How do you follow a million- selling debut effort that music mag NME named “Album of the Year”? If you’re Bloc Party, maybe you throw in some moodier moments and send out for strings on a couple of tracks without abandoning your roots in twitchy, postpunk angularity. And, well, it…
Not only does Shane Ocell play all the instruments in Via Vengeance, but he plays them all at once. With his Gibson guitar on his lap, he sits behind his drum set and feeds fat, gritty guitar sounds through effects pedals and Sunn amps with one hand while drumming with…
Since striking out on their own as The Autumn Defense, Wilco bassist John Stirratt and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone have seen their soft-rock side compared in Rolling Stone to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the slower side of Big Star. But the lead-off track to The Autumn Defense’s new self-titled effort…
Between Pelican and Sigur Rós lie Red Sparowes, whose epic instrumentals have the ability to pummel you, but instead lull you into submission with rich sonic washes as thick as oil and as deep as the ocean. Formed four years ago, the band features Isis guitarist Bryant Clifford Meyer, and…
Georgia-born and French-raised Madeleine Peyroux has a voice that could calm crying babies or a venue packed with jazz-hungry fans, but that doesn’t mean she puts on a great show. This is not to suggest that her voice — which has been compared to Billie Holiday’s and interprets and bends…
Don’t get us wrong: We’re definitely down with all the old-school jams getting dropped during the off-the-chain hip-hop history lesson known as Take Me Back Tuesdays at Stray Cat Bar & Grill, 2433 East University Drive in Tempe. But let’s face it — the weekly DJ night is something of…
Do you enjoy getting down to brass tacks? Or are you more of a steel fan? Tacks not big enough for you? Then how about a massive, industrial-strength, steel-bore drill manned by a terse, aggravated drill sergeant? Then you’re in luck, because Helmet is coming to town. Way back yonder,…
1. The Shins, Wincing the Night Away (Sub Pop) 2. Authority Zero, 12:34 (Big Panda Records) 3. Nelly Furtado, Loose (Geffen Records) 4. Tech N9ne, Everready (Strange Music) 5. Alkaline Trio, Remains (Vagrant Records) 6. Primus, They Can’t All Be Zingers (Interscope Records) 7. Akon, Konvicted (Umvd Labels) 8. Skinny…
In simple terms, Terminal 11 is known as a laptop DJ. However, placing such a generic label on a driving creative force in experimental electronic music implies that he uses computer equipment as a crutch. That’s definitely not the case, because what the local musician transfers from his madman-scientist brain…
Xpoz Magazine, mediocrity personified As I told you about last week, I spent this last weekend at the G-Unit/Money Management One Stop Shop producer’s conference, where I ran into a grip of players in various factions of the local hip-hop industry, including local rag Xpoz Magazine. Xpoz, which had a…
Seems a few people took offense at my calling local rapper Cballa a “dumb fuck” for naming his album Blacc Hitla. Marcus Staples, who put out the album on his Clicc Made Entertainment imprint, asked “Do you consider Julius Caesar a tyrant?” (Well, actually he misspelled “Caesar” but I corrected…
wish i had a joint, Fred, but this’ll have to do I’m not proud of it, but I honestly love smoking cigarettes. This post isn’t music related, but the video below is invaluable for historians and future archaeologists alike. If only it were for marijuana instead…..
Due to some alien interference with the blog-ware that I use to compose these missives, I didn’t get to holla at y’all yesterday; then again, I was enjoying perusing what the upcoming weekend has in store for me. This weekend marks a high point for Phoenix — Money Management XL…
Thursday 8 AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Burn: DJ Jeremy (Top 40, hip-hop) Cat Eye: Punk Rock Thursdays (rock, punk) Club Vibe: DJ D’Anthony (hip-hop) The Crown Room: DJ Gable (rock, house, hip-hop) Dos Gringos – Tempe: DJ Steel (rock, ’80s, old school, hip-hop)…
The first time I heard of Attack of the Giant Squid, I was drinking whiskey with my friend Rob Birmingham, a.k.a. Fun Bobby, who used to bartend and book shows at Hollywood Alley in Mesa until he left to raise his son in rural Oregon. Rob told me that the…
Club Candids has been showing a lot of love to the straight folks lately, so we decided to hit up Burn Nightclub to get a good dose of gay on Saturday, February 3. The light-rail construction didn’t stop the beautiful boys who gladly pranced through dirt piles to get their…
Few events on the U.S. holiday calendar muster the same degree of cynicism in people as Valentine’s Day, the other notable dates being Christmas and Election Day. Somehow, this tradition that spans more than six centuries is now just as bad as a religious holiday that became a secular merchandising…
Iron Maiden made it into the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a sound level of 124 dB (decibels) at the 1988 “Monsters of Rock” Festival. Since the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) claims that 7.5 minutes of exposure to 120 dB can cause permanent hearing damage,…
David Lowery lost his share of fans when he followed his days at the helm of one of independent rock’s most willfully eccentric acts — Camper Van Beethoven — with Cracker, a far more conventional roots-rock band in slacker-rock clothing. Of course, as often happens when your second act is…
If there is a downside to the huge commercial comeback that American Idiot spawned for Green Day, it’s the way that comeback only reinforced the notion that the band had somehow lost its bearings after Dookie sold, like, 40 billion copies — when, in fact, the records from the oft-neglected…
If you’ve ever found yourself up in the clouds (for whatever reason), you’d probably run into Portland psychedelic-rock trio Menomena while surfing the heavens. The music marvels have transcended the mere experimental rockers of the band’s first album, I Am the Fun Blame Monster (2003), and climbed to the next…
Universal revived the Republic logo — last seen in the ’30s and ’40s for a series of B-movie Westerns — for Mellencamp’s new album, and it ain’t a bad match. Like the cowboy heroes of yesteryear, Mellencamp still believes that hardworking, honest people can eventually triumph over the forces of…
