Last week marked the return of Mardi Gras to New Orleans, as well as the crawfish, beads and liquor being poured in bar after bar along Bourbon Street. It also meant a musical palette of the region’s wonderful blend of zydeco, soul, funk and blues, and five successive nights of…
Back when he was in the surf band the Bomboras, Jake Cavaliere would ritually end sets by setting his organ on fire. Dressed in matching outfits and accompanied by bikini-clad dancers, the Bomboras could turn a club gig into ’60s film exploitation. In Lords of Altamont, his current band, Jake…
Andrew Ahiakpor has never heard the “explicit version” of star rapper Ludacris’ platinum-seller Word of Mouf and that’s just fine with him. “I think that true talent doesn’t need profanity to shine,” scoffs the 25-year-old UC-Santa Barbara grad from Fairfield, California. “Plus, when words like ho’ and the b’ and…
Phoenix native DJ Z-Trip has a trademark sound that’s been forged by experimentation as well as by an unbreakable will to do things his own way. So, at 31, he doesn’t mince words when he talks about his ability to shake up hip-hop. “Where am I going? To the fuckin’…
Roger Clyne says if there’s no music scene in Phoenix today, it may be partially his fault. Clyne led the sensationally quirky Refreshments in the mid-’90s at the zenith of what some locals refer to as the “Mill Avenue conspiracy,” when talented jangle-pop musicians ruled the bars of Tempe. “Everybody…
“Wow! Look at all that pornography, material waste of photography/When all you need is a fertile mind to formulate pictures of any kind.” from “All You Need Is a Fertile Mind,” an American song-poem. Fans of “outsider music,” from Harvey Sid Fisher to Ken Nordine, unite and embrace the pretty…
Friday, February 7, 2003 Time: 7:30 p.m. Thought Crime There’s no vantage point in central Phoenix as illuminating as the one-story rooftop above Thought Crime, a communal art space on Central Avenue just north of Roosevelt. “The DEA is stationed in that building. You’ve got the transvestite bar there, the…
Imagine you were abducted by aliens in 1973. Thirty years later, the little green bastards return you to Earth. Your friends hold a welcome-back party, during which they ask you, “Hey, man, guess which album has ruled the charts since you left, dude?” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?” you…
The diversity of melancholic genres Calexico blends together within its latest release, Feast of Wire, is almost as varied as 17th-century writer Robert Burton’s behemoth book-of-all-books, The Anatomy of Melancholy. “Sunken Waltz” trips through the 3/4 timing of a traditional waltz, always staggering in a little late on the last…
Once upon a time, reggae was ordained as the next big thing. No fooling. Several mid-1970s critics actually predicted the Jamaican genre was going to hit our shores like a musical squall. Um, not quite. Instead for many listeners reggae’s legacy lingers in two ways. One is the near-mandatory inclusion…
Kathleen Edwards is not a carbon-copy winsome angry waif, in spite of what the tunes on Failer might suggest. True, the songs on her debut are retorts to a world of pain, of sour nights, bitter mornings, hard drinking, bad love, bad music and excess. There are, however, a few…
Hip-hop’s history a dialectic forged by battling, boasting and street-corner besting is a tug of war between MCs and producers. Throughout much of the late ’90s, the lyricists had the upper hand, prompting the British label BBE (short for “Barely Breaking Even”) to launch The Beat Generation, a series of…
Ballistically speaking, there is no equivalent to 50 Cent. 50 thug’s thug was shot nine times in a single evening and survived, qualifying him for ‘hood sainthood. That assassination attempt came on the heels of a stabbing, which occurred shortly after the release of “How to Rob,” in which the…
Since the demise of Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age have been stoner-rock standard-bearers, the lit Beatles to everyone else’s dim Dave Clark Five. On its 1998 full-length debut, QOTSA demonstrated Josh Homme’s desire to move beyond Kyuss’ lengthy song cycles and craft heavy but hooky rock that at times…
Hot Rod Circuit moved from Auburn, Alabama, to New Haven, Connecticut, in a day. They may not have arrived dressed like the Blues Brothers looking more like a union of displaced roadies in tee shirts, jeans and tats but back in 1998, Hot Rod Circuit was certainly a band on…
Life was cool for Brendan Benson back in 1996. He had a record deal with Virgin Records. His connections enabled him to write and record with Jason Falkner, bandleader of sweet-pop revivalists Jellyfish. He lived in San Francisco just as the Internet was booming and twentysomethings were fancying themselves as…
If anything irritates Fred Sargolini, half of the hip-hop/electro duo Ming & FS, it’s artists who force themselves to color inside the lines. “They say they’re open-minded, but they’re really puritans,” he says. “And people in drum and bass and all kinds of other stuff do it. It’s like they’re…
Two recent developments have me thinking about the Davids of the music industry and whether they have any chance going up against Goliaths, both local and national. First, two local promoters have joined forces, and you can blame it, at least partially, on the Format. The local pop duo scored…
Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the first full-length release from rapper 50 Cent, isn’t so much a debut as an entry wound. Having been shot nine times, 50 Cent is plenty familiar with the latter. But despite all the spent rounds, death and suffering that serve as this album’s very…
Chan Marshall, known to the rock ‘n’ roll world as Cat Power, is a painfully shy woman with a lot to say. You Are Free, her new album and first since 2001’s bleak The Covers Record, is the least self-assured-sounding self-assured record in ages. “Don’t be in love with the…
Contrary to popular belief, the Spanish word puto doesn’t mean “fag.” Only a homosexual who also happens to be an asshole is really a puto. Puto, though, is anything that’s bad, or wrong. For example, if you accused Molotov of homophobia for its 2000 hit “Puto” (which repeated a “Puuuuuto-Puuuuuto”…
Loose Fur is not a Jim O’Rourke album but that’s only true in the sense that Magritte’s famous painting The Treason of Images (which features the line “This is not a pipe” written in French below an obvious pipe) is not a pipe. After all, everything the guitarist, tape splicer,…
