Calmness intercepts Zac Pennington’s tortured timbre and nervous-breakdown-bordering subject matter when he croons tunes for the Parenthetical Girls, the indie pop ensemble that recently swiped Phoenician Edward Crichton of the recently disbanded and once hugely popular Reindeer Tag Team. The Seattle area-based group — which sounds like Belle and Sebastian…
The Besnard Lakes are having a moment. The band is squinting into the icy Montreal sunshine now that they’ve been called up to the sonic front of croissant-crunching Canadian megabands. Long after (well, “long” in the sense of indie rock trends, which fly by faster than steroid-infused Olympic runners) the…
Baltimore’s Page France crafts music for hypothetical, as-yet-unwritten John Hughes films. This is indie pop anxious with hope and possibility, led by singer/guitarist Michael Nau, who sometimes aches with a little vocal quake, like Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. Jangling, lilting guitars swoon and swoop like circling seagulls over perky arrangements,…
For Philadelphia’s Circa Survive, the live performance is often less about the band’s obscenely compelling music and more about singer Anthony Green’s intense charisma onstage. While the band’s driving rock songs — layered with urgent melodies and propulsive guitar riffs that bring an sense of actual motion to the numbers…
Graf artist-DJs are some of the hippest hyphenates we got goin’ on here in the PHX, with peeps like Wet Paint’s Jesika Jordan and FreshOut-DaBox’s T3PO tagging walls and tearing up turntables across the Valley. But back before these spray-painting spinsters grabbed their first can of flat black, the dope…
Thursday 15 Bikini Lounge: Scratchy Rekkid Night with DJ Shane Kennedy (various) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Cherry Lounge: DJs Tranzl8tr, & Earth (rock, ’80s, old school, hip-hop) Chilly Bombers: DJ Statik (rock, hip-hop, dance) Coyote Hill: DJ G-zus (Top 40, hip-hop) Dos Gringos – Scottsdale: DJs Benjamin Cutswell & Kid…
Wormwood Brothers new album, Spider Lake Due to space limitations in the print version of New Times, there are a lot of local records that we can’t fit into the music section. That’s why here, on Ear Infection, I try to turn you on or steer you away from certain…
Marshall “Fucking” Beck and his army of internet-tards still have their panties in a bunch about my recent posts involving him and Madhouse Records, found here and here. Beck wrote, “Although I do find humor in the fact that you call me a pussy from behind the computer screen and…
Today’s kickoff day for the music industry’s biggest orgy of shmoozing, boozing, and trying to see far too many bands in a brief period of time – the 2007 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. I won’t be there – my illustrious music editor Niki D’Andrea is on her…
My apologies for my brief absence from the interweb blogging thing recently; a trip to San Diego without the appropriate power source for a laptop left me unable to play with all the angry people that Marshall Beck, who I blogged about here a while back, recruited to cry and…
After last year’s Rock N The Seas cruise from Los Angeles to Ensenada, which featured a shitload of booze consumption and music from a grip of Arizona bands like the Gin Blossoms, Dead Hot Workshop, Sand Rubies, Rich Hopkins, and Ghetto Cowgirl, I was kicking myself for not going this…
The Black Parade had all the makings of a total drag. A concept album devoted to death? Yeah, those are always fun. But New Jersey rock darlings My Chemical Romance stared death in the face and decided to send out for Liza Minnelli, who sounds right at home on an…
It’s the bee’s knees, daddy-o. I love to swing, but I can’t dance. I can’t swing dance, either. But here I am at a VFW hall on Thomas Road in central Phoenix on a Sunday evening, taking a swing dance lesson and getting ready for some move called “the sugar…
Meg & Dia, a four-piece power-pop outfit out of Utah, is bulwarked by a strong confessional singer-songwriter sensibility and fronted by sisters Meg (21, guitars and lyrics) and Dia (19, vocals) Frampton. In shorthand: They’re everything Ashlee Simpson likes to imagine she is. More interesting, though, is the relationship between…
This Detroit band found some success in the swing revival of the late ’90s, even though they were really an eight-piece jump blues band. They had the horn blasts and boogie beats to steal Cherry Poppin’ Daddies fans, and the good sense to make their second (and last) album, Torch…
The Search may be the perfect title for the latest album from Uncle Tupelo offshoot Son Volt, conveying the yearning, seeking quality that underlies the album’s indie rock-flavored mix and lyrical bent. In fact, it is long past time to bury the “alt-country” banner that Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and…
Where its higher-profile tour mates and pop-punk counterparts Simple Plan and Good Charlotte have coupled their massive record sales with face time in the spotlight, Ohio’s Relient K has taken a subtler route to the top, remaining virtually faceless to the rock (and punk, for that matter) mainstream while still…
At its best, Ace of Hearts, the U.S. debut from Danish quintet Green Pitch, lilts, floats, and haunts like the best work of Mazzy Star; at its worst, Ace is ponderous, awkward, and inscrutable. Dream pop is undoubtedly the band’s genre of choice, but folk influences abound. The opener, “In…
Good news for metalheads who are still living in 1983 — Age of Evil (whose members are half your age) is making new music that sounds like outtakes from Iron Maiden’s Killers album and Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather. The Scottsdale quartet (composed of two sets of teenage brothers)…
Call him a poor man’s Dylan, or a wise man’s Clapton. Richard Thompson is perhaps the most underrated performer of his generation. For 40 years, first with Fairport Convention, then with ex-wife Linda Peters, and finally solo, Thompson has continued to produce terrific, thoughtful albums while others have fallen off…
Eric Clapton may have aged a bit too gracefully for many fans of his incendiary work with Cream, abandoning that youthful urgency in favor of a gentlemanly school of easy listening. And Back Home, his latest effort, clearly plays to Clapton’s older, wiser, less exciting side. As the title suggests,…
Priestbird — not to be confused with Priestess, Judas Priest, or “Freebird” — can be confused with Tarantula A.D. That’s the name under which the New York trio crafted its unique, enticing blend of classical music, freak-folk, punk, psychedelia, prog-rock, and metal before changing their moniker in recent months. Why…
