So there's a new mixtape DJ on the prowl in Broward County and she (that's right, I said she) has a deft ear for good music.

Her name is Miss Face, and she just released a red-hot digital download called "Face Smusher" which, when you hear these beats drop, will have your face contorting for sure. But in a good way, I promise.

For people who like free music, here's the link so that you can download it. A full-track listing is below. Notable standouts include straight-up bangers from Invincible, Butta Verses, Major League and Q-Tip. But there's something for everyone so check it out.

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Kamelot
Saturday, October 10, 2008
Culture Room, Fort Lauderdale

Better Than: Sweating through two layers of leather in the Fort Lauderdale humidity.

Friday night, Culture Room was packed full of long-haired, black-clad melodic metal fans (you know, the people death metal fans beat up and steal lunch money from) and echoing with the power riffs and vocal vibrato of prog metal titan Kamelot.
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The Tampa-based band took the stage punctually amidst flashing white lights and a blanket of fog machine-induced billowing mist. With the stoic seriousness and minor grandiosity that only melodic metal performers can muster, goatee-sporting lead singer, Khan, solemnly walked to the edge of the stage and promptly dissolved into head-tilting, vein-popping, cheek-puffing, Broadway-style belting. In response, a pack of unwashed underarms were immediately exposed as each fan in the house elevated an arm and threw the horns to welcome the power-metal powerhouse to Fort Lauderdale.

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Justin Namon

Yelle brough the electro party to the Polish American Club. Click to view the full slideshow.

Yelle with Kap10Kurt and Funeral Party
Friday, October 11, 2008
Polish American Club, Miami

Better Than: A rollicking La Marseillaise dance party with Gérard Depardieu.

The question came over and over between Yelle's songs and her coquettish glances over the microphone.

"Are you ready to dance, Miami?"

It was either a statement of purpose or a reflection of Yelle's less-than-stellar English that she kept returning to the same question. Or, perhaps, she was just really confused about whether or not Miami truly was prepared to shake it.

Whatever. The crowd adored it, and it was hard not to. Yelle, also known as Julie Budet, also known as the French hottie who got famous by MySpace dissing the dick-size of French rapper Cuizinier, may not have much of a catalog yet or much practice flaunting it onstage.

But she does have some serious Gallic charisma. And it doesn't hurt to have two serious beat-breakers like Tepr and GrandMarnier cranking it behind her all night.

From the opening chords of "Tristesse/Joie," with Yelle shimmying around the stage in a loose, blue-sequined dress embossed with a huge female face (her own?) and lines of silver glitter streaked across her cheeks, the packed house at the Polish American Club bounced, jumped in unison and reflected the French bombshell's smoldering glances back at her with screaming affection.

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Daft Punk tried to warn us.

With the U.S. economy tanking, we can't help but to feel a little pessimistic about our future. We reverted to our inner 15-year-old, which happened to grow up in the go-go '90s of excess and wealth (a.k.a. the Clinton years), and decide to make a mixtape of the songs that eerily foreshadowed our impending economic doom. So here are the Top 10 Songs that Warned Us About the Recession (a.k.a. The Great Depression 2k8):

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Blackest of the Black Tour
With Winds of Plague, Moonspell, Dimmu Borgir, and Danzig
Thursday, October 9, 2008
The Fillmore Miami Beach

Better Than: Those faux Misfits, headed by Jerry Only, who seem to come through South Florida at least once a year.

The Review:

Last night's kickoff of Danzig's first tour in three years was a spotty affair -- there were moments of real payoff for fans, but it took a certain stamina to remain standing and enthusiastic for them. The production of the tour's first night suffered from an overly long lineup, too-long gaps between some bands, uneven sound, and a surprisingly scant audience whose spark clearly dimmed as the night wore on.

Well, maybe that scantness wasn't surprising -- tickets were some $35 at the box office the day of the event. And although there was clearly an effort to give bang for the buck, with five bands on the bill, this also contributed to the evening's lack of the momentum it deserved. Still, Glenn Danzig himself is in more or less fine form as a frontman -- and he's still intent, it seems, on partying like it's 1988. But more on that later.

I arrived at the venue around 7:30 p.m., near the beginning of the set by the Upland, California-based sextet Winds of Plague. I figured they were the first band, but realized at the end of the night that I had missed Skeletonwitch -- either they didn't play, or they played even earlier than Winds of Plague. If that was the case, I pity both Skeletonwitch, who would have played to only a handful of people so early, and those people, who, if they stayed to the very end, would have been at the venue almost six hours. As for Winds of Plague themselves ... well.

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So it's now official that R&B singer Erykah Badu is carrying her third child. During a recent concert in Texas, the Dallas-born chanteuse announced that she is in fact pregnant again...and it looks like the father is Jay Electronica pictured above.

Back in June, Erykah took some slack when the rumors first started to surface, mainly because it meant she'd be having a third child by a third man. Even though it's true, I thought those early disses were tremendous low blows. Her first two children were fathered by Andre 3000 of OutKast fame and the D.O.C. from N.W.A. respectively. Now her and rapper Jay Electronica are expecting.

To me, that's the most intriguing part--the fact that they're all rappers. Anyway, she always picks cool names for her kids: her son is named Seven, her daughter is named Puma, so it's anyone's guess what she'll come up with this time.

Anyway's here's my favorite Erykah Badu video. Now that I think about it, if the baby is a girl, the name Honey would work just fine.

--Jonathan Cunningham

I just got a press release stating that reggae artist Tami Chynn will be in South Florida tonight performing at Pangaea at the Seminole Hard Rock and Casino.

There's a surprise guest slated to perform as well and rumor has it that it could be Shaggy.
Shaggy is probably best known for his hit song "It Wasn't Me" from 2000. He's had a number of popular dancehall tunes since then and will definitely have enough material to put on a solid show if he attends. For me, I'm just excited to hear that Tami Chynn is in town. She's a gorgeous woman with a great voice and it won't be long before Chynn gains more popularity in the US. According to her MySpace, she's actually opening up for New Kids on the Block across the country starting next week.

If the rumor is true that Shaggy is in town, he'll most likely be singing his remake of "KungFu Fighting" along side Chynn. Here's a link to their latest video, which oddly enough, includes T-Pain and Verne "Mini Me" Troyer as well. The show tonight starts at 8 p.m.

--Jonathan Cunningham

We apologize for not bringing you your weekly dose of On the List last week, but we've got life to you know. But we're back, so you can get your panties out of a twist and relish in the fact that you won't be clueless as to what is going on this weekend.

Is there plenty to do? Yes. Is most of it worth mentioning? Hell nah! Here is what what passed our crap-tacular meter:

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Gym Class Heroes, Estelle and the Roots
Wednesday, October 8
Fillmore Miami Beach

Better than: Reading Okayplayer.com for news on the Roots.

Last Night, the Fillmore Miami Beach was alive and drenched in abstract hip-hop. Putting Gym Class Heroes, the Roots, and Estelle on one line-up guarantees that there will be something for everybody as they all approach hip-hop in a different way.

Before I fully get into this review, I'm stumped as to why this show had to start at 7:30 p.m. sharp. I don't like when black shows featuring black musicians start at non-black times, like 7:30 p.m. Balk at that if you want to but it's true. The last time the Roots were in town opening up for Erykah Badu, they were off the stage by 8:30 p.m. sharp and so many people complained that they drove all the way to Boca, and missed the Roots.

I can identify because last night, I drove all the way to the Fillmore, showed up at 8:20 p.m, and had already missed Estelle. I wasn't a happy camper about that, but I did notice how sparsely attended the show was a that point. There were maybe 600 people in the venue even though capacity is 2,500, and the curtain was drawn at the halfway point in the audience so that it wouldn't look so empty.

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C. Stiles

Some of the hottest roller skating tracks of all time are booty, bass, and freestyle songs that were wildly popular a few decades back in South Florida. That’s because many of the jams were produced locally by outfits like Luke Records, as in the label of 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell. A few of the songs are now so obscure that they seem like dusty inventions of the memory. That is, until the deejay revives a classic at the rink.

Get ready for synthesizers and robotic voices, punctuated by sounds like the one Ms. Pacman makes when she swallows a ghost. Here are a few fave tracks that didn’t make it into this week’s “Roller Jam” story:

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For those who can't get enough of this pseudo-scandal, it seems that Rick Ross has finally copped (lol) to his past as a corrections officer. After photos leaked recently of his academy graduation, he first flat-out denied it was him, claiming someone had Photoshopped his face onto someone else's body. That story seemed awfully hard to stick with after The Smoking Gun dredged up all his official employment documents -- guess Ross never considered that pesky Freedom of Information thing that gives anybody access to such public records.

Anyways, seems like he's finally stopped the charade and admitted this all definitively, in an interview in the latest issue of Don Diva magazine. Here's the teaser quote the magazine has been sending out:

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No event that ends with "--con" is complete without highly specialized musical guests. (Just check out, for example, this long list of wizard-centric bands that just rocked the huge Harry Potter convention in Chicago earlier this year. Anime Supercon, South Florida's biggest anime/comic/manga/etc. convention, which takes place Oct. 31 through Nov. 2, is no different. In keeping with the event's theme, most of the acts just announced this year are rather theatrical. The biggest booking coup here is an appearance by Tadahisa Yoshida, adored by J-rock/visual kei fans for his electro-flavored, scary-sexy jams and androgynous, fetishy style.

The one local act on the bill, Kill Miss Pretty, is no less, uh, pretty or made-up. For longtime scene followers, or people who care about this sort of thing, the driving force behind this act is local musician Scott Putesky, who, once upon a time, was Daisy Berkowitz in Marilyn Manson.

Follow the jump for more information about the musical guests, from the latest official Supercon press release.

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Antoine Asseraf

Je suis fashionable.

Ze French iz always at ze forefront of -- how do you say? -- ze fashion. This iz why French chanteuse Yelle wants you to, eh, wear ze mask she gives online. Silly Americans can hide their fat faces they stuff with ze McDonald and Burger King.

In all seriousness, CrossFade received a press release from Yelle's people encouraging concert-goers to download an a "easy-to-assemble" Polygon Dog Mask straight out of her "Ce Jeu" music video. The press release insists that fans make the mask and wear it at her concert this Friday at the Polish American Club, part of her C'est L'Amerique Tour. But before sending you off to do an arts-and-craft project, we thought we'd test it out ourselves. Why? Because we wouldn't recommend something we hadn't done ourselves and because we had a bit of extra time between our deadlines. Check out our mess after the jump.

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You know a band from your city is awesome when one of my favorite people in music, Greg Puciato of the Dillinger Escape Plan, has to ask about them or shout them out every time he's in town. So it goes with Miami's own Poison the Well, the decade-plus-running metal-ish, hardcore-ish, straight-up crushing quintet. While things seemed to have been quiet on the PtW front in recent months, the band recently announced it would be heading back to the studio to work on its fifth studio album, to be released in May 2009. Like 2007's Versions, the album will be released on Ferret Music; the producer this time around will be J. Robbins, who's worked with Against Me!, Clutch, and Modern Life is War, among others.

But in the last couple of days, PtW has announced some other good news for fans starving for new material. As a sort of teaser before the release of the album, the band's going back to that old punk/hardcore standby medium, the seven-inch. Three will be released leading up to next May, and the first, "I/III," drops November 11. While it'll be available for legal digital download, it'll be more fun to order the whole physical package through the band's MySpace page, starting October 24 -- that includes the record itself, a poster, and a specially designed T-shirt. -- Arielle Castillo

[Via Blabbermouth]

Charlie Pickett
Bar Band Americanus – The Best of Charlie Picket And
(Bloodshot)

Both as a music addict and “critic,” I hear lots of music that slips into cult following-status and/or obscurity while less talented musicians reap the big rewards. Take South Floridian Charlie Pickett for example. Throughout the1980’s he was a road-warrior of roots-rock long before the term became commonplace in America. He released four fine records (3 LPs and 1 EP) during that stint and played memorable genre-fusing shows all over the country before “officially” giving up on his dream of hitting it big in late 1988. He was convinced that he'd never be more than just a regional talent--but boy was he wrong.

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