The unkempt Aussie barroom brawlers in Jet are probably best known for making grungy, high-octane, adrenaline-fueled, testosterone-laden garage rock. The band first hit stateside in 2003 with the rough-edged, riff-heavy “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” and the lusty, drunken “Cold Hard Bitch,” both of which embraced the spirit of…
They have the glacial majesty of Sigur Rós, the swelling symphonic bluster of the Moody Blues, and a subtle metallic bent. Aereogramme are an intriguing Scottish quartet that combine an eclectic mesh of guitars and electronics with a variety of tempos and tones. At times, they will spiral off into…
Lots of artists get touted for being raw and uncompromising, but Texan hellraiser Scott H. Biram truly is. Put in perspective, Biram didn’t “compromise” when he was hit head-on by an 18-wheeler truck and took to the stage in a wheelchair a month later with two broken legs and an…
Bang! Bang! doesn’t waste any time living up to its name — exclamation points and all — on The Dirt That Makes You Drown. The opening track, “What We Need,” rocks the way you only wish the latest Stooges album would rock. It’s a sonic explosion touched off by a…
Rare is the indie rock band that inserts a bona fide mosh part into the middle of one of its songs. Rarer still is the band that can pull it off. Minneapolis four-piece Tapes ‘n Tapes not only pulls it off (in an epic show-closing number called “Jakov’s Suite”) but…
Over the past three years or so, the debauched dudes and dames of DJ collective Sadisco have served up countless salacious and surreal spectaculars, filled with industrial thrash and scandalous splash, where Valley night crawlers can let their freak flags fly. These prurient party monsters get even more pornographic with…
Thursday 19 Axis/Radius: Ladies’ Night (hip-hop, rock, dance) AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Bikini Lounge: Scratchy Rekkid Night with DJ Shane Kennedy (various) Blue Note: DJ Soloman, & Fredj (acid jazz, trip-hop, house) Bobby Cs: Willie B (old school, R&B) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Cherry Lounge: DJs Tranzl8tr,…
It’s something of a rarity when homeboy brothers Mike and Jared Bell are both in town to play as the Lymbyc Systym ever since Mike relocated with his girlfriend to Austin, so I highly recommend that you hightail it to Modified this evening to scope them out with Colorstore and…
According to the sister-act death metal band Hellen’s Myspace page, the older sister, Desiree, passed away on Friday the 13th. My initial thought was that it was a gag, but the photo above is captioned “Chaser’s 4/7/07 Desi’s Last Show,” and I haven’t found any information to the contrary. In…
I haven’t heard this band yet, but Vag of Honor definitely ranks high in my opinion as far as band names go. It’s supposedly feminist grindcore, but the grrrls really need to get some songs up on the Myspace or list some shows so I know it’s for real. I…
Ohh yeah, the ol’ Friday the 13th barrage of shows has arrived, as you can see above. Rather than reiterating what the flyers above let you know, I’ll just say that I wouldn’t recommend the HellHouse show, but I will recommend one that I can’t find a decent flyer to…
Well, Elliott Smith’s not with us in the physical world any longer, but, especially for those of us who got to know him at least briefly, he’s still living in his beautiful songs, a double-CD of which is being released in a few weeks on May 8 (which I dig,…
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got absolutely no use for the mall-punk-distillery that is Hot Topic. It might be alright for the high school kids who need a leather-studded punk rock belt or a t-shirt of the The Used (eccchh!), but Hot Topic is really just a symbol of…
Thursday 12 Bikini Lounge: Scratchy Rekkid Night with DJ Shane Kennedy (various) Bobby Cs: Willie B (old-school R&B) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) The Door: Pink Thursdays with DJ Astonish (hip-hop, Motown, Top 40) Dos Gringos – Scottsdale: DJs Benjamin Cutswell & Kid Vicious (rock, ’80s, old-school hip-hop) E-Lounge: DJ Domenica…
Do you want what’s in the box or what’s behind door No. 3? The latest episode in the radio payola version of Let’s Make a Deal is looking like a zonk. Then again, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s heroic crusade against payola — netting more than $35 million in…
Even if the night hadn’t ended with whip-its and Adult Mad-Libs, my recent Saturday night excursion onto Mill Avenue in Tempe would still be among my most fun forays into Valley nightlife ever. It was a pleasant surprise, because I don’t usually hang out on Mill, the main drag in…
UK chanteuse Amy Winehouse is quickly becoming known for two things: her drinking habit and her amazing voice. She combines the two on “Rehab,” the opening song on her second album, Back to Black, in which she sings, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no no no”…
Directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez know a thing or two about music and the movies. Tarantino’s soundtracks have become pop-culture staples, while Rodriguez scores his own movies. We sat down with them recently to discuss their new double feature, Grindhouse, and how music affects their creative process. New Times:…
Dear Gods of Rock: It’s me, The Mullet. Please kill me. My time on this Earth — hanging off Richard Marx’s head as it sang “Don’t Mean Nothin’,” going to Indigo Girls shows, and bathing in NASCAR exhaust fumes — has been fun, but I just can’t take being the…
For Amon Tobin’s Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 Soundtrack, the Brazilian-born UK resident and producer/DJ spun delicately assembled cinematic instrumentals into epic nightmarish video-game backdrops, boasting chopped organ and string section bits over boisterous drum breaks. It was another impressive exercise in Tobin’s venturesome sound manipulation, but Foley Room presented…
In a progressive jazz culture dominated by New York and Chicago, other towns with improvised music scenes tend to get the shaft. That’s too bad, because pockets of experimental sounds — from Santa Cruz, California, to Montague, Massachusetts — continue to challenge and imbue eardrums. A perfect example is Look…
It’s funny how trends turn in terms of the cool becoming passé and the unspeakably lame becoming “the shit.” For first-wave punks, guitar solos were as voguish as a Three’s Company T-shirt; the ascendance of Meat Puppets and Dinosaur Jr. made nimble-fingered six-string aerobics stylish again. Generations of indie-rock aesthetes…
