A lot has happened to Nada Surf since the NYC trio’s introduction to the record business a decade ago. Its Ric Ocasek-produced debut album on Elektra, 1996’s high/low, spawned the scathing high school satire “Popular.” But just two years later, the same label refused to release a darker but equally…
Isn’t Tony Lovato the dreamiest? With that unruly mess of spiked blond hair and those baby blues of his, you know in your heart of hearts the tattooed cutie-pie singer of bubblegum punk foursome Mest is singing just for you, be it live in concert or during an appearance on…
As the six-string slinger for Georgia raunch ‘n’ roll band Nashville Pussy, Ruyter Suys has all the finger-chops and flash of her idol, AC/DC’s Angus Young, plus big boobs that never manage to stay contained onstage. But rather than go off on a whole “respect me for my music only”…
Compared to the pandemonium you’d encounter on, say, a Mariah Carey tour when the wrong color limo arrives, the relative bedlam of a well-oiled machine like the Taste of Chaos tour might seem sedate. Created by Warped Tour mastermind Kevin Lyman as a successful off-season counterpart to Warped, Taste of…
In the 2003 documentary Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop, Prime Minister Tony Blair gets more screen time for his contributions to the genre than Supergrass. Maybe that’s because Gaz Coombes, Mickey Quinn and Danny Goffey weren’t directly responsible for ’90s Britpop’s rise or fall as much…
Local impresario Joe DiPadova’s StraightNoChaser night at The Loft in Tempe has blown up to the point where he’s expanding the sophisticated, jazzy lounge night to Los Angeles this spring. Meanwhile, SNC continues to bring in top-tier talent to rock the decks alongside the eclectic roster of local residents. This…
These days it seems that for a band to be credible, it has to reference some predecessor or style, preferably prefixed with “post.” There’s “post-ska punk à la Reel Big Fish,” “post-hardcore minimalism screamo,” and pretty soon, there will simply be “post-post.” This is not the case with Glendale’s Dietrichs…
Horror novelist (and recovering goth) Poppy Z. Brite once said, “You can only maintain a gothic frame of mind for so long before you either go crazy or kill yourself.” To wit, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis and Christian Death singer Roz Williams both shuffled off the mortal coil, but…
When I listen to Closing In, the new riff-fucking-tastic retro-metalfest from Early Man — the duo of singer/guitarist/bassist Mike Conte and drummer Adam Bennati that, thanks to the power of overdubbing, sounds at least three members larger — several things rush into my mind all at once: Heavy Metal Parking…
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, there were two notable occurrences last year — one intentional, one less so. The official celebration came in the form of a repackaged Born, complete with a DVD and other extras. But perhaps the livelier honoring of that album’s…
The Fray is easily classified as a purveyor of sugar-coated angst; on closer inspection, the band often provides more than slickly packaged emo tunes, with lyrics that tell personal stories (rather than generic words of love and loss) and instrumentation too skilled to be studio-doctored. The Fray gives a solid…
It’s a safe bet no one’s ever had a recurring Willie Nelson nightmare but me. Years ago, a song I’d co-written was being recorded in Nashville, and the producer, a good friend of the Ponytailed One, said, “You know, I can hear Willie singing a harmony on this.” For four…
Sure, there are plenty o’ emo droids out there whining about hurtful girls, hopeless work environments and self-destructive habits, but Armor for Sleep is here to tell you there’s something else . . . the afterworld, a place of never-ending moodiness where you have the option of either going to…
Sing-Sing’s debut album, The Joy of Sing-Sing, hit stores in the fall of 2002 amidst numerous references to Emma Anderson’s former, much-beloved band Lush. The music didn’t help, either, since it seemed split between multi-instrumentalist Anderson’s shoegaze history and primary vocalist Lisa O’Neill’s own folk-pop background. And I is much…
With delicate tunes and referential album titles like The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian main man Stuart Murdoch is a cult artist who’s more or less birthed a scene of pop miniaturists, known as Twee. But whoever thinks it’s impossible to make pop music of the overeducated,…
RJD2’s two-track production cameo on Aceyalone’s 2003 album Love & Hate stood among that disc’s high points. Fans have plenty of reason to be geeked for a full-length collab. But while Magnificent City’s peaks are as good as expected — the Carter-admin gloss-funk of “Fire,” and the gritty Hammond B-3…
Can you say “mainstream”? Seasoned Phoenix-based rock outfit Fivespeed has officially grown up with Morning Over Midnight, an album packed with alternacore radio hits destined to top sales charts and incite rabid fist-pounding and panty-wetting on a national level. Fivespeed has in spades what mediocre nausea-inducing radio bands like Nickelback…
DJ Drez cemented his impact on the underground DJ scene in 2004, when he dropped his groundbreaking album The Capture of Sound, a whipped-smooth blend of reggae and jazz with hip-hop. Ordinarily we’re a little suspicious of white dudes with dreads, but Drez’s are long enough — and his message…
Doubling up on guitarists is commonplace in the metal realm, but Ed Gein is anything but ordinary. Maybe that’s why instead of having a guitar duo, the Syracuse, New York, grind-metal band opted for a trio of vocalists. Okay, so there are only three people in the band, but these…
For aging punks still enamored of nihilism but tired of playing all those pneumatic downstrokes, the allure of country music isn’t hard to see. After all, three out of four of The Ramones are dead, but those guys in Alabama still rise each morning to kick the shit once again…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is the musical equivalent of stumbling side-by-side with Satan through a surreal horror movie on bad acid and rotten peyote. TKK’s influential 1990 album, Confessions of a Knife, opens with a track called “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” and the first thing the…
Man, I wish they’d had Roadtrip Nation in 1997, when I was fresh out of college and wondering what to do with myself. My roommate and I were scraping by from paycheck to paycheck with entry-level office jobs, and student loan payments on our overpriced educations hadn’t even kicked in…
