Vampire Weekend — the album — sounded a lot like Graceland, inasmuch as most of us hadn’t heard that bright Afropop guitar tone on any other albums in the intervening 20 years, and Ezra Koenig’s lyrics were as epigrammatic as Paul Simon’s, if in a different way. It wasn’t just…
I have never once been so confused by a song as I was the first time someone told me to listen to “Stick Stickly,” by Attack Attack! All I’d been told was that it was the source of the animated GIFs I’d started seeing all over the internet, in which…
Arrested Development ruined the Segway. Lots of things ruined the Segway — don’t get me wrong — but the first time Gob Bluth made his dramatic, perfectly self-confident entrance into the frame on his fanny-packed Segway, he instantly summed up all the worries people had about them. Will this make…
So are you a Tribute-John guy, or a Tribute-Paul guy? Or a Tribute-George guy, I guess? This question and more answered in this week’s list of five Phoenix-area shows this weekend…
Matchbox Twenty tickets go on sale today at noon — the show’s July 26 at Comerica Theatre — which means that this weekend is a time for you to reflect on whether, why, and how much you love America’s most indestructible post-grunge band. For me those answers are yes, because…
Du Hot Club de BizarreCrescent BallroomMay 8, 2013 Turquoise Jeep looks and sounds like a novelty act at first, but that doesn’t quite explain their appeal. What they’re really doing with their bizarre slow jams and paeans to stretchy pants and choreographed dance moves is hitting the basic tropes that…
In 2013, we’ve reached the point where Beatles tribute bands should, given the time that’s elapsed, have some of their own tribute bands by now. 1964 the Tribute — that’s their name — has been re-creating the British Invasion-era Beatles since 1984, which means they’re now coming up on a…
Music-discovery apps like Spotify and Pandora are free, but they have social costs. Among them: Every six months or so, we get an open letter from an artist who is being cut comically tiny checks for thousands of plays on one service or another. This week, it’s musician and label-owner…
Until very recently, it was not necessary to point out that the Beach Boys who were on tour were not necessarily all of the surviving Beach Boys. Alas, we’re spoiled: Last year’s totally unexpected new album and tour brought the warring Beach Boys factions together for some extremely poignant (and…
If you and I visit the same Weezer forums, you’ve probably had Rivers Cuomo’s J-Pop album — okay, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Murphy of Allister’s J-Pop album — for a while now. If you don’t visit the same Weezer forums I do, now’s your chance: It was released Monday on…
Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience tour will be coming to Phoenix on December 2. Tickets will be available May 17, which gives you 11 days to figure out how you’re going to get tickets, and then six months or so to figure out how you’re going to camp in front of…
Of all the bands that managed to go diamond (that’s 10 million albums sold) back in the mid-’90s, when conditions were right for it, Matchbox Twenty looked the most like one-superhit wonders. It wasn’t their fault; it just seemed like there were 10 million themselves-or-someones-like-them doing similar (if less effective)…
I don’t want to bury the lede, here: There’s a video, in this post, of Go Daddy founder and local philanthropist Bob Parsons making a smoke-filled introduction to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” next to a bunch of scantily clad dancing girls, getting a big round of applause for saying, “Nuke the Chinese…
The Monkees are coming through Mesa — it’s called “A Midsummer’s Night with The Monkees” — which should not surprise anybody who’s ever heard an Arizona stereotype. The show’s on August 9, at the Mesa Arts Center, and it will (for obvious reasons) not feature the Davy Jones, the group’s…
Dearly beloved, I have good news and bad news: The good news is that the potential length of Prince’s set-list is now no longer constrained by playing two shows per night when he visits the Marquee Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday. The bad news is that that means he’ll only…
Twitter #Music — the music-discovery service from the people who brought you #SomaliDirectionersLoveZayn-style declarations of collectivist fandom love — rolled out this week, and people are . . . not especially happy with it. A blunt summary of the problems with it was passed around among tech-liberal-arts-blog types over the…
Prince’s relationship with his backing bands has always been a little more fraught than, say, Buddy Holly and the Crickets or Dave Matthews and Band. There’s been several of them, for one thing — the Revolution and the New Power Generation, along with associates like Morris Day and The Time…
Pop music is obsessed with youth, but it’s also obsessed with itself. Result: An endless procession of youthful musicians from pop golden ages who are rapidly becoming capital-h Historic figures. The MTV era’s counterculture heroes are now culture heroes. Bruce Springsteen is an institution. Madonna is an icon. Prince is…
Black Sabbath — that is, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler, for the moment — have been teasing a summer tour of North America for weeks, and when they finally announced the full tour on Thursday it came with an August 30 performance in Phoenix, at US Airways Center…
The Flagstaff Hullabaloo is not a big festival — 2013’s June 1-2 event in Wheeler Park is the first time it’s stretched to two days — and because there are a lot of big festivals in and around the Phoenix area, that might seem like an unbeatable disadvantage. But they…
Your mom wants to go see Bon Jovi in Glendale. Other people do, too — don’t get me wrong. Former hair-metal aficionados, air-guitar soloists, a surprising number of people in what appear to be Bon Jovi football jerseys. But mostly your mom. Having successfully finished raising you and come into…
When Bad Religion, AWOLNATION, and the rest of That Damn Show comes to the Mesa Amphitheatre on Saturday, there will be 14 bands crammed onto the bill, split between two stages — which is to say It’s going to be a little hectic. You can still buy tickets online; to…
