Rondo Brothers

Related Content

• Awkward! The Top Five Most Uncomfortable Grammy Moments
  February 10, 2012
• Live 105's BFD: Linkin Park, Snoop Dogg, the Strokes, Bad Religion, Wolfgang Gartner, More
  April 19, 2011
• Bad Rabbits: Show Preview
  March 30, 2011
• Metallica Fans More Likely to 'Do It' on a First Date, Dumb Survey Says
  April 12, 2011
• Exclusive Premiere: Lateef The Truthspeaker and DJ Shadow Team Up for "Say What You Want"
  November 17, 2011

More About

• Head Automatica
• Daryl Palumbo
• Dan The Automator
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Underground Hip-Hop

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

White dude hip hop tends to fall into three categories: second-generation carbon copies (Vanilla Ice, Everlast), freaky art-rap (Anticon, El-P), and rocktronic syntheses (Tipsy, Head Automatica). Rondo Brothers' debut disc deserves the latter classification. It most closely resembles Dan the Automator's Handsome Boy Modeling School project, in that here hip hop serves more as a touchstone than a template. There are plenty of looped beats, wicky-wack scratching, and singsongy wordplay, but there are also warm pedal-steel atmospherics, languid slack-key plucking, and siren-song crooning. The Brothers, both longtime S.F. musicians, have concocted a Hawaiian theme to hold their tunes together, layering hip hop rhythms with loungy instrumentation and sprinkling the stanzas with pupu platters and pineapple wine. Sometimes the style works (the sexy swing of "Evening to Remember," the Beckian strut of "Aquarium Dreams") and other times it doesn't (Glassjaw's Daryl Palumbo's emo mumble on "Whispering Reef"). Give the boys kudos for trying something new, or at least for not sounding as lame as Linkin Park.