Catherine Vericolli and Ryan Champagne might’ve dubbed themselves The Lucky Bitches, but the truth is that they’re quite the pleasant pair. Consider them to be goofballs to the third degree, as they named their DJ duo after a French & Saunders skit and incorporate silliness whenever possible into their weekly…
Most critics gave up on these horndogs back in ’68, when they had the temerity to boot out founder Al Kooper to get someone who could really shhhaaaang! The counterculture gave up on ’em completely when they went on a 1970 State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe and had to…
Thursday 8 AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Bikini Lounge: Scratchy Rekkid Night with DJ Shane Kennedy (various) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Coyote Hill: DJ G-zus (Top 40, hip-hop) The Door: Pink Thursdays with DJ Astonish (hip-hop, Motown, Top 40) Hollywood Alley: Blunt Club with Emerg McVay, Hyder, Pickster,…
A Club Candids without drinking? What could possibly make us want to go out besides the sweet promise of bars filled with bountiful booze? The biggest downtown arts event of the year, that’s what. This week, we decided to keep our livers clean and take in a little culture on…
The Inimitable George Tabb What seems like a million years ago — but was really just half-a-lifetime, when I was 15 or 16, I was a faithful/fanatical reader of Maximum Rock N Roll. If you don’t know, it was the bible of punk rock, a newsprint compilation of all the…
SiOP The band SiOP’s press release begins, “SiOP was formed in the summer of 1998 and has been on the rise ever since.” Truth is, SiOP never left 1998 and its plethora of shit bands: Static-X, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, the Bizkit, etcetera. Here’s the goods on SiOP’s latest album,…
A little over three years ago, I wrote here in my column Revolver about the sad descent of Zia Records from a truly indie and customer oriented record store into an algorhythmically stocked clone of chains like Tower and Best Buy. I would venture to guess that a lot of…
After hitting up a couple empty clubs this past Saturday night, we finally gave in and headed to The Rogue in Scottsdale for Shake!’s two-year anniversary. Leave it to William Fucking Reed to steal the crowds, because on Saturday, February 24, the place was packed with a mixed mob looking…
Other than a few years of classical piano as a preteen, I never learned to play music. My parents wouldn’t buy me a guitar or a drum kit, I never got to sing in front of an audience (thankfully, since I can’t sing), and I never had a rock band…
In the 30 years since its inception, hip-hop has grown from a means of expression for oppressed black youth to a major force in American popular culture. As such, hip-hop has been appropriated by all segments of our society — most controversially, by young white suburbanites. Fortune Small Business editor…
For nearly 20 years, the Queers have made a crude pop art of thrashing through their most infectious songs with the reckless abandon of a hardcore band — a really funny hardcore band that worships the Ramones and The Beach Boys. They actually cover the Beach Boys in one of…
“I thought it was garbage,” says guitarist Kenny Florence, recalling the first time singer/songwriter Adam Baker let him hear the new songs he’d been writing as Annuals. “The first few songs, I really didn’t like. And he’ll admit to you that they’re just not that great,” Florence says. “But then,…
As much as Kittie benefited from the late-’90s nü-metal explosion, they were always one smart step removed from it: From the scrappy, Hole-via-Cannibal Corpse death-grunge of 1999’s Spit, to the Pantera-style bludgeoning of 2001’s Oracle, to the finessed, goth-tinged chug of 2004’s Until the End, the all-female Canadian quartet never…
Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible is a dense, academic, and ultimately rewarding album fixated on questions of spirituality, religion and the concept of self — and, more specifically, how to reconcile these things in a bleak world where uncertainty is the norm, hope seems dead, and God isn’t exactly benevolent. (That…
Although Fall Out Boy lyricist/dreamboat Pete Wentz is inveterately verbose, his words don’t mask profundity, and that’s a big reason for his band’s success. A lot of emo acts have a limited audience because of all that freakin’ emotion. But instead of turning songs into platforms for pain, Wentz eschews…
Sex Change starts off re-exploring Trans Am’s journeys on the Autobahn, as the echo of Afrobeat guitars washes over the lull of a trance-inducing synth riff. But they move on quickly while keeping the synth front and center on “North East Rising Sun,” where droning psychedelic vocals tug against a…
Well, Lucinda Williams’ first release in four years won’t be making many people’s lists of Least Depressing Albums of 2007. Someone took her joy again. And this time, there’s no sign that joy is coming back, as Williams struggles through the heartache of her mother’s death while dealing with the…
This trio from Richmond, Virginia, includes singer/songwriter/guitarist Jacob Thomas Berns; Earnest Christian Kiehne Jr., a multi-instrumentalist who plays almost every folk instrument you can think of; and Sonya Cotton, who supplies breathy mountain harmonies. The gentle ambient folk music here spins a subtle web, and while the music is light…
Alternative Press included Moneen’s latest effort, The Red Tree, on its “10 Essential Albums of 2006” list, and went on to say that if you’d give your favorite record of the year five stars, The Red Tree would get six. Now, chances are, you’re thinking, “That’s just crazy talk.” And…
Few hard-edged punk bands were as blatantly pissed off about politics in the ’90s than Naked Aggression. Formed in 1990 by singer Kirsten Patches and guitarist Phil Suchomel among the breweries and cheese factories of Madison, Wisconsin, Naked Aggression’s original purpose was to protest the first Gulf War. The band’s…
After scoring two platinum albums and one massive hair-metal anthem (that ode to statutory rape titled “Seventeen”), Winger officially crashed and burned with the commercial failure of 1993’s Pull. And while most rock fans had written off the band, which actually rocked harder than most of its peers, guitarist Reb…
See ya never, Blonde Redhead! The top spot for bands made up of one sprightly Asian singer plus two experimentally oriented white guys has been usurped by Northern California spazzers Deerhoof. Last year was Deerhoof’s year. Finally, plenty of show-going indie fans caught on to what a few have known…
