P.M. Dawn

P.M. Dawn's sultry, New Age melding of hip hop and R&B made perfect sense in the early 1990s, when any and every pop hybrid had an honest shot at serious chart status, no matter how bizarre. But despite the heavy radio rotation the Spandau Ballet-sampling, 1991 single "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" received, brothers Attrell "Prince B" Cordes and Jarrett "DJ Minute Mix" Cordes were destined to follow breakout contemporaries like Arrested Development, Vanilla Ice, Digital Underground, and C.C. Music Factory into trivia-question obscurity. Fickle fans lost interest even as the albums kept coming. So now they're another touring nostalgia act with a completed album in limbo—P.M. Dawn Loves You, which was supposed to come out last year—spreading their beguiling positivity from burg to burg in a country that mostly doesn't love or deserve them, even though they kicked ass on short-lived one-hit wonder TV program Hit Me Baby One More Time. Maybe this is how the P.M. Dawn story ends—or maybe they'll follow Coolio's lead and find runaway success in Europe.
Fri., April 18, 8 p.m., 2008