Music

This week, we decided it was high time to turn our attention to the local labia-lovin’ ladies, so we hit up e-lounge on Saturday, March 10, where it was packed with smokin’-hot mamas looking to drink, dance, and fondle each other in the corners. Not only were there plenty of…

Otep, the L.A.-based metal fusion quartet led by singer/poet/self-described “mental pugilist” Otep Shamaya, released one of the most dense, disturbing debut albums in the history of metal with 2002’s Sevas Tra, a fiery confessional wherein Otep screams about being raped by her father against a searing sonic backdrop of eerie…

The prospect of hearing 72 minutes of wildly cacophonous squeeze-bulb horns may be too much for even the most patient listener. And as is often the case with world music albums with a field-recording slant, the story tends to be more interesting than the actual recorded document. Indeed, the tale…

For the past several years, Alabama Thunderpussy has been on an unwitting journey to become the Van Halen of stoner doom metal. ATP started with no singer, picked up Johnny Throckmorton for its first four albums, replaced Throckmorton with Johnny Weils for one album, and replaced Weils with Kyle Thomas…

Singer-songwriter Cayce Lindner sports a thick gray beard, calls Northern California home, and plucks an acoustic guitar. This means most music writers are going to describe his new project, Flying Canyon, as a symptom of this whole freak-folk, indie-hippie fad. And while Glenn Donaldson’s production — transforming doom-metal grooves into…

Before Shane MacGowan and his rotting teeth had the ruffian idea of merging punk and traditional Irish music, all Celtic headbangers had were The Irish Rovers (who were Canadian, for Chrissakes), the Clancy Brothers (who weren’t all brothers) and the Chieftains (whose sound relied heavily on a piccolo, the single…

Three years ago, when CocoRosie burst onto the scene with its lo-fi recordings of almost-lullabies sung over a beat box and toy animal noises, psych-folk fans of the Devendra Banhart variety took note. Now out of Brooklyn comes Bunny Rabbit, the trip-hop answer to CocoRosie’s Cassady sisters. The comparison between…

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…