Brendon “Alias” Whitney and Rona “Tarsier” Rapadas don’t technically use the needles to get their dark and vibrant combo of rhythm and female vox across; Alias instead exchanged the turntable technique for drum machines and electronic tools, while Tarsier lays her poetic lyricism on top. The duo’s collision and collaboration…
The Loon is right, and not the bird, either. And I see the high-jump kings with roadside stirrups on when I come back to meet the bear, explains singer Josh Grier on “In Houston.” Crumple up lyrics like these with guitar that ranges between riffy fuzz and crystal ambiance; synth…
If you’ve been racing down local dirt roads in your pickup, jamming to Toby Keith or Gretchen Wilson, then you should probably skip this week’s Hank III concert. Plastering a Confederate flag in your back window might buy you a redneck pass (and hopefully a good ass-whuppin’), but it doesn’t…
The Smiths inspire the formation of a new band about once every 3.7 seconds, which means in the time it takes you to read this sentence, two guys with hard-ons for Morrissey have decided to pick up a mic and mope about how bad their middle-class childhoods were. In the…
Okay, check this out: You’re not gonna believe this, but you know that Ice Cube guy? From the movies and stuff? The one who played the cuddly father figure in last year’s family flick Are We There Yet?, and who just got cast as “Mr. Kotter” in the upcoming remake…
Who was the first well-educated white smart-ass who realized the comic potential of hip-hop? No one knows for sure, but the prank-filled legacies of the Beastie Boys and the Bloodhound Gang are in good hands with MC Lars, a California native who uses his laptop raps to gleefully piss all…
One of metal’s more interesting and versatile (if frequently overlooked) acts, New Jersey sextet Ill Niño merges blistering, Slayer-like riffage with front man Cristian Machado’s wide-ranging vocals delivered in both English and Spanish (he can scream like Sick Of It All’s Lou Koller or croon like Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington),…
Legendary blues drummer Chico Chism turns 79 years old on May 23, and details from much of his seven-plus decades on Earth still remain a mystery. We know that Chism was born on a riverboat in Louisiana, to a mother of Cherokee ancestry. We know his birth name is Napoleon,…
Much of U.K. outfit Art Brut’s appeal lies in the wide-eyed incredulity of frontgeezer Eddie Argos, the need he constantly feels to state (and then immediately restate) particular observations as if to highlight how incredible or ridiculous some circumstance is. “I saw her naked — twice!” he exclaims about a…
Charlie Musselwhite hasn’t lived in Chicago for a long time, but the Mississippi-Memphis lad cut his teeth in the Second City second generation of upstart white bluesboys like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, who looked up to their heroes: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Cotton, Junior Wells. It’s funny that…
The number of young, pasty men with petty post-rock ambitions could populate a small city — say, Mopetopia: Behold! Overly sensitive souls wile away the gray-dappled hours, thumbing through dog-eared copies of Schopenhauer, journaling ad nauseam or sobbing quietly into their chamomile tea. Enter Rahim, a New York-based three-piece that…
1998 was a terrific year for chicks with picks: Kacy Crowley, Billie Myers, Melanie Doane, Emm Gryner, Tara MacLean, Garrison Starr, and dozens of other female singer-songwriters got starring roles in Sarah McLachlan’s second Lilith Fair tour . . . and then they promptly fell off the face of the…
It’s been alleged that nearly every U2 song — from “I Will Follow” to “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” — is about Jesus; certainly, Bono and buds have never really tried to hide their sturdy Christian roots, and yet they managed to transcend that dreaded “Christian rock”…
Not only does U.K. rock band Gomez play innovative, soulful music that makes listeners reconsider the talent of some other bands out there, but it’s apparently very Internet-savvy, too. The sixsome, whose new album How We Operate recently was released in the U.S., has an actual blog that it updates…
Who’d have thunk it? The way DJ nights come and go in this town, it’s pretty damned amazing that Adam “Dumperfoo” Dumper’s Thursday night Blunt Club at Hollywood Alley in Mesa has made it to the ripe old age of four. Mad props to Dumper and his cohorts, resident DJs…
Because a pedal steel guitar is featured prominently in their sound, The Court & Spark often get pegged as an alt-country band, but nothing could be further from the truth. The steel guitar is just part of a multilayered sound that can include cello, hammered dulcimer, Mellotron, and the percussive…
Unless I happen to stumble upon a great band at a live show, my laboratory for finding new music is my car. I’ll grab a random pile of CDs to play while driving back and forth to work on a familiar stretch of 16th Street, and depending on how much…
In the current business climate for live music venues here in the ‘Nix, a three-year anniversary is definitely something to celebrate. Last Exit, the rock and Americana club at Priest Drive and Southern Avenue in Tempe, is throwing a third birthday party for itself on Saturday, May 13, with Dramarama,…
This is the first release from local music maven Will “Vil Vodka” Tynor’s Vodka Tonic Media, and rather than highlight the talents of one band via a studio album, Tynor’s opted to showcase the sounds of six Arizona bands on this quirky comp. The synthesizer-saturated “Come On Feel It,” a…
Nothing personal, Meg, but working with new playmates has set Jack White free. “I’m through ripping myself off,” he screeches on the title track. If you didn’t catch that, he repeats, “I’m done ripping myself off.” From the lighthearted ease that oozes from every track, it’s obvious that White has…
If A Tribe Called Quest had jettisoned the bong-jazz flow and picked up where Afrika Bambaataa left off, the group would have created something like the simultaneously amped-up and chilled-out atmosphere of the debut by Baltimore duo Spank Rock. Naeem Juwan doesn’t blaze any trails with his booty-call braggart lyrics,…
The comparisons to Dido and Joss Stone that surround KT Tunstall are inevitable. She’s British and pretty, she sings wonderfully, and she was successful right out of the gate. But similarities to her fellow countrywomen end there. Whereas Dido and Stone are content to mine one stylistic vein, Tunstall has…
