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…
Melechesh’s geography — which involves being a thrash/black-metal band from Israel comprising Armenian, Assyrian, Dutch, and Ukrainian musicians who’ve relocated to Europe — makes for an interesting story, but it becomes doubly curious when you consider that the band’s material fixates on ancient Mesopotamia. These are no Sumerian dilettantes, either:…
The opening track wastes no time living up to everything this latest reinvention from the desk of Damon Albarn promised — Danger Mouse pushing the post-Lee Perry echo like The Clash in Sandinista! mode, with pulsing reggae bass from The Clash’s own Paul Simonon and Albarn at his soulful best…
While your iTunes playlist is doubtless clogged with songs by bands well-suited to their noms de plume, Philly/NYC quartet Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is that rare act whose name describes the desired effect its music will have on listeners. Frontman Alec Ounsworth’s uneven squawk recalls Talking Heads’ David Byrne…
Well, oy vey!, opa!, and oh my gosh!, here’s a world-music collective that plays an enchanting blend of Gypsy music (two of the five members of Fishtank Ensemble actually traveled across Europe in a caravan as Croque Mule) and other exotic styles, including klezmer, polka, punk, flamenco, classical, and rock…
Watching Young Love mastermind Dan Keyes wriggle his hips behind the microphone as he yelps, “If you get the chance/You must dance dance dance” on the R&B-tinged “Find a New Way,” one would never know that he used to be a member of an emo band. Keyes, formerly the moping…
“I write my life as it progresses, as it gets worse — whatever,” says Aaron Yates, who headlines Friday at the Marquee Theatre under his nom de plume, Tech N9ne (Blaze Ya Dead Homie opens the show). “I’m like a fan inside this cat called Tech N9ne who writes this…
The jokes about tentacles and ink could write themselves, so we won’t bother. What we will do, however, is note how gleefully the members of Austin’s Octopus Project plow through their glitched-out, post-rock instrumentals. Armed with an arsenal of toys, keyboards, drum machines, and samplers, spouses Josh and Yvonne Lambert,…
