Joel Davis has had one helluva packed schedule. Up until recently, the 21-year-old Phoenician was holding down two Joe jobs (slaving away behind the scenes at Stinkweeds Records and behind the front desk at the Clarendon Hotel) as well as working his regular gigs as the Thursday-night resident at Chronic…
Forget that Sean Kingston is about as reggae-sounding as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Forget that he uses Auto-Tune more than Kanye West singing the collected works of Freddie Mercury. The important thing to remember is that, well, he’s lovable. He’s a round mound of raw teenage heartbreak that brings out…
Oh, the ’80s, where have you gone? Back when Republicans meant well enough, U2 albums were badass, and every girl wore hoop earrings. Now it’s almost 2010, and all we’ve got is teabaggers, No Line on the Horizon, and hoopfetish.com, which makes me feel like a pervert — all without…
Boy, did we drop the ball on emo. For the longest time, we coolly dismissed it as drama-drenched poseur-rock; all histrionics, no substance. Then lawmakers in Russia went and introduced legislation to ban emo fashions and regulate emo Web sites throughout the mother country. Male eyeliner as the tip of…
Shane MacGowan once said The Pogues were his way of overcoming guilt for not laying down his life for Ireland with the IRA. He was probably shit-faced at the time. Despite their punk leanings, the sodden violence that often accompanies gigs, and MacGowan’s Brendan Behan-influenced — and sometimes radical —…
Amidst the mind-numbing barrage of identical-sounding modern rock and pop starlets, it’s nice to come across something different every now and then. Enter Gogol Bordello. As immigrant punk goes, they’re basically your only choice, so be thankful that they’re also badass. Imagine putting Spoon onstage with a polka band and…
It’s not often you get to see a rock n roll legend perform, period; so the fact that Wanda Jackson, the “Queen of Rockabilly” and 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, played an intimate venue like the Rhythm Room last night is nothing short of amazing (you can…
Thankful Birds have had some cool posters in the past — just check out this and this. Compared to those, actually, this is pretty tame. But, in a week of weak fliers this is distinctive enough to claim the prize for the jazzy Phoenix band. Looks like a pretty cool…
Despite the inflated reputation of 1999’s Keep It Like a Secret, it’s obvious Built to Spill has never made the perfect Built to Spill record. If anything, the band’s Pavement-meets-Phish take on jammy indie rock is universally agreed to be best realized in concert, and has been remarkably consistent, though…
It’s reportedly gonna be colder than normal this weekend, which means you’ll definitely want to be somewhere hot. Slide over to the Venue of Scottsdale, 7117 East Third Avenue in Scottsdale, where things are probably gonna get a little toasty during Tropic on Friday, October 9. Hollywood’s Latin Prince and…
If rock required a caretaker for its creative flame, it could do a lot worse than Yo La Tengo singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan. The one-time rock critic and his crew possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the form (witness their annual covers-by-request pledge drive performances for Jersey’s WFMU), and they’ve developed such…
Sequels can be tricky to pull off. For every Terminator 2 and The Dark Knight, there are twice as many shitheaps like Caddyshack II and The Two Jakes. This axiom also extends to music, which is cluttered beyond measure with ill-advised follow-ups: For example, Woodstock ’99 never should have existed…
After a meteoric rise that brought them perilously close to the line that separates buzz from hype, Vivian Girls have followed up their self-titled debut album with another that seems to wisely dial things back just a little. That isn’t to say that Everything Goes Wrong is subdued or watered…
It’s pretty much always good news when any of the Wu-Tang Clan decides to show up in town, so Ghostface Killah’s upcoming appearance is probably worth checking out, if only out of prurient interest. He just dropped his latest album, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, which for…
If a pig-roastin’ rock show at Tempe’s most legit dive bar is what you’re in the market for, this is it, bro. In the parking lot of the venerable Yucca Tap Room, an entire (presumably, already dead) pig will be sacrificed (ya know, metaphorically speaking) to the party gods. The…
Hold on a second: It’s called the Atticus Tour, and the co-headliner is a band called Finch? Wow, that’s really precious. Maybe they’ll hire Scout Willis as a cage-dancer, or add melancholy indie-pop duo Harper Lee to the bill later on. Actually, let’s hope they don’t. Featuring the identical swept…
There’s only one thing that almost kept The Skinwalkers from claiming this week’s Flier of the Week nod, and that’s the fact that they’ve done something similar to this before. Still, I’m OK seeing this oddly compelling piece of Esherian art twice. I’m not sure exactly what it’s doing to…
Jen Deveroux has become the hipster queen of putting on cutie-pie parties for the big-sunglasses crowd, like this summer’s Adult Swim and Tune in Tokyo. So it’s somewhat apropos that the 30-something promoter’s latest weekly gala is called Royal Filth and will take place every Saturday at the Rose and…
Somewhere along the way — probably after Garth Brooks invented the “arena country” genre in the early ’90s — country music lost its sense of humor in the quest for pop crossover moolah. Sadly, the twangy novelty tune became a thing of the past. Country music used to embrace its…
There’s no denying that Ingrid Michaelson is an indie-rock success story. The singer has sold many, many copies of her 2007 album Girls and Boys. Michaelson’s “The Way I Am” was featured heavily in an Old Navy ad campaign and her track “Keep Breathing” received some buzz after being played…
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, seems an unlikely locale for a punk band to form, but such is the case for The Queers who call the “Old Man in the Mountain”-less state. Rumor has it that the old-school punk rockers, who formed in 1982, were inspired by their name as a way…
More than one music journalist has dubbed this art-rock trio a “supergroup . . . of sorts.” Basically, that’s just industry shorthand for “a side project featuring musicians from two or more obscure but critically admired bands that have never sniffed the Billboard Hot 100.” In other words, they ain’t…
