If the recent death of Storm Thorgerson was any indication, music is often married to its album art. All the more reason to take something incredibly iconic in the age of Pirate Bay and iPods and turn it on its head, like the graphic reinventions of Christophe Gowans. The former…
David Dimmick isn’t much of a braggart — at least as far as we can tell — but he’s got every effin’ right to be. Since becoming a DJ in 1996, the dude’s C.V. includes sharing stages with some pretty stellar icons from hip-hop history, like the Wu-Tang Clan, Pharohe…
For decades, punk and metal have been an outlet — a means for fans and musicians to escape reality. For Suicidal Tendencies, that’s changing. With the release of 13, the band’s first album since 2000, singer Mike Muir is looking for listeners to embrace his realities. It has been 30…
Cultural revolutions are so passé these days, right? I mean, all that stuff about radical movements, political upheavals, and melting pots belong to generations past, not our era of interconnectivity and augmented reality. By extension, cross-cultural musical mash-ups are, also, a thing of the past. Aren’t they? Arizona rockers Fayuca…
“The longer that we are a band, I think, the longer that we will be playing music together,” says Jimmy Eat World frontman Jim Adkins. “Because we appreciate the goals that we reach even more the longer it goes on.” Now into their 20th year, the Mesa rockers are expressing…
Music-discovery apps like Spotify and Pandora are free, but they have social costs. Among them: Every six months or so, we get an open letter from an artist who is being cut comically tiny checks for thousands of plays on one service or another. This week, it’s musician and label-owner…
Until very recently, it was not necessary to point out that the Beach Boys who were on tour were not necessarily all of the surviving Beach Boys. Alas, we’re spoiled: Last year’s totally unexpected new album and tour brought the warring Beach Boys factions together for some extremely poignant (and…
If you and I visit the same Weezer forums, you’ve probably had Rivers Cuomo’s J-Pop album — okay, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Murphy of Allister’s J-Pop album — for a while now. If you don’t visit the same Weezer forums I do, now’s your chance: It was released Monday on…
Welcome to Ask Willie D, where the Geto Boys MC answers reader questions about matters, in his own words, “funny, serious or unpredictable.” Something on your mind? Ask Willie D! Photo courtesy of Peter BesteREPULSED BY A CO-WORKER’S BAD BREATH Dear Willie D: I am a female working at the…
This week, let’s shine the spotlight on a brother-and-sister team from the Valley who are doing something pretty dope — especially considering they’re 8 and 12 years old. I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Cody and Chloe, who are quite possibly the Valley’s youngest-ever DJ tag…
Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience tour will be coming to Phoenix on December 2. Tickets will be available May 17, which gives you 11 days to figure out how you’re going to get tickets, and then six months or so to figure out how you’re going to camp in front of…
So, my girlfriend and I just broke up. Coincidentally, or maybe because April is just a shitty month, the inverse happened to Camille Standen, who wrote a piece for Noisey about how her shattered relationship ruined all the songs she used to love. I can relate, but I wouldn’t say…
Of all the bands that managed to go diamond (that’s 10 million albums sold) back in the mid-’90s, when conditions were right for it, Matchbox Twenty looked the most like one-superhit wonders. It wasn’t their fault; it just seemed like there were 10 million themselves-or-someones-like-them doing similar (if less effective)…
Legendary film composer John Williams is scheduled to appear at a benefit performance by the Phoenix Symphony on September 28. It’s not like he needs to tour to help raise money for his kids’ college fund, and he’s probably busy with the Jurassic Park IV and new Star Wars soundtracks…
I don’t want to bury the lede, here: There’s a video, in this post, of Go Daddy founder and local philanthropist Bob Parsons making a smoke-filled introduction to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” next to a bunch of scantily clad dancing girls, getting a big round of applause for saying, “Nuke the Chinese…
Sporting a scraggly beard, greasy hair covering his eyes, Vancouver’s Stephen McBean could almost be the last living member of a tribe of garage-rocking, psychedelic-stomping, hippie-prophet nomads who once wandered the woods. As the frontman of four bands, each steeped in different angles of the future and present, but especially…
The first thing most people heard from Rehab probably was its breakout single, “Bartender Song (Sittin’ at a Bar).” The grit in singer Danny Boone’s tattered voice had listeners singing along by the second verse. “It’s been a breadwinner for a lot of years,” says Boone. “It’s crazy, ’cause you…
As guitar maestro and frontman for Built to Spill, Doug Martsch has developed an instantly recognizable sound — soaring, layered guitars, pounding rhythm section, quirky lyrics — that often builds into a psychedelic frenzy. At least, that much characterized the band’s earlier output. For the band’s last two albums, You…
The Monkees are coming through Mesa — it’s called “A Midsummer’s Night with The Monkees” — which should not surprise anybody who’s ever heard an Arizona stereotype. The show’s on August 9, at the Mesa Arts Center, and it will (for obvious reasons) not feature the Davy Jones, the group’s…
Twitter #Music — the music-discovery service from the people who brought you #SomaliDirectionersLoveZayn-style declarations of collectivist fandom love — rolled out this week, and people are . . . not especially happy with it. A blunt summary of the problems with it was passed around among tech-liberal-arts-blog types over the…
On Saturday, I had the pleasure of returning to one of my favorite events of the year: the Mesa Super Show! Just when you think the lowriding lifestyle might be fading away, I am here to remind you that it is alive and well. The culture, the cars, the food,…
So what didja wind up doing last weekend? Get drunk and act the fool at a club, perhaps? Or did it involve sacking out in front of the latest episode of Game of Thrones or Mad Men? We’re willing to bet it was nowhere near as pimp as how Valley…
