A week on the scene
Fire starters
Percussive Latin-rock band Sexto Sol are finalizing the mixes for their highly anticipated third album, Let There Be Fire. Sexto Sol bassist Greg Goodman says the disc has been two years in the making, with the band compiling a group of studio tracks and deciding early this year to augment those tracks with some fresh live recordings.
Goodman says the idea for the album’s live component derived from two songs they recorded in performance for an upcoming Luna Fine Music Club compilation CD. The band was so happy with the results, they decided to make Let There Be Fire a hybrid studio/concert album. Roland de la Cruz is currently mixing the studio tracks while Goodman is working on the live recordings. The band will celebrate the album’s release with a July 29 show at Ruta Maya Riverwalk Coffeehouse.
In other CD news, everyone’s favorite local live-band hip-hop group, Mojoe, will unveil their three-year-old debut CD, classic.ghetto.soul to a national audience via Musicworld Entertainment/Universal-Fontana, the record label founded by Destiny’s Child svengali Matthew Knowles. The soulful collective will spread the word in August by playing Texas dates on the Dave Matthews Band’s summer tour. The group also has a second CD in the can, which will surely be pushed back to accommodate the national push for classic.ghetto.soul.
Wizard of Ozzfest
The hottest names on this year’s Ozzfest tour (System of a Down, Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold, Hatebreed, and Lacuna Coil) all earned their metal stripes by paying dues on the festival’s second stage. So there might be a poetic symmetry to the fact that the tour’s namesake, Ozzy Osbourne, is headlining the second stage at seven Ozzfest dates this summer.
One of those dates is the Tuesday, July 11 stop at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. The move could be interpreted either as a humble, passing-the-torch gesture from the most famous man ever to whiz on the Alamo while wearing a green dress, or a recognition that he’s no longer Ozzfest’s biggest draw. In any event, most attention will focus on the grandiose new breed of metal, represented by System of a Down — a band that has brought Armenian-American art-rock to new heights of head banging — and the abysmally named Avenged Sevenfold.
- Gilbert Garcia
