Seven Nights of DJs and Dancing

Thursday 30Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Cat Eye: DJ Diesel (rock, punk) Club Central: DJ Luis (salsa, merengue) Coconut Club: DJ Coolstylz (Top 40, dance, rock, hip-hop) The Crown Room: DJ Gable (rock, house, hip-hop) Dos Gringos: DJs Benjamin Cutswell & Kid Vicious (rock, ’80s, old school hip-hop) Grilled Expedition: DJ…

Top 10 selling CDs at Zia Record Exchange, 105 West University Drive in Tempe

1. Jay-Z, Kingdom Come (Roc-a-Fella) 2. Brand New, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (Interscope Records) 3. Killswitch Engage, As Daylight Dies (Roadrunner Records) 4. Snoop Dogg, Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (Geffen Records) 5. Tenacious D, The Pick of Destiny (Sony) 6. The Game, Doctor’s Advocate (Geffen Records)…

Bro Beats

Jared and Michael Bell are the Lymbyc Systym Jared and Michael Bell, the brothers who make the pretty noises in Lymbyc Systym, are about to drop the band’s first album on the influential Mush Records label, home also to avant-beatmakers and MC’s like cLOUDDEAD, Aesop Rock, Jel, Odd Nosdam, and…

Cap’n Spazz

Scary Kids Stealing Names I usually find it pretty goddamn annnoying when bands take their names from other band’s song titles. This was the case when I first heard about Scary Kids Scaring Kids – especially since the band’s name is copped from one of my favorite bands, the Chicago-based…

Bzzzz-Worthy

Sweetbleeders Just received a missive and a new song from Robin Vining of the Sweetbleeders (and Colorstore) yesterday, asking if I’d let y’all know about the listening party for the band’s upcoming new album, Bzzzz. No problem; the Sweetbleeders make some of the prettiest little piano-laced pop songs aroud the…

PHX Hold Em

Pokafase It’s been a while since I last checked in with Pokafase, the ‘Nix’s long-suffering aspirant to establishing PHX hip-hop as a west coast powerhouse. His latest album The Martyr is due out any time, so I grabbed a couple of his tracks (one off of Mastermind, and one off…

Snow Songs for the Winter

Yolanda Bejarano A few bar nights back I went out with my old friend Yolanda Bejarano, who’s not only a swell girl but an incredible musician, and who’s been cranking out music since I moved here eleven years ago, in bands like Slugger, the Slowdown, and a mariachi band that…

Glam-O-Rama

The Phoenix indie crowd has a new pit stop on their Friday-night boozing agenda. Glam (formerly Ky’s Place), at 32nd Street and Indian School Road, is a perfectly petite dance club stuck in a strip mall. The place goes nuts after midnight, when the pre-drinking is over and an ass-shaking…

New and Improv’d

Walk into Trax on a Monday night, as I did recently to grab a beer, and you’ll run into a strange amalgamation of sonic styles emanating from the outdoor stage in the back, courtesy of the Dave Wade Trio. I saw the Dave Wade Trio accidentally the first time, and…

The Headbangers Have a Ball

Face it, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen your friends make asses of themselves at karaoke. On a Saturday night in mid-November, I’m about to launch an alcohol-fueled audio assault on the croaky-oke crowd, along with my friends Bones, Chazz, Toxic JuJu, and JuJu’s dad Papa JuJu, who’s visiting P-town…

For the Rest of Us

Joe Pernice has published a book of poetry, a popular novella based on The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder for the 33 1/3 series, and “B.S. Johnson” — the most anthemic offering on the Pernice Brothers’ latest, Live a Little — pays tribute to a little-read English writer who died by…

Great Expectations

. . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead may be a victim of its own success. The Austin-based post-rock group’s ragged and glorious indie-punk albums, like 1999’s Madonna, and 2002’s brilliant Source Tags & Codes, didn’t make it onto the Billboard charts, but the latter…

The Melvins

Kurt Cobain loved The Melvins. Without that band’s influence, there would be no grunge. The outfit un-cheesed Sabbath and created truly evil-sounding metal that directed future generations toward methodical bass lines and sick distortion. Cobain (the band’s most tragically beloved roadie) tinker-punked The Melvins’ sounds and made them palatable to…

All-American Rejects

Somewhere, “power-pop” sticklers are brooding that these Oklahomans can’t possibly apply that mantle to what it is that they do. According to most universally accepted theorems, most power-pop bands are in their late 30s and early 40s, unless they had some estimable RIAA success in the ’70s — then they’re…

Copeland

Piano rock, schmiano rock. What Copeland produces is something much more than the recycled Ben Folds schmaltz typical of most ivories-oriented groups. Both Beneath Medicine Tree, the quartet’s 2003 debut, and In Motion, its 2005 breakthrough, were awash in lush, dreamy indie pop that eschewed irony for introspection. The guitar…

Glenn Danzig

Best known for incredibly catchy punk songs about murder and monsters, Misfits-Samhain mastermind Glenn Danzig is the only alumnus from hardcore’s original old-school scene to land an album at No. 1 on Billboard’s classical album chart, with 1993’s Black Aria. More sophisticated and eclectic, Black Aria II is instrumental, but…

Lady Sovereign

Lady Sovereign may not seem as revolutionary as the last great British hip-hop export, M.I.A. In fact, at times, her record feels a bit like M.I.A. and Dizzee Rascal sitting down to tea. But it’s the pintsize rapper’s cheeky personality that ultimately matters here (although the quirky synth hooks certainly…

Various Artists

We’ll take the esteemed word of Vogue — along with reports of Karl Lagerfeld’s collection of 60,000 CDs — as evidence that this two-disc comp of the iconic fashion designer’s “favorite songs” isn’t the product of a focus group. But there’s something tragic about a man born in 1933 (according…

The Clash

The Clash may have scavenged the past for inspiration — calypso, Beat poets, film idols, rockabilly, the Spanish civil war — but never for the sake of nostalgia. And while boxed sets sometimes embalm history, this one suggests the spirit of discovery Joe Strummer might have felt poring through record…

Paul Oakenfold

Is there anything that Paul Oakenfold hasn’t done? The London-born wax worker has been dubbed the world’s most successful DJ (per Guinness World Records), toured with Madonna, sold zillions of CDs, reportedly has collected as much as £25,000 or more for certain gigs, and collaborated with actress Brittany Murphy on…

George Bowman’s “Tribute to Maxine Johnson”

The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year, alternately known as “Black Friday” and “Blitz Day,” when people get up at 4 a.m. to barrel over each other in shopping carts and take advantage of the ridiculous rollbacks. If you’re not in such a hurry to…

Seven Nights of DJs and Dancing

Thursday 23Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Camus: KURRENT_affairs with Pablo Gomez (electronic, rock, pop, avant-garde) Chilly Bombers: DJ Statik (hip-hop, dance) Dos Gringos: DJs Benjamin Cutswell & Kid Vicious (rock, ’80s, old school hip-hop) E-Lounge: DJ Domenica (hip-hop, house) Harley’s 2303: DJ Juan (progressive house) Hollywood Alley: Blunt Club with Emerg…