Four years after her last album, PJ Harvey has abandoned the elegant, Mercury Prize-winning slickness that made Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea such an anomaly in her edgy and provocative oeuvre, and frightened longtime fans. Her transformation from angry young girl to elder stateswoman must have scared…
Top 10 sellers at Hoodlums (ASU Memorial Union Building in Tempe) for June 20 through 26: 1. Wilco, A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch) 2. Beastie Boys, To the 5 Boroughs (Capitol) 3. Ozomatli, Street Signs (Concord Jazz) 4. Jadakiss, Kiss of Death (Ruff Ryders) 5. Various artists, 2004 Warped Tour…
THE NIGHT: Fridays at E-Lounge THE DJ: Domenica THE SCENE: A diverse coterie of same-sex couples (male and female, and the occasional straight couple) busts shameless moves on the dance floor. Narcissists watch themselves in the giant mirror that covers one wall, while exhibitionists gyrate on the platform. By midnight,…
Thursday 1 Acme Roadhouse: DJ J. Alan (house) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Suzy (Top 40, hip-hop) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Piranha Room/Area 51 with DJs Jeremy & Ricky (industrial/goth, electroclash) Axis/Radius: Summer Nights with DJ MCB & Josh Royal (all genres) AZ 88: DJ Seduce (acid jazz lounge) Club Bash: Atomic…
Last month at the band’s final show in the New York City area, Phish invited special guest Jay-Z onstage for a couple of numbers, drawing a line between two retiring heavyweights of two very different scenes: jam-rock and hip-hop. Like Jay and his Black Album, Phish has proclaimed that the…
The Bled is the best goddamn rock band in Arizona. On the band’s 2001 EP His First Crush, the album cover bears the line, “Can you still feel the butcher knives?” It’s a clever play on Jimmy Eat World’s chorus to “For Me This Is Heaven,” off the Clarity LP…
Mike Castaneda is mesmerized. An eerie, bluish glow lights up his face as he kneels onstage in front of a computer screen, clicking the mouse and bobbing his head to a frantic barrage of digital beats that blast like machine-gun fire from the amps at Modified Arts in downtown Phoenix…
Beer, barbecue and a gang of good friends are all you need to make the most of Independence Day. But while you might find all of that in your own backyard, there’s one thing that your boom box can’t compete with: live bands. Join the punk-rock picnic at Ziggy’s, where…
This weekend, support some of underground hip-hop’s finest when locals Dumperfoo and Diggs team up with Scion Summer Sessions to present an unusual, cutting-edge showcase of artists from the independent Mush Records label. Performances by Circus (formerly of the legendary Shapeshifters), Andre Afram Asmar, Radioinactive, Anti MC, Curse ov Dialect…
Part of Devendra Banhart’s appeal is the sheer magnitude of his iconoclasm. Nobody sounds quite like him. With his wobbly, warbling falsetto, colorful but unusual lyricism, and penchant for musical and vocal outbursts that run counter to the slow-bubbling acoustic folk informing his arrangements, he’s like the crazy uncle who,…
If there weren’t asshole junkies and layabouts, Danny Marianino and company would have precious little to go on a tirade about. Lucky for us, there seems to be no end to the supply of good-for-nothings hanging around the social hall. This third effort goes further out than the band’s last…
Uh-oh . . . TVT’s collection of Southern thug rappers is pretty much — to borrow a phrase from Lindsay Lohan — completely retarded. The Dirty South’s incarnation of gangster rap is no torch-bearer to the West Coast’s industry-shaking forebears like ‘Pac and Eazy. Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boyz,…
Go through the looking glass this weekend at Wonder, an Alice in Wonderland-themed rave at a yet-to-be-announced location on Saturday night. Wonder ought to be one of the biggest parties around here this summer — local DJ Kore, of azhardcorejunkies.com, says, “If this doesn’t bring everybody out, then there’s nothing…
Last year the Georgia-based rapper Bubba Sparxxx made an underappreciated record called Deliverance that presented a bracing vision of hip-hop told from the perspective of a small-town country bumpkin. This year the Nashville duo Big & Rich is flipping that coin, playing country music from the POV of slick Music…
Though it wasn’t as startling a musical about-face as, say, Pat Boone’s embrace of heavy metal, Josh Rouse took a pretty big leap from semi-depressive alt-country strummer to sunny ’70s blue-eyed soul man on last year’s 1972, the Nebraska native’s fifth album. Whatever the reason (was he tiring of the…
Top 10 sellers at Stinkweeds Records (1250 East Apache Boulevard in Tempe) for June 13 through 19: 1. Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse (Geffen) 2. PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her (Island) 3. Beastie Boys, To the 5 Boroughs (Capitol) 4. Reubens Accomplice, The Bull, the Balloon, and the Family (Western Tread)…
Why let such a trifling thing as the death of your most important member (or members) stand in the way of gettin’ the band back together, maaaaaan? I mean, who needs that bloated ol’ Jim Morrison and his stank-ass leather pants when Ian Astbury can grow a mussy shag, throw…
If you like a little evil with your needles, look no further than this Saturday’s Sadisco 54 party at Jugheads. Sadisco (www.sadistic-disco.com) is a monthly industrial/EBM/noise event where resident DJs Squalor, ///she///, 1975, and Aversion drop ear-eating bombs of wax — this month’s event bumps up the atmosphere with ’70s…
Thursday 24 Acme Roadhouse: DJ J. Alan (house) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Suzy (Top 40, hip-hop) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Piranha Room/Area 51 with DJs AKA & Ricky (industrial/goth, electroclash) Axis/Radius: Summer Nights with DJ MCB & Josh Royal (all genres) AZ 88: DJ Seduce (acid jazz lounge) Club Bash: Atomic…
Tragedy is an unpredictable catalyst, as Mike “Sir Pie” Gomez knows all too well. On May 10, 2003, Chris “CPT” Pangrazi, Pie’s rhyming partner and fellow MC in long-running hip-hop/rock collective Cousins of the Wize, was killed by a drunken driver. Pie and CPT were the backbones of Cousins, the…
Like a trip to the dentist, most bands put off making an album for as long as they can. It’s a put-up or shut-up moment that forces a band to stare at its prospects for success in the cold, harsh light of day — and few are ready for the…
Lines in My Face might seem an odd album title for a band whose members’ mean age isn’t old enough to drink at a bar, but Chronic Future has already been around the block a few times at this point. On this, the band’s third full-length release, Chronic Future has…
