“It’s like almond,” Anand Wilder says, “like the nut.” No, this isn’t a setup for a nut joke. Wilder, the guitarist/vocalist of the abruptly acclaimed, suddenly sanctioned experimental rock group Yeasayer is, at my request, clarifying the pronunciation of his first name. “It was definitely a problem in elementary school…
Ah, the new wave of British heavy metal. Affectionately known to metalheads the world over as the NWOBHM, the genre’s sound was characterized by galloping rhythms, operatic vocals, and guitars that straddled the line between wailing, classical-tinged solos and not-quite- thrash crunch. Epitomized, of course, by its most world-famous icon,…
For those of you going through “year-in-review” withdrawal, here’s a day-by-day account of what the year’s given us so far. January 1: Dick Clark’s “New Years Rockin’ Eve” hardly rocks, with Fergie, The Jonas Brothers, Carrie Underwood, and Miley Cyrus doing the honors. But for the third straight year after…
The first two lines on Joe Jackson’s new album are: “Hey, can you hear me now, as I fade away and lose my ground? Maybe you’d like to know what I’d have to say, if I was still around.” Are the words merely song lyrics or is ol’ Joe wryly…
On his previous disc, La Kahena, San Francisco-based, Algerian-born DJ Cheb i Sabbah explored the sounds of his native North Africa, adding tracks and loops to the material he had recorded there upon his return to the U.S. This time around, the focus is the music of the Indian subcontinent,…
Kate Nash’s debut LP, Made of Bricks, was released last summer in the U.K., where she became an overnight sensation; both the CD and single, “Foundations,” charted at number one. The 20-year-old from a London suburb pals around with Lily Allen, with whom she’s frequently compared. Yet unlike Alright, Still…
Too many movie tie-in collections put profits before cohesion. Tunes by widely disparate performers, most of whom just happen to record for companies affiliated with the film studio, wind up being tossed together willy-nilly in the hope that one of them will stick, thereby inducing fans to purchase all the…
Keeping it real is always tricky. People who hate “new country” complain that it’s not “authentic country.” Though that may be true, it’s no guarantee that every Gram Parsons-influenced, alt-country shit-kicker will be any more genuine. Jesse Dayton and Brennen Leigh’s Holdin’ Our Own is neither “new country” nor “alt-country.”…
Southern-fried piano swamp funk doesn’t get better than Leon Russell. His greasy R&B cadges a hopping, Delta blues stomp, fueled by his gravelly croak and his percussive pounding at the piano. Russell left Tulsa for L.A. at 16. There, he learned guitar from rockabilly legend James Burton and soon became…
Remember way back (like, to the early ’90s), when suddenly, almost out of nowhere, you heard a ska song on the radio? You inevitably thought to yourself, “What the fuck? Ska hasn’t been popular in the U.S. for ages!” Shortly thereafter, you found yourself practicing “skankin'” in your apartment when…
Sons? Unquestionably. Bastards? Probably. Of Johnny Cash? Who can say? We are all the bastard sons of Johnny Cash if we so choose to be. If, in fact, we are talking about a band and that band’s themes, musical and otherwise, Mark Stuart and the other Bastards’ songs inhabit that…
The term “indie rock” is as vague as the term “rock” these days; thankfully, there are still people out there making music that can’t be defined, no matter how many adjectives or hyphens scribes throw into the description. Take Asthmatic Kitty Records artist Raymond Raposa (the sole member of Castanets),…
While it might be a little chilly outside this weekend, with nighttime temperatures dipping into the 40s, local beat-slinger extraordinaire DJ Spyder and a crew of torrid turntablists are gonna be heating things up on Saturday, January 26, at Inferno, a new monthly dance night at Chasers, 8005 East Roosevelt…
With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers headlining Super Bowl XLII’s halftime show, we couldn’t help but wonder what other acts deserve the chance to play to one of the year’s biggest crowds. Of course, then also we got to wondering about what rare duets the event could motivate, especially after such great team-ups as Aerosmith and Britney Spears and Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake (which, okay, ended poorly). Here’s what we came up with.
Valley folk-rock guitarist extraordinaire Mat Weddle has gotten plenty of worldwide fame in the past 18 months, since the video for his acoustic cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” debuted on YouTube in August of 2006, including more than 1.5 million views, kudos from iTunes, and loads of press coverage from the likes of Spin.
And the attention just keeps on coming, as last week, legendary shock jock Howard Stern featured the song on his Sirius Satellite Radio show. Shoehorned in between pointed discussions about ABC reality show Wife Swap and Joey Buttafuoco’s new sex tape during the January 10 edition of the show, the self-proclaimed “King of all Media” heaped plenty of praise upon the bearded Obadiah Parker frontman and the song.
“I’m gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies like these . . . somebody will listen to me . . .” — James Stewart, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington “Been broken down too fucking long . . .” —…
Environmental destruction, greed, suicide, and watching your elderly mother die may sound like strange topics to plumb for optimism, but that’s exactly what Oakland’s Rogue Wave manages to do on its latest album, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate. An exquisitely crafted slice of pop that harks back to the days when…
Sasha Frere-Jones, Jessica Hopper, and pitchfork-toting denizens of the blogosphere: You’ll be satisfied to know Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt experienced a road-to-Damascus type conversion. His iPod was shattered, and all pop sins — endorsing the catchiness of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” under-representing black artists in his numerous “artist playlist” exercises, and boldly…
THURSDAY 17 Axis/Radius: Crystal Thursdays Ladies Night (Top 40, rock, dance) Big Fish: Drunk Ass Thursday with DJ Kocky, & MC One (Top 40, hip-hop) The Blooze Bar: DJ El Dedo (rockabilly) Bobby C’s: Willy B. (old-school R&B) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Casey Jones: Da Gutter Thursdays with DJ Soulman…
December is gone and I think I’ve been drunk since Thanksgiving. For some reason, I decided to celebrate a Greek Christmas with my Jewish friends down in Tucson. What’s a Greek Christmas, you ask? It starts with a huge boneless leg of lamb with mint jelly and homemade spanakopita, and…
There’s been a lot of talk about hip-hop at the New Times office, so by midweek, we were geared up for Raising Arizona at The Bar, a.k.a. The Lucky Devil in Tempe. (Click here for more photos.) This weekly DJ night may not have the frantic buzz of Hollywood Alley’s…
OneRepublic’s Colorado connection is mighty tangential. Tulsa-born lead singer Ryan Tedder and guitarist Zach Filkins met while attending high school in Colorado Springs, and guitarist Drew Brown is from Boulder. But local fans had little to do with their rise to prominence. Indeed, the band’s been based in Los Angeles…
