An old roommate once offered a thought: “Dude, is there any popular music from Germany that doesn’t suck?!” In thinking about it, he had a point — this is a country that made that Hasselhoff guy a performing god and presented the cranky robotics of Kraftwerk as its version of…
The Boston trio Morphine made a compelling argument for avant-garde minimalism in the ’90s. It relied on tenor saxophone, drums and especially bandleader Mark Sandman’s funky two-string bass playing. While the rockin’ 1993 album Cure for Pain solidified the band’s place among hipsters, its work grew more challenging and sensuous…
Thirtysomething R&B superstar R. Kelly stands accused of taping himself having sex with underage girls and collecting child pornography. Hard to believe any songwriter in that position would want to mine his libido for fresh material — and yet the out-on-bail Kelly has done nothing to temper the boldness of…
Timbaland and Bubba Sparxxx are the new tag-team champions of rap. With Deliverance, the second Bubba album produced mostly by Tim, they’ve made the best hip-hop album since Jay-Z’s 2001 entry The Blueprint. The undying punch of their collaboration seems amazing when you consider how far they travel for their…
The owners of Bandersnatch Brew Pub in Tempe have sold the downtown institution to the owners of Martini Ranch, Scottsdale’s upscale version of a white trash bar. It’s a done deal, which, naturally, for the musicians and patrons who make up the Tempe scene, is an outrage. The local enthusiasts…
For hard-core hip-hop heads and regular patrons of urban clubs throughout the South and West, Jonathan “Lil’ Jon” Smith is not a newcomer. The Atlanta producer, promoter and rapper (if that’s what you want to call it) has been developing a style of simplistic but undeniably enjoyable hip-hop he calls…
Steve Shelton plays with his cell phone between sips of English tea at the George and Dragon on Central. He checks the blue display screen for his call log, and then answers a quick call from a friend. Shelton, guitarist for Phoenix punk band Glass Heroes, looks amused by the…
After several years of tributes and eulogies, with his work in vogue and a video meditation on his aging mesmerizing MTV viewers, Johnny Cash did about the most rebellious thing he could last Friday morning. He died. The symbolism — legendarily flawed man finds redemption time and time again and…
The Coral is a talented sextet of kids from Merseyside, England, whose improving songcraft and sense of self-expression threaten to eventually eclipse the kitsch and appreciation for pop history that earned them a cult following last year. The group’s 2002 self-titled debut was alternately ridiculous and fascinating. It blended an…
Daniel Lanois, superstar producer and occasional solo artist, took pains in his liner notes to thank all of the musicians who contributed to Shine, his first album in a decade. These fellow musicians include U2’s Bono, sensual country singer Emmylou Harris, prolific session drummer Brian Blade, longtime friend and collaborator…
Atreyu is a band of young misfits and slackers from the suburbs of Orange County, California, that’s channeled its angst into developing an exciting style of hard-core punk. The kids are in the midst of what seems like a nonstop tour. Last week, that tour took a brief pit stop…
Steve Trella fields requests for songs by Southern bands like the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band and the Outlaws every day. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trella is an afternoon DJ for KSLX-FM, Phoenix’s classic rock station. Lots of listeners grew up on the rebel-flag-waving attitude…
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Perhaps this is the saddest commentary about the apathy of American popular musicians, or about the stranglehold corporate entities have on radio right now. The best protest songs in the wake of the Iraqi conflict come from a band of Welsh oddballs willfully influenced by late-period Beach Boys — as…
Club Next, a danceteria-style lounge in Old Town Scottsdale that embodies some of the stereotypes you might expect, doesn’t seem like an ideal joint for low-key Phoenix house DJs Pete Salaz and Senbad. But the partners found themselves there after changing priorities and schedules forced them this past spring to…
We don’t normally pay much attention in these pages to happenings in Sedona, our lovely day trip to the north. The Sedona Cultural Park, though, booked itself a doozie of a show in its efforts to turn itself into an elite Western musical destination, much in the way Red Rocks…
Target me now. I’m a thief. I blatantly disregard laws for my own fulfillment. The fuzz needs to come to my central Phoenix house, confiscate my computer, hand me a subpoena, and fine me a bunch of money. I’ll open the doors and gladly invite them in. To borrow a…
Funerals can suck. But for singer and songwriter Matt Ward, the memorial service for John Fahey was a formative artistic experience. “It opened some doors, I feel, for me,” says the 29-year-old resident of Portland, Oregon, who performs as M. Ward. “It provided ways for thinking about what music can…
My people smoke cigarettes, but they’re the brand of people I want to be around. More often than not, they’re not at all self-serious. They’re passionate about their lives, their environment, their friends, their recreation. In other words, smokers make great bar patrons. Now, I don’t smoke. I never have…
Robert Lockwood Jr. is a remarkable American story. Nurtured and taught by seminal bluesman Robert Johnson, who lived with Lockwood’s mother in the last years of his life, the 88-year-old Lockwood is one of the last living practitioners of the Delta blues the way it was conceived. “I’ve got two…
That the Drive-By Truckers would be compared so widely to Lynyrd Skynyrd now is obvious. The band, fronted by Alabama expatriates Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, burst into critical consciousness two years ago with their Southern Rock Opera, a sprawling two-CD concept record that translated the Skynyrd tragedy into rumination…
The local punk crowd erupted out of left field last week. Literally. The Vans Warped Tour, which since the late 1990s has become the U.S.’s prime traveling summer punk and ska showcase, routinely attracting stars of the genres (Rancid, Less Than Jake) as well as the artists pushing the noise…
