The first two lines on Joe Jackson’s new album are: “Hey, can you hear me now, as I fade away and lose my ground? Maybe you’d like to know what I’d have to say, if I was still around.” Are the words merely song lyrics or is ol’ Joe wryly…
On his previous disc, La Kahena, San Francisco-based, Algerian-born DJ Cheb i Sabbah explored the sounds of his native North Africa, adding tracks and loops to the material he had recorded there upon his return to the U.S. This time around, the focus is the music of the Indian subcontinent,…
Kate Nash’s debut LP, Made of Bricks, was released last summer in the U.K., where she became an overnight sensation; both the CD and single, “Foundations,” charted at number one. The 20-year-old from a London suburb pals around with Lily Allen, with whom she’s frequently compared. Yet unlike Alright, Still…
Too many movie tie-in collections put profits before cohesion. Tunes by widely disparate performers, most of whom just happen to record for companies affiliated with the film studio, wind up being tossed together willy-nilly in the hope that one of them will stick, thereby inducing fans to purchase all the…
Keeping it real is always tricky. People who hate “new country” complain that it’s not “authentic country.” Though that may be true, it’s no guarantee that every Gram Parsons-influenced, alt-country shit-kicker will be any more genuine. Jesse Dayton and Brennen Leigh’s Holdin’ Our Own is neither “new country” nor “alt-country.”…
Southern-fried piano swamp funk doesn’t get better than Leon Russell. His greasy R&B cadges a hopping, Delta blues stomp, fueled by his gravelly croak and his percussive pounding at the piano. Russell left Tulsa for L.A. at 16. There, he learned guitar from rockabilly legend James Burton and soon became…
Remember way back (like, to the early ’90s), when suddenly, almost out of nowhere, you heard a ska song on the radio? You inevitably thought to yourself, “What the fuck? Ska hasn’t been popular in the U.S. for ages!” Shortly thereafter, you found yourself practicing “skankin'” in your apartment when…
Sons? Unquestionably. Bastards? Probably. Of Johnny Cash? Who can say? We are all the bastard sons of Johnny Cash if we so choose to be. If, in fact, we are talking about a band and that band’s themes, musical and otherwise, Mark Stuart and the other Bastards’ songs inhabit that…
The term “indie rock” is as vague as the term “rock” these days; thankfully, there are still people out there making music that can’t be defined, no matter how many adjectives or hyphens scribes throw into the description. Take Asthmatic Kitty Records artist Raymond Raposa (the sole member of Castanets),…
While it might be a little chilly outside this weekend, with nighttime temperatures dipping into the 40s, local beat-slinger extraordinaire DJ Spyder and a crew of torrid turntablists are gonna be heating things up on Saturday, January 26, at Inferno, a new monthly dance night at Chasers, 8005 East Roosevelt…
December is gone and I think I’ve been drunk since Thanksgiving. For some reason, I decided to celebrate a Greek Christmas with my Jewish friends down in Tucson. What’s a Greek Christmas, you ask? It starts with a huge boneless leg of lamb with mint jelly and homemade spanakopita, and…
There’s been a lot of talk about hip-hop at the New Times office, so by midweek, we were geared up for Raising Arizona at The Bar, a.k.a. The Lucky Devil in Tempe. (Click here for more photos.) This weekly DJ night may not have the frantic buzz of Hollywood Alley’s…
OneRepublic’s Colorado connection is mighty tangential. Tulsa-born lead singer Ryan Tedder and guitarist Zach Filkins met while attending high school in Colorado Springs, and guitarist Drew Brown is from Boulder. But local fans had little to do with their rise to prominence. Indeed, the band’s been based in Los Angeles…
Guitarist Scott Stearns is an astronaut of musical violence. He explores dark, ugly places that reek of sulfur, rotgut, and boiling sweat. His Necrodamus project is a reshuffling of a recent Fistula lineup. But where that band lurks in a sludgy punk-metal midground, Necrodamus alternately stalks both sides of the…
Get Off the Stage is Too $hort’s 17th album — not counting compilations and reissues — but it’s also the end of an era. It’s his last for Jive, the label he’s been associated with since 1988. “I’m a legend in the game,” he says on “Shittin’ on ‘Em,” adding,…
On the surface, a musical collaboration between two such seemingly polar opposite talents as Americana/bluegrass goddess Alison Krauss and shouting, yowling Robert Plant is mind-boggling. But under producer/bassist T-Bone Burnett’s direction, there’s no superstardom at play here, just a cadre of singularly talented people painting something novel, interesting, and completely…
For every quote, cliché, or saying, there is something or someone to disprove it. Dionne Warwick has disproved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “no second acts in American lives” quip famously. With a voice both honeyed and dusky, Warwick was frontwoman for one of the greatest partnerships in pop history, Burt Bacharach…
The wave that this Texas-born singer/songwriter has ridden for the past few years isn’t bad, considering he’s someone who began seriously pursuing a professional career only after being fired (by his stepfather, who thought he needed a push) from his day job as a gas wholesaler. Green is unique because…
It’s too bad the days are gone when metal bands tried to make their album covers look all tough and sinister and ended up with borderline laughable results instead. After all, what metalhead of a certain age bracket doesn’t get all warm and fuzzy thinking about the cartoon-evil artwork for…
Gallows wield their instruments with such malevolence that it wouldn’t be surprising to discover they also use them to brain rodents in their flat. The U.K. quintet is heavily indebted to the brutal pulse of ’80s American hardcore acts like Black Flag and post-punk’s jagged guitar salvos, influences they share…
Crash Romeo work on their power chords as often as they work on their action-figure poses. Guitar-driven verses come with enough space to allow ax-slinger Steve Anderson the time to point to audience acolytes, with pick nestled between thumb and middle finger; the pauses before choruses are protracted, meaning vocalist…
Don’t know if you’re down with the latest 411, but Emerg McVay and the rest of the Blunt Club crew have ditched their longtime digs at Hollywood Alley in Mesa and set up their weekly hip-hop shop at a new location, namely Club Red, 2155 East University Drive in Tempe…
