Thursday 3 Acme Roadhouse: College Night with DJ J. Alan (Top 40) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Suzy (hip-hop, dance) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with AKA (gothic, industrial) Axis/Radius: DJ MCB (hip-hop, dance) Big Fish Pub: Reggae Thursdays with Selector J-Cut & DJ Blackstar (reggae, dance hall) Dos Gringos –…
1. Bright Eyes, I’m Awake It’s Morning (Saddle Creek) 2. Bright Eyes, Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (Saddle Creek) 3. The Game, The Documentary (Aftermath) 4. Green Day, American Idiot (Warner Bros.) 5. Dresden Dolls, The Dresden Dolls (8ft Records) 6. The Killers, Hot Fuss (Island) 7. Papa Roach,…
Phoenix may be known for bands of the Jimmy Eat World persuasion, but for each of those, there is a Vehemence. It’s true — the Arizona metal scene is alive and well. In an attempt to start another downtown tradition, a local production company, SMUT, has dubbed the night after…
Band documentaries can be great for showing a different side of a group whose music you know well, or just filling in the personality blanks for a group you only really know in passing. For me, MxPx falls into the latter category — I was aware that they’re a long-running…
Playgroup is U.K.-based electro maven Trevor Jackson; in addition to making Romper Room punk-funk party bombs like 2002’s Playgroup (notable for including cameos from both Edwyn Collins and Shinehead), Jackson runs Output Recordings, a superhip English label that’s home to chilly post-rock acts like Fridge, and Colder. Jackson is also…
The safe money is on local heroes and special guests Authority Zero to be the night’s big crowd-pleasers; they will certainly be kicking the ass of headliners Pepper, the first punks out of Hawaii since the Waikikis. Anyone expecting a night of luau music can leave their expectations with the…
If old-school metal fans view Soulfly as once-removed from singer/guitarist/songwriter Max Cavalera’s earlier band Sepultura, now they can view Soulfly as once-removed from itself. With its fourth album, Prophecy, released in the spring of last year, Cavalera reassembled the band with all-new members handpicked from Ill Niño and Primer 55,…
Listening to Bury Your Dead with the volume cranked to 11 leaves the sensation of getting punched in the face. Now that’s hardcore. The Connecticut five-piece’s live show will pummel you with blast beats and then, like a deranged drill instructor, order your bruised body off the floor to take…
“Brian Alfred: The Future Is Now!” at the Phoenix Art Museum: New York-based artist Brian Alfred ponders corporate culture and rampant industrialization in his latest exhibition. Although Alfred’s retro-futuristic paintings and collages emphasize society’s fascination with the digital age and subsequent sensory overload, his collection of work is surprisingly sensory-friendly…
Before I get into Halo 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there’s a little matter of The New York Dolls’ new CD, The Return of the New York Dolls: Live From Royal Festival Hall, 2004, on Attack Records. That little matter is: WHAT THE FUCK? Okay, so that Morrissey…
A Rubinesque Story A fool and his money . . . : Another killer story, this time on divorce mediator Gary Karpin, by Paul Rubin (“Dr. Buzzard,” January 27). Without Rubin here in Phoenix, we would never find out about the charlatans in our midst. What amazes me, though, is…
THU 1/27 Where have all the heroes gone? Sure, today’s pop culture heroes deserve some props. (Just how many bullets has 50 Cent taken and survived?) But for hard-core heroism, we must hark back to the 1800s, and people such as Harriet Tubman, who braved the severest of penalties –…
1/31-2/6 In years past, the FBR (formerly Phoenix) Open was best known for bringing a much-needed dose of fun to the often staid and stuffy world of professional golf. And while the frat-party mentality that once ruled the 16th hole may have mellowed (a bit), there is little doubt that…
What you see isn’t necessarily what you get in “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life,” opening at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday, January 29. Rather than reflecting human experience and emotion in a concrete sense, the way paintings or sculptures do, the show is more like a…
Rennie Harris doesn’t mind if you use a superlative or two to describe the funkdafied hip-hop and b-boy style his Puremovement dance company will bust out at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts this weekend. After all, he’s heard them all before: dazzling, dynamic, inspiring, compelling . . . the…
Some people think they’re a new art form; others see them as adolescent time-killers. Whatever they are, video games don’t make good models for feature films (mostly because their interactive essence is lost), and their clumsy transfer to the big screen continues to invite all kinds of speculation — not…
In her first stab at narrative drama, writer-director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…
If any indie band could be reconstituted with a properly calibrated mix of the mood, pop and rock quarks, Early Day Miners would require practically a whole shaker of mood, seasoned with a sprinkle of pop and but a dash of rock. Like the paintings of Winslow Homer, their watercolor…
Carson Daly prefaced Citizen Cope’s network TV debut with some blubbering comparisons to Bob Dylan and John Lennon, which Cope obliterated by performing a first-rate single (“Bullet and a Target”) that sounded like neither. Clearly the new Dylan/Lennon analogy has more to do with the engineer’s cap Cope sports on…
Past a certain point in their careers, musicians tend to get more serious, putting away childish obsessions with pop culture in favor of creating something of more importance (or self-importance), sometimes with mixed results. The career of Mike Park, former vocalist/saxophonist for the ’90s third-wave ska supergroup Skankin’ Pickle, certainly…
Kyle Howard will make himself throw up for the Stiletto Formal. Dedication of that extent is rarely called for, but sure enough, on the third night of its first tour, the slender vocalist has to heave for his band. For the December show in Omaha, Nebraska, the Stiletto Formal wants…
When I run into Phoenix rapper Pokafase a few days before his record release party for Mastermind, the long-overdue LP he recorded back in 2002, I remind him we met several times years ago when he was in the hip-hop group Know Qwestion, back when his moniker was Cappuccino. “Shhh,…
