Features

The “Making The Band 4” Tour, featuring Danity Kane and Day 26, has canceled its scheduled performance at Dodge Theatre on June 5. Refunds are available at point-of-purchase.

By Jonathan McNamara Cellos descended upon the Marquee Theater like a team of horses from the underworld. They came to bring brutal rock to the ears of all who would listen. You thought guitars made the heaviest rock? Think again. Apocalyptica, the Finnish cello rock band known for playing Metallica…

After 13 years together, the ladies of Phoenix blues group Sistah Blue have announced they will play their last show on Thursday, May 22, at the Rhythm Room.

A hard-working rock ‘n’ roll band from Detroit, after nearly 15 years of recording and gigging all over the world, gets its best-known song placed in an Oscar-nominated movie last year. Breakthrough time, right? “We played a show in Arkansas — our first time in Arkansas,” says Ben Blackwell, a…

By all appearances, Justus is livin’ large. The half-Greek kid from north Phoenix who once jumped onstage with The Roots and commandeered a mic as a freestylin’ fan is now rolling in a big, black 2007 Honda Ridgeline, decked out with a slick, full-body, custom art wrap, 22-inch custom rims,…

Like most of the output from Vancouver indie-rock band Destroyer, Trouble in Dreams is a beguiling album that’s hard to pin down. Full of surrealistic tales of lost love and missed opportunities, Dreams’ songs defy easy categorization. We tracked down the band’s creative engine, guitarist and vocalist Dan Bejar, for…

Minneapolis quartet Tapes ‘n Tapes was one of the first examples of both the “blog buzz” and “Pitchfork effect” phenomena — widespread online fawning made their 2005 debut, The Loon, an indie-rock success story. Now the band is back with the follow-up, Walk It Off. Over the phone from a…

I first saw Blackmarket at the 2007 SxSW festival. The band was performing on a bill with retro-metal monsters Danava, and they went on early, to a mostly-empty club.

What struck me about that performance was all the heart Blackmarket put into it — they sounded as professional as any arena band, and they had the rapt attention of every single person in the thin, earlybird crowd. Blending the melodic sensibilities of bands like The Beatles and Radiohead with the dark lyricism and artistry of artists like David Bowie, Blackmarket immediately struck me as the next Arizona band to make a mainstream splash.

If Pollstar is to be believed, the members of Green Day will be playing a show in Phoenix on Sunday, May 25, at the Brickhouse Theatre. Huge news, right? Well, the reason nobody heard about this huge news is because Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool will be performing as a band called Foxboro Hot Tubs (the show is NOT listed on the Brickhouse Web site at this time, however).

This is the “Arizona Rock Fight,” and, besides sounding like we’re gonna be in the heart of a ballistic granite storm, the event promises 24 of the Valley’s best bands will leave their all on stage over the course of four weeks. Why will they bother? Because the prizes are pretty damn sweet.

Phoenix is one of the most diverse cities on the West coast, and the eclectic, multi-cultured sounds on the Diverse-Fi Music label provide ample examples of the rich sonic stew we’ve got brewing in P-City. This week, we tip our hat to Diverse-Fi.

This might be our most exciting Future Shock yet, as several big-name shows and rare concert opportunities came down the wire. Rather than sit and gush about how awesome it is that Phoenix is one of only 17 cities on Tina Turner’s tour, or that Tom Waits is playing two nights here, let’s just get on with the roll call of radness.

Scrubs actor and Garden State director and star Zach Braff is making a music video for singer-songwriter Jay Clifford, and he wants footage of you and your friends to be included.

If there’s one thing the self-satisfied, liberal, tofu-munching, cappuccino-sipping, in vitro fertilization-utilizing coastal elite hate, it’s Fox News. The Rupert Murdoch-owned home to such neoconservative mouthpieces as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity is known for cheerleading the Iraq war and not finding John McCain insufficiently right-wing. It even has the…

With Mother’s Day fast approaching, we here at New Times have spent a lot of time mulling over what makes a great mom. In the end, we each wrote down a trait, tossed these little slips of wonderful into a hat, and then, with a stick of glue, assembled them…

Tristan Prettyman — the San Diego folk-pop singer-songwriter, surfer, and former Roxy model — is back with her sophomore album, Hello . . . x. Over the phone from New York, where she was getting ready to board a plane to Nashville to continue her U.S. tour, the genial Prettyman…

Unless you’re a well-schooled jazz or R&B fan, Marcus Miller is probably the best bass player you’ve never heard of. The Grammy Award-winning Miller has played bass for Miles Davis, David Sanborn, and Luther Vandross, and also played bass and bass clarinet in a band called Legends, with Eric Clapton. He’s got his own signature bass (the Fender Marcus Miller Jazz Bass, available in 4- and 5-string versions) and is also one of the most in-demand R&B producers in the world, having co-produced/arranged most of Vandross’ albums from 1981 onward, as well as records by Al Jarreau, and The Crusaders.

By Thomas Bond When Grant McLennan, co-founder of The Go-Betweens, died of a heart attack two years ago today at the age of 48, it brought the curtain down on one of Australia’s finest ever bands. Now, fellow Go-Betweens co-founder Robert Forster pays touching tribute to his late songwriting partner…

Almost seven years after the release of Mesa-based Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American album, it might be easy for some people to forget the magnitude of that record — especially since JEW’s post-Bleed American albums, Futures (2004) and this year’s Chase the Light, haven’t even come close to matching the commercial success of Bleed American. Some might even wonder if Jimmy Eat World, the Valley’s largest breakout band since the Gin Blossoms, will be resigned to the same sort of national collective remembrance that befell the Blossoms — if it’s not something from the ’90s like “Hey Jealousy,” “Found Out About You,” or “Follow You Down,” they don’t want to hear it. Do people in Virginia even know that the Gin Blossoms released an album (Major Lodge Victory) in 2006? It’s really good. It’s just not on the radio like all their stuff from 1992’s New Miserable Experience still is.

The Wiley family’s produced its share of local music talent. Sisters Marta and Cristiana were the cornerstone of estro-art rockers W.O.M.B., and now their brother, Sammy Wiley, has released his first CD as “The Wiley One.”

This week was a like a rock-revival for concert announcements — acts that haven’t toured in forever are loading up the buses and making their way into the Valley. But as you’ll see, some newer, underground acts will be breaking in the stages here as well.

Avril Lavigne, scheduled to perform at Cricket Wireless Pavilion on Friday, May 2, is suffering from laryngitis and her concert has been canceled.