Though there is no shortage of young, angst-ridden musicians with angst-ridden tales to tell, ultimately, the power of a story is in its telling — a notion that puts Dave Smallen, the brains and emotion behind Oakland’s Street to Nowhere, at the top of his game. Comparisons to Bright Eyes’…
Santa Cruz’s Comets on Fire. D.C.’s Dead Meadow. Japan’s Ghost. Add Atlanta’s Deerhunter to the list. With the summer of ’07 fast approaching, a new slew of bands is channeling the ghosts of the Summer of Love, 40 years after the original hippie counterculture movement. Like their parents in the…
Yes, it’s been too long since ZZ Top has made a song half as brilliant as “La Grange” or “Tube Snake Boogie.” But if classic rock has taught us anything, and we both know it has, it’s that it doesn’t matter if an old band’s new stuff isn’t fit to…
Even though Camp Crystal Lake ain’t anywhere near P-Town, the dance demons of ClixBagofTricks and Mafiatic will channel the teen-slashing spirit of Jason Voorhees for their latest raucous rave event, My Friend Jason’s House. The horrifying all-night hootenanny on Friday, April 13 (natch), sounds like something the hockey mask-clad killer…
If national elections are the government’s way of dicking you over every four years, Tax Day is its way of making sure you don’t forget who has the biggest dick every year. Of course, if you’re a musician — especially if you’re a rock star and, therefore, predisposed to civil…
The new CD by local industrial metal band The Iris sounds like a sonic blueprint for a band that’s finding its sound, and getting hotter by the minute. But the blueprint isn’t new — Marilyn Manson, Deftones, and a dozen other bands drew it. What’s great about The Vanity Fair…
We’ve been on a roll with the weekday party circuit, so Club Candids decided to make a humpday run for one of Tempe’s favorite neighborhood drinking digs, Casey Moore’s, on Wednesday, April 4. We can always count on this old standby for attractive twentysomethings looking to unwind on a school…
I wasn’t a fan of the band The Fray previously; definitely not enough to attend the has-been-celebration that was called the Tempe Music Festival a couple weekends back. I don’t remember all of the acts that were playing, but I know that The Fray was amongst few contemporary artists. The…
Although we have a pretty vibrant, poppin’ music scene here in the ‘Nix these days, not that many folks outside of our desert metropolis seem to recognize that. So I was stoked when I found out that Truxton Records rockabilly/psychometal act Grave Danger has a song featured in the new…
Saturday night I missed the CD release party for Runaway Diamonds album God’s Mom and Her Turquoise Chow-Chow, which my fellow scribbler Ed Masley wrote about here, because I was at the Yucca Tap Room scoping out the Drunken Immortals (two of whom are also in this week’s issue, in…
Wednesday for happy hour I spent a couple of hours watching Chip Hanna play acoustic at Last Exit. If you’re not familiar with Chip, he’s the former drummer for punk stalwarts U.S. Bombs and One Man Army, but currently he’s honing his chops as a country singer/songwriter. That might seem…
Mesa may not be known for a totally bumpin’ night life, but when we heard about “Sound in the Ground: Jelly/Belly” on Thursday, March 29 at Mesa Contemporary Arts, we thought it might be worth checking out — especially because Mesa Arts Center is one of the most sleek and…
Back in the late ’90s, I was getting pretty tired of Drunken Immortals — the group was playing a weekly hip-hop night at the now-shuttered Arizona Roadhouse Brewery and, after that, weekly at a place called Donny Brasco’s. I’ve always believed in the laws of supply and demand as far…
Dark Star Orchestra is as close to the Grateful Dead as you’ll get these days, but don’t think of them as a tribute band. No member tries to look like any of the Dead. There’s no effort to talk like them, either. Instead, the DSO picks a different Dead show…
Few artists have spoken more eloquently — or more passionately — about the high cost of life during wartime since Bush took the wheel as commander in chief than indie-punk hero Ted Leo. On his latest effort, Living With the Living, Leo sizes up the prospects of a soldier’s life…
She’s been part of The Spirit Squad, Runaway Diamonds’ life-affirming wall of vocals, for nearly a year now. But when people ask Rhianna Riggs what the Phoenix band sounds like, she has no idea what to tell them. “You’re just like ‘Well, Gabriel plays the beat machine and piano and…
Axel Willner’s debut album stutters so much, sometimes it’s as if the speakers will wobble off the table’s edge and crash to the floor in pieces. As The Field, Willner casts his ubiquitous, reliable software looping techniques in a frequently satisfying light on From Here We Go Sublime, one of…
“I’ll await you, while you’re cheating/lightning strikes you when you’re moving,” sings Blonde Redhead frontwoman Kazu Mikino, whose vocals float atop rhythmic looping riffs in “The Dress,” as she delves into loving-you-less and proves that early-’90s dreamy art-rock can still survive in today’s power-pop-oriented world. The album’s title track opens…
West Coast electro-shoegaze outfit Languis took its already compelling sound to towering heights last year on the mysterious, electronically enhanced stoner pop of Other Desert Cities. For Split, their shared platform with Bay Area leftfield hip-hop duo Meanest Man Contest, Languis apparently developed the medicated-drone end of what comes out…
A recurring problem with many Americana/neo-roots-music performers can be summed up thusly: Terminal Earnestness, an affliction that compels a songster to prove how salt-of-the-earth “authentic” s/he is, no matter what graduate program they recently opted out of. Of course, some take the opposite (though equally tedious) tack of Excessive Irreverence,…
This band named its latest effort The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. And it sounds like the devil is getting all the better punches in as Jesse Lacey leads Brand New through moments as explosive as the chorus hook of “Sowing Season,” howling “Yeah” as though the word…
November 2000: With filming on the multimillion-dollar Lord of the Rings trilogy almost complete, New Line Cinema’s mercenary cavalry teams silently scour the moors and mountain peaks of New Zealand in a desperate search for the three experimental vat-grown hobbits who have escaped the top-secret holding pen. Raised on a…
