On a quiet spring night several weeks ago, a radical metamorphosis took place within the normally placid confines of Tempe’s Arizona Roadhouse Brewery. The usual clientele — middle-class jeans-and-tee-shirt types — was replaced by an invasion of leather-and-metal-spike-clad, greasy haired hellions and young ladies wearing more makeup than clothing. As…
No one’s ever accused Sascha Konietzko, the man behind the now-dead KMFDM and the very much alive MDFMK, of suffering from incurable optimism. Since the ’80s, he’s made hard-as-nails electro/industrial music whose lyrics focus on topics such as inhumanity and anguish, not true love and thongs. But last year’s massacre…
My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/that’ll stab you in the head/whether you’re a fag or lez/ . . . hate fags? The answer’s yes — Eminem, “Criminal.”Marshall Mathers LP, the sophomore effort from Michigan-by-way-of-Missouri native Eminem, ranks among the year’s best from a musical standpoint. With…
Back when Ricky Nelson sang about being a lonesome “Teenage Idol” playing one-night stands, road songs were still a novelty, something chain-smoking Brill Building songwriters cooked up in between gulps of coffee. Once rock stars began writing from their own personal experiences, hundreds of songs came down the pike lamenting…
Twenty-year-old aspiring guitar maker Allen Pegues recalls his high school days. “I was all about buyin’ me some beer,” he says. “That’s what I did.” Pegues lives near downtown in a neighborhood peopled by crack dealers, whores and kids wielding oversize bikes with bare-rimmed wheels who noisily run over empty…
Perhaps it was optimistic to think this wasn’t much of an issue anymore, but the reviews of nyc ghosts and flowers seem to fall under two general, and stupidly familiar, headers: (1) Sonic Youth is, and has been ever since ’round about 1990, coasting on soft/inferior material, of which this…
Stefan Betke of Berlin started the ~scape label after his own work (recorded under the name Pole) sold beyond anyone’s expectations, turning him into one of the few experimental electronic music producers recognized by anyone outside the insular “Intelligent Dance Music” community. After wowing critics and fellow studio maestros alike…
When in 1980 I first jammed my eight-track cartridge of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! into the maw of my father’s massive console stereo, and he heard the boinky-squeaky sounds emerging from his speakers, he looked at me like I’d lost my natural 9-year-old mind. I…
You don’t see the “Simultaneous Two New Album Release” every day, and with good reason. 1991: Nobody can convince Axl Rose to pare down a pair of new Guns N’ Roses albums, each CD with over 75 minutes of music — the length of two White Album sets minus all…
And then Lou Reed says, “I love you.” It’s his way of answering a question that could, in truth, be interpreted as a vague compliment — something about how his albums have never conformed to fad or fashion, something about how Lou Reed albums always sound like Lou Reed albums…
Traditional Irish folk music has been combined with plenty of different musical styles, so you’d think mixing it with punk and hard-core would be some kind of joke, right? Wrong. The Dropkick Murphys, Boston’s premier Irish punk working-class band, uses bagpipes, grinding guitars and bone-shaking rhythms. Three-chord punk blasts surround…
The Tavern, as it’s called, is the only rock ‘n’ roll bar in town. It’s located down the highway, past the car dealership and the strip mall, and sits next to the one shop in town that rents out porn videos. Seasoned Oldsmobiles and Fords clutter the parking lot, and…
Tragedy has been a constant companion of the Promise Ring through the past couple of years. In early 1998, while on tour, the band’s van flipped over on an icy road and left all its members hospitalized; guitarist Jason Gnewikow spent three weeks in a hospital room with a broken…
Back in the early ’90s, music constructed out of the breakbeat branched into two distinct factions: hip-hop and drum and bass. Separated by the Atlantic from their stateside counterparts and responding to their own socioeconomic conditions, British drum and bass producers bred a different kind of animal altogether — twice…
By the fall of 1959, Marty Robbins had amassed a recorded catalogue of five albums and 32 singles. Embedded in this waxwork were songs with whistling, songs with yodeling, songs with rockabilly guitar licks and songs with Little Richard-type squeals. One song even had sped-up chipmunk vocals. There was a…
Invariably, conversations at the New Times offices drift to topics such as, does Britney Spears need a spanking, and if so, would she accept one? (Answers: Yes, and probably.) Or, those guys from ‘N SYNC and the Backstreet Boys must be gettin’ it on more than a lounge singer in…
Look at the latest industry sales meters — Billboard, SoundScan — and at the top you’ll see the usual suspects: Britney, Eminem, matchbox 20. But among those familiar names you’ll also find a relatively unknown commodity, a new aggro-metal band called A Perfect Circle. While the music-biz hype machine usually…
Wig-sporting, cosmetic-caked Chick Cashman saunters onto the Club Congress stage with the Countrypolitans looking like a cross between some Warhol Superstar and Ziggy-era Mick Ronson and a teenage transvestite hooker swathed in mom’s scarves, cologne and the aura of the back room of Max’s Kansas City. Cashman’s porcelain skin, snake…
Folks who don’t get the aesthetic parallels between, say, costumed (if admittedly rocking) clowns like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Slipknot, or the cultural similarities between of-their-era mainstream metalheads like Grand Funk Railroad and Korn, probably haven’t seen any of those excruciating where-are-they-now? features that VH1 banks with regular…
Lately, Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock has been fond of telling rock critics about his run-ins with Satan — an explanation for the grim content of the trio’s latest record and major-label debut. Such fire-and-brimstone rationalizations might sound strange coming from a young man who, in the past, has…
About time a bio was written on Sonny Rollins, the last living jazz patriarch, who also met repeatedly with the author as the book was taking shape. Not that the saxman was pleased with the project, to which he admits he “reluctantly agreed, feeling that it would probably be written…
In 1971, John Lennon issued a No. 1 album and Top 5 single both titled “Imagine.” The following year, Lennon and Yoko Ono self-directed a 55-minute film also titled Imagine, which included clips for all 10 of the album’s songs plus two from Ono’s Fly record, making it the precursor…
