Fat Rhabit Last month Casey Lynch reviewed Fat Rhabit’s self-titled debut EP, giving the local rockers a pretty glowing assessment. Just this morning, the band’s manager Sean Shepherd sent over a couple new tunes from the Rhabit’s upcoming full-length “rock opera-ish” album, due out around March. The Grand Rapids transplants…

Army of Robots Last week I dropped a couple of new demo tracks from Army of Robots for your listening pleasure; after a debauched drinking marathon this weekend, frontman Daggrr hit me off with one more new track for you. “Fabulous” is about picking up a girl (who ends up…

Still Alive Speaking of trite, I really couldn’t come up with a better title for this blog post; you’d think I’d have learned more Espanol in my eleven years in Arizona… but I digress. I just got my hands on the latest release by Still Alive, a reggaeton group from…

Sonny Long Once in a while we music critics get lucky and an especially stinky CD ends up in our hands… an easy target, something genuinely bad. I scored that recently, when I got my hands on some tracks by PHX rapper/R&B-er Sonny Long, whose debut album The Resume is…

Dave Wade Is a freebie… the Dave Wade Trio playing at Trax (the former Sail Inn) this evening. Along with guitarist extraordinaire Charles Bond and drummer J.B., Wade takes every style he can think of and jumbles them all together, be it jazz, reggae, blues, Middle Eastern music, or straight…

Cute Lil’ DJs (My Friend Andy in foreground) Over the last month or so I’ve spent some time watching and listening as DJ My Friend Andy, formerly half of the Cute Lil’ DJs (along with DJ Stefascope), worked on a remix album of Modest Mouse songs – mostly kind of…

There’s a shitload going down tonight at joints around the Valley, including the AZPunk compilation release party at the Sets. If you’re not making it down to that, here’s a couple of other options to sate your thirst for the live music thing. Heather Rae and Shannon of the Moonshine…

Army of Robots Way back in February of 2005, I wrote a column saying that Army of Robots had succeeded Tucson’s The Bled as the best band in Arizona (in my opinion, of course), and that they’d “fucked up the whole paradigm and established a new gold standard for Arizona.”…

Saki Photography Violet Wild A while back I wrote a column about Violet Wild, the band put together from remnants of the Black Moods (guitarist Josh Kennedy) and Mink Rebellion (singer Bobby Scott). Along with bassist Paul Fenix and drummer Joey Schwegler, the boys were working on an album that’s…

The Breadwinners In tomorrow’s new ish of the paper, I hang out with the Breadwinners, a four-piece traditional bluegrass group that plays at the Loft in Tempe every Tuesday night. There ain’t much bluegrass in these parts, but these four bring it with an authenticity you can’t find anywhere else…

While my esteemed blogging colleague (blog-eague?) Stephen Lemons has been busy picking fights with the fiesty commentators at AZPunk.com, I’ve had my ears glued to the formidable portal’s latest compilation of local punk bands, AZPunk.comp V5, which will have its release celebrated Friday night at The Sets in Tempe. This…

Pacific Coast News Happier Times Lefties get the House, maybe the Senate, Rumsfeld resigns, but even better than that – Britney filed for divorce!! Ordinarily I stick to BS-ing about local music steez up in this piece, but I had to pass on the fantastic news that Britney Spears is…

ProjectGuerilla.com Back in late August I wrote a feature on revolutionary rapper GRIME (the acronym stands for “Got Revolution In My Eyes”) and his musical perpetuation of the Revolutionary But Gangsta movement. Apparently GRIME’s getting up in the election day today in his own unique way, releasing his new single…

DJ Aaron Roberts Local producer Aaron Roberts released a tricky little EP of booty shaking house beats called Hip-Hop Stop on Nashville label Photo Records this week. The “hip-hop” reference is deceiving – this is bass-heavy house with chopped-up vocals and dancefloor cuts. Not really the sort of thing I…

Wormwood Brothers This local self-described “dustcore” outfit called Wormwood Brothers sent me a beautiful little track called “Trigger Happy” that reminds me of shoegazers with a taste for y’all-ternative bands like Wilco, Son Volt, and their ilk. It’s pretty fucking melancholy, as are the other tracks up on the band’s…

After I posted a couple of songs from the enigmatic Janis Joplin Crap N Vomit last week, the band sent me a couple of emails to explain what the deal is. And it just got weirder. Here’s the illumination from “Pete aka Solvent the Solution”: “Two piece, bass and drums…

Woodpile in New Times There was a little e-mail scuffle between an L.A. Times writer named Chris Lee and myself recently, when I wrote a column refuting his assertion that local white rapper trio Woodpile are white supremacists (he wrote that in a front page story for the beleaguered newspaper)…

Z-Trip’s Bling Phoenician ex-patriate and now Los Angelian DJ Z-Trip, who I’ve toured through the Pacific Northwest with before and is currently hitting up European dance floors, has been pretty damn busy lately, getting married in this summer and posting some new and old cuts on his website and continuing…

Jimmy Eat World I’m sure you’re all aware that tomorrow is election day, which I wouldn’t ordinarily type about up in this piece, but it’s made for some strange endorsements this year. Check out the video here, and you’ll see local music scene players like Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat…

You probably remember Chronic Future if you’ve been around the ‘Nix for a while… “Scottsdale Brat”?? nevermind that shit though, Mike Busse is a sick fuckin’ MC these days, and they’re down with one of the most innovative/weird/twitchy beatmongers around, Ryan Breen. Breen is known publicly as Back Ted N…

There’s mu-fuckin’ two tonight, cuz its mu-fuckin’ friday… if you’re one of the artsy types, you ought to hit up the afterparty at Angelo’s Lounge (16th St. north of Osborne) and check out Telemore Repair from Long Beach, along with local mofos Underwater Getdown and An Aesthetic (stupid name guys,…

There are good radio-ready songs and there are shit radio-ready songs; a while ago i wrote about the Heartless here, now the boys are back in the studio and preparing some new jizm for yr ears. Cuz they’re nice guys (even if they’re pop-punkers), they dropped off this new track…