cruise Kick-off Party at The Stage with Fucked Up, King Khan and the Shrines, and Jacuzzi Boys (Thursday); Com Truise at Bardot (Saturday); and the B-52s at the Arsht Center (Sunday). There’s also an actual festival — the GrassRoots Festival at Virginia Key (Thursday – Sunday), headlined by Chaka Khan and Fishbone — and a Rachel Goodrich show at Bayfront Park with Tristan Clopet and The Jacob Jeffries Band for the DWNTWN Miami Concert Series.
Update: The Bayfront Park show has been cancelled due to threat of rain. Rachel Goodrich is instead playing at Vagabond. See the Miami Music Guide listing for full details.
For full details on all of the shows going down this weekend, check out the Miami Music Guide — but not before watching this performance of “Bananas” from Goodrich’s Jan. 20 show at Ricochet, presented by Beached Miami. The video was made by Shaun Wright.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 7th, 2012 | No Comments
Show alert! Beached Miami presents Third Thursdays at The Electric Pickle on Feb. 16 with three of South Florida’s best: Guy Harvey, New Coke, and Lil Daggers. Many thanks to Grolsch for sponsoring the show and supporting South Florida music. To learn all of the details, check out the Facebook event page. Here’s a bit about each band.
GUY HARVEY: Recently featured in Brooklyn Vegan, this West Palm Beach-based quartet plays a solar-powered brand of alt-pop revival that catches the ear like a riptide. Singer Adam Perry recently appeared with Surfer Blood on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Guy Harvey’s “Something in the Way” Nevermind Miami cover is probably the best thing you’ll hear today.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 3rd, 2012 | No Comments
Photographer Robby Campbell took this shot at the Radiolab Live: In The Dark performance at the Fillmore Miami Beach on Wednesday night. “An exploration of the dawn of sight and the evolution of the human eye”, the performance was a collaboration between WNYC radio hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, comedian Demetri Martin, musician Thao Nguyen, and the dance troupe Pilobolus. This photo is of a moment late in the performance when the audience held up small, bright lights while a pre-recorded astronaut described his riveting experience in the unfathomable dark of space. To see the image in wide format, click it.
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By Jordan Melnick | February 1st, 2012 | 1 Comment
-- photo by Hadrian via shutterstock.com
This is the question I address in a piece I wrote for The Atlantic Cities, a very cool online section of The Atlantic that explores “innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today’s global cities and neighborhoods” and a must-read for people interested in how Miami can explode its own potential.
With the Florida legislature currently considering expanding gambling statewide and Genting hoping to build a mega casino called Resorts World Miami on Biscayne Bay, many Miamians are debating whether the expected jobs are worth the expected increase in crime, traffic, and other feared downsides. But how the expansion of gambling to include mega casinos — a whole different beast than anything in Miami’s existing gambling infrastructure — may affect Miami’s emerging arts community, in which so much hope and money have been invested over the last decade, is also a crucial question, and one without a clear-cut answer.
Art Basel Miami Beach has hinted that it may move elsewhere if Miami turns into — or appears to be turning into — Las Vegas East. At the same time, one gambling industry analyst I spoke to believes a mega casino could help Miami artists by employing them. With no existing research on the correlation between casinos and the vitality of the arts in their host cities’, it is hard to predict what will happen in Miami if Genting gets its way.
Nonetheless, that is exactly what I try to do in my story. To give it a read, head over to The Atlantic Cities. After, I’d like to know what you think. Will expanding gambling in Miami hobble its cultural development? Or is the expansion a gamble worth taking?
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