Music

I first saw Blackmarket at the 2007 SxSW festival. The band was performing on a bill with retro-metal monsters Danava, and they went on early, to a mostly-empty club.

What struck me about that performance was all the heart Blackmarket put into it — they sounded as professional as any arena band, and they had the rapt attention of every single person in the thin, earlybird crowd. Blending the melodic sensibilities of bands like The Beatles and Radiohead with the dark lyricism and artistry of artists like David Bowie, Blackmarket immediately struck me as the next Arizona band to make a mainstream splash.

If Pollstar is to be believed, the members of Green Day will be playing a show in Phoenix on Sunday, May 25, at the Brickhouse Theatre. Huge news, right? Well, the reason nobody heard about this huge news is because Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool will be performing as a band called Foxboro Hot Tubs (the show is NOT listed on the Brickhouse Web site at this time, however).

This is the “Arizona Rock Fight,” and, besides sounding like we’re gonna be in the heart of a ballistic granite storm, the event promises 24 of the Valley’s best bands will leave their all on stage over the course of four weeks. Why will they bother? Because the prizes are pretty damn sweet.

Phoenix is one of the most diverse cities on the West coast, and the eclectic, multi-cultured sounds on the Diverse-Fi Music label provide ample examples of the rich sonic stew we’ve got brewing in P-City. This week, we tip our hat to Diverse-Fi.

This might be our most exciting Future Shock yet, as several big-name shows and rare concert opportunities came down the wire. Rather than sit and gush about how awesome it is that Phoenix is one of only 17 cities on Tina Turner’s tour, or that Tom Waits is playing two nights here, let’s just get on with the roll call of radness.

Scrubs actor and Garden State director and star Zach Braff is making a music video for singer-songwriter Jay Clifford, and he wants footage of you and your friends to be included.

If there’s one thing the self-satisfied, liberal, tofu-munching, cappuccino-sipping, in vitro fertilization-utilizing coastal elite hate, it’s Fox News. The Rupert Murdoch-owned home to such neoconservative mouthpieces as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity is known for cheerleading the Iraq war and not finding John McCain insufficiently right-wing. It even has the…

With Mother’s Day fast approaching, we here at New Times have spent a lot of time mulling over what makes a great mom. In the end, we each wrote down a trait, tossed these little slips of wonderful into a hat, and then, with a stick of glue, assembled them…

Tristan Prettyman — the San Diego folk-pop singer-songwriter, surfer, and former Roxy model — is back with her sophomore album, Hello . . . x. Over the phone from New York, where she was getting ready to board a plane to Nashville to continue her U.S. tour, the genial Prettyman…