Music

There may be a lot of bitchy backbiting in the music business at large, but on a local level, great P-town bands understand the spirit of the season. Local rockers Goodbye Tomorrow are the epitome of “good sports” — when the musicians parted ways with bassist David Roat, they posted…

David Allan Coe’s been looking like a redneck version of George Clinton lately, sporting a multicolored dreadlock beard, big sunglasses, and more tattoos than Skin and Ink. But the only thing funky going on behind the Confederate flag guitar is the booze-and-broads smell of a hard-livin’ country legend. The 65-year-old…

When local blues outfit Sistah Blue took second place at the International Blues Talent Competition in 1996, the band was just a year old. Over the past nine years, it’s built up a fan base by playing all over the Valley, opening for such acts as John Lee Hooker and…

While all the upstart pop-punk bands seem insistent on establishing their “maturity,” the Vandals are like the guy who shows up to the 20-year high school reunion wearing parachute pants and a joy buzzer, revealing he still lives in his mom’s basement and still works at the local comic book…

1. Iron and Wine, Passing Afternoon (Sub Pop) 2. Arcade Fire, Funeral (Merge) 3. Pinback, Summer in Abaddon (Touch & Go) 4. My Morning Jacket, Early Recordings, Chapters 1 & 2 (Darla) 5. Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill (Anti) 6. Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken (Anti)…

Guy Blakeslee, a.k.a. Entrance, plays left-handed on conventional guitars turned upside down, just like Jimi Hendrix. Blakeslee has also developed his own unique style, a blend of blues, rags, field hollers, ragtime and primordial Midwestern American church music that at times comes close to the sound John Fahey called “American…

‘Twas 16 nights before Christmas, and all through Glendale Arena, little punk rockers were throwing bottles of Aquafina. Stage divers were hung from the rafters by their hair, in hopes that someone would get them the fuck down from there. The stage was warmed up by Story of the Year,…

This English band, named after a Talking Heads song, originally formed in the late ’80s after all the members met in art school. After recording a debut EP, the group released its first full-length album, Pablo Honey, in 1993, which spawned the international smash single “Creep.” Although some thought it…

A friend of mine refers to all electronic music as “techno.” Doesn’t matter if it’s drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, house, down-tempo — to him, “it’s all fucking techno, man.” And with a little encouragement, he’ll launch into a rant that includes dead-on onomatopoeia of what techno sounds like: Sst. Umph…

For all the cynical talk of grave robbing and misplaced mythology, this much-ballyhooed, litigation-delayed three-CD/one-DVD Nirvana boxed set delivers an intriguing, entertaining, and periodically spine-tingling depiction of the trio’s seven-year journey — warts and all — with none of the voyeuristic guilt associated with reading 2002’s disgraceful journals. Opening with…

Ever found yourself knee-deep in malt liquor, a mile high on weed and strung out on the Cartoon Network? Then The Shapeshifters Was Here is your new battle cry. Bubbling over with Simpsons samples and pop-culture references, the Shifters’ third full-length is a sprawling effort that sucks in and then…

If the Carter Family had intermarried with the Addams Family, their children might have grown up to start a band called Blanche. The band’s stripped-down sound is based on the early country style that folkies call Old Time music, but Blanche puts its own art-rock spin on the genre to…

There’s a lot of work cut out for anyone just copping to MF Doom after catching him bend space and time on that damn-near-relevant new De La Soul album. Between pseudonymous releases (Viktor Vaughan, King Geedorah) and his collabs (Mad Lib, MF Grimm), Doom has dropped four records in 2004…

As far as bands with unassailable names go, you don’t get any better than Awesome. See how we’ve bolded the word Awesome right at the top of this paragraph? Every reviewer writing up this band’s debut CD or one of its shows is gonna be doing the same thing whether…

Here’s an interesting story, as told by D.O.A. front man Joey Keithley in his autobiography, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk: Back in 1987, the band was opening for David Lee Roth (yes, really). After D.O.A. almost got booed off the stage, Roth’s road manager kicked the entire band out…

Though they hail from Brooklyn, the Damnwells traffic in a loping, Americana-pop sound that seems endemic to the middle of the country, from the Replacements to Wilco to the Old 97’s. Not as ragged as the ‘Mats or as adventurous (if precious) as Tweedy, lead singer/guitarist Alex Dezen’s reedy tenor…

About five years ago, Adam Cohen, son of Leonard, released a pleasantly forgettable disc of jazz-tinged singer-songwriter material and got slammed for not being more like his father. That won’t be a problem this time. While Cohen writes the songs, Low Millions sounds like a rock band now, and the…

Dolly Parton has always been one tragedy away from country sainthood. No plane crashes, widowhood, stalker or savage attack, or devastating scandal has ever really toted Dolly to the stars; Dolly’s natural shocks have all been in the realm of bad taste, which Dolly in fact has always embraced –…

So much for the afterglow, indeed. While well-advertised career retrospectives from Nirvana and Pearl Jam celebrate those heavyweights of ’90s rock, some of the lesser-known bands from that era struggle on, largely forgotten and misunderstood. Case in point: Everclear’s Art Alexakis, a frank, empathetic songwriter who delivered consistently melodic anthems…

Radioabandonment Tour is more like it. Nobody’s singing “We Want the Airwaves” anthems anymore, and since Joey Ramone’s look-alike Howard Stern announced he’s abandoning broadcast for satellite radio, the end is drawing near. Radiotakeover.com has been an invaluable source for independent music on the Internet, and its smorgasbord tours are…