Against expectations of what might emerge from the Swedish countryside, Dungen’s latest album, 4, possesses light-hearted moments of absolute joy, taking from Swedish folk music and even classical and tying this into rock n’ roll freak-outs, feedback, and extended guitar solos. While the prog rock moments present on past albums are still a major factor, string arrangements and flute offer 4 a more cinematic and whimsical air. Between Reine Fiske’s masterful guitar-work, tight and jazzy structures, and the nearly ever-present piano, on the part of Ejstes, the new album emits a sentimentality that overrides otherwise traditional rock band instrumentation.

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Not many bands can rightfully claim to be the voice of a generation. For legions of hardcore and punk rock fans that came of age in the late ’90s, H20 was their voice. The band spearheaded a revival of New York Hardcore by stressing the importance of unity within a scene, through their deliverance of poignant messages and credos aching to be screamed at the top of one’s lungs. Lead singer Toby Morse reminisces about the early days, “Back then we had nothing... It was live and die on the road…You just went to shows and you loved the music because you were all singing the same songs and the message.”

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Nearly a decade into acting as the voice of one of the underground’s most celebrated duos, and on the brink of an autobiographical second solo attempt, Esoteric did what any reasonable man would do—he paused to dig into his stacks of Japanese LPs and VHS tapes and took to sampling. Taking cues from the “true-school” hip-hop likes of Golden Gangster, Juice Crew and Public Enemy, and breeding them with the death-kill monsters of the eastern world, the Mecha-Mecha sound of Esoteric Vs. Japan: Pterodactyl Takes Tokyo was born. 

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Drawing her inspirations from portions of hip-hop culture most have seemingly forgotten, Jean Grae delivers each lyric for deep impact, as she writes with an authenticity and transparency that would be celebrated in most other genres. Jeanius, her long awaited summer release on Blacksmith Records, produced mostly by 9th Wonder, has been hampered by leaks, a problem that has dogged her prior projects.

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Preaching love and acceptance since 1989, Lenny Kravitz is back with a new album, It is Time for a Love Revolution. The multi-instrumentalist spoke with Beyond Race about music, life, and karma.

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Visual artist, tattooist, and cult icon Paul Booth is always looking for new ways to disturb. Nowadays, he’s delved into filmmaking as just another medium for  getting under peoples’ skin. A burgeoning horror filmmaker with an appetite for such auteurs as Fulci and Bava, he admires the ability of Jaws, which he saw in the theater as a child, to instill in him a deep-seated fear of the ocean. “That’s the kind of movie that I want to make, something that puts people in therapy for the rest of their life. I want to affect people in such a way that my movie can fuck them up.”

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As one of the two founding members of Canadian indie-rock sensation and super group Broken Social Scene, Brendan Canning has been involved in a plethora of musically creative collaborations. He recently released a solo record titled Something For All of Us… as part of the Broken Social Scene Presents series. Though this would suggest a one-man show, about 25 people contributed to the record; some had already made musical bonds with Canning, while others were new to collaborate.

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Halfway through recording his fifth studio album, Love, War And The Ghost Of Whitey Ford, Everlast lost his creative spark and took a two-month hiatus from the booth. One fateful night during that hiatus, he began playing a guitar melody and sang the lyrics for what would become the album’s unofficial first single, “Letters Home From The Garden Of Stone.” The composition details the mindset of an American soldier fighting in the Middle East and while the songwriter hasn’t experienced that lifestyle, it was as if he were in a hypnotic state.

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Up until just recently, the work of Ayre’s life has been Bodog Entertainment, which he started in 1994 with 10K and a dream. It acted as the umbrella that housed all of his ventures, including those in music (Bodog Music), mixed martial arts (Bodog Fight) and poker (Bodog Poker). He retired this year to work on his latest passion, Calvin Aye Foundation, which he founded in 2005 in an effort to support social justice, child welfare, animal rights and environmental protection, full time.

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