All but the dullest punks get restless with age, but while Joe Strummer branched out in high-minded directions like world-folk, cruder and ruder minds chase a different kind of eclecticism. On The Dwarves Must Die, for example, Blag Dahlia trades whatever class he’s got left for an orgy of ill-bred…
The members of Before Braille decided they couldn’t make their fans wait until 2005 to hear new tunes, so for this six-song teaser EP, they recorded four new tracks (three of which are acoustic), and then tacked on a couple tracks from Tired of Not Being Away From Here, the…
Yellowcard belongs to the very exclusive club of emo-leaning pop-punk bands named after soccer violations that prominently feature a violinist who does onstage back flips. Gymnastics aside, though, the presence of Sean Mackin (the Itzhak Perlman of the Warped Tour set) is hardly a gimmick; his adroit bow-handling adds buckets…
There’s nothing better than having your front man fuck up in public, especially when your band is about to release a new album. Jason Stollsteimer let Jack White go smack-my-bitch-up on his face, and suddenly the Von Bondies became positively anticipated. Likewise, Jeff Tweedy checked into rehab for painkiller addiction,…
Modern-day indie rock owes a huge debt to Pavement, and Crooked Rain is arguably the pinnacle of the band’s career: all endearing sloppiness; disses on the Smashing Pumpkins; cool, jammy guitars; wit for miles; and anthemic catchiness (pretentious diehards, get over yourself: “Cut Your Hair” is the best indie rock…
UNKLE is Mo’ Wax tastemaker James Lavelle’s all-star project. He and songwriter Richard File gather a noteworthy group of musicians for Never, Never, Land, and although the grocery list of guests is overwhelming, the duo elicits interesting performances from each participant. Where Psyence Fiction, Lavelle’s inaugural UNKLE collaboration with DJ…
Forget “back porch music.” Mofro is more like whiskey-drenched “pontoon deck music,” boogieing down murky swamp waters. Main Mofro-man JJ Grey grew up in Florida, which helps explain the backwoods beats and woozy harmonica that swagger through many of the songs like a drunken uncle at a dysfunctional family reunion…
Kathleen Hanna helped pioneer the “riot grrrl” movement during the early ’90s in the group Bikini Kill, which melded feminist politics with punk-rock fury. Since disbanding Bikini Kill in 1998 and founding Le Tigre, she’s sort of come full circle. Certainly, Le Tigre’s music is of a different ilk. While…
Dear Abby: I’m a 20-year-old singer from Canada. People used to say I was a phony because the Matrix wrote all of my songs, and because I wore wife-beaters and thrift-store ties and acted all punk rock even though I originally wanted to be a country singer just like Shania…
Melissa Ferrick’s been making music for more than a decade since her Atlantic Records debut, Massive Blur, without making any lasting inroads to the mainstream, despite possessing strong, passionate vocals and a pop sensibility that’s absorbed the lessons of Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow and Thea Gilmore. The music on The…
Ordinarily, fashion shows are a little bourgeois for our taste, but we’ll make an exception for LabelHorde’s second annual Fashion Ball this Friday, November 12, just so we can catch a rare performance by DJ Radar with Raul Yañez of the Chicano Power Revival Orchestra. It’s been a couple years…
Top 10 selling CDs at East Side Records (217 West University Drive in Tempe) for October 30 through November 5: 1. Social Distortion, Sex, Love, and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Time Bomb) 2. Against Me, We’re Never Going Home DVD (Caroline) 3. Haiku D’etat, Coup De Theatre (Red Urban) 4. American…
A Perfect Circle’s eMOTIVe is the angriest chill-out album since Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. Inspired by current events, this side project from Tool front man Maynard James Keenan covers classic songs of uprising, greed and protest, and in a detached manner that’s mostly a welcome departure. Black Flag’s…
Unlike many of its ’80s Cali punk peers, Bad Religion aged like wine, not delivery pizza. While most bands of that era realized their potential within the first two albums and then began a slow, sometimes torturous slide into mediocrity, creative stagnation and beyond, Bad Religion started as a “good,…
It has been 22 years since Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released “Planet Rock,” a seminal hip-hop cut that borrowed its funky electro goodness from the German act Kraftwerk, and Bambaataa is still perfecting the beat, whether it’s in hip-hop, breakbeat, or drum and bass form. After releasing several…
Once Nick Cave finished his last major round of detox a few years back, he instituted a daily routine of getting up at 7 a.m. to write music obsessively. And it was starting to show. Cave’s discs since 1997 — often intense, achingly beautiful detours from the Bad Seeds’ sex…
Five years ago, on the most audacious move of a brilliant debut, Mos Def declared “The Rolling Stones could never, ever rock like Nina Simone,” and reclaimed rock ‘n’ roll for the ghetto. On The New Danger, he puts his music where his mouth was. Bristling with guitars and filled…
Von Bondies
Figures. The minute the Donnas put a cartoon of themselves on an album cover, they stop being one. Gone are the uninterrupted sneers that meant either a) the Donnas are gonna bend all you matchstick men to their whim (“Are You Gonna Move It for Me,” “40 Boys in Forty…
The opera I Pagliacci may have spawned the murderous harlequin, but ICP elevated it to, well, something similar to an art form, if you count merchandising and marketing. The homicidal Juggalos’ combination of predictably cartoonish rap-metal and lowbrow performance art owes obvious inspiration to KISS (or maybe Spinal Tap), but…
“My,” said Little Front Row Kid to the Michigan trio onstage getting ready to play, “what big amplifiers you have.” “The better to cause your frontal lobe to rupture and make blood, bone, and gray matter ooze painfully out of your ears with, my child,” said John Olson. “My, what…
Gaze upon the cover of the Last Vegas’ sensitively titled Get Hip debut, Lick ‘Em and Leave ‘Em, and you’re face to face with four hairy dudes who look as if they’ve spent the last six tour stops showering at a gas station. Actually, the music catches that Pennzoil shampoo…
Detroit’s Soledad Brothers — named after the three African-American inmates of California’s Soledad Prison who were convicted of killing a guard there in 1970 — layer the faux-revolutionary shtick a little thick on Voice of Treason, their third studio album. The reach for meaning is endemic to the roots-fixated garage-blues…
