After a harrowing accident totaled their van and gear in November, the members of Seattle surf-noir quartet La Luz didn’t just feel lucky to be alive. Singer-guitarist Shana Cleveland says the outpouring of support during the band’s recovery came across as a message that a life in music is where…

Nick Thorburn calls Islands’ fifth album, Ski Mask, a culmination and summation of everything the band has done. Since the band arrived with Return to the Sea (after the dissolution of The Unicorns), Islands has turned in stylistically varied albums, from explosively poppy to emotionally somber. “Ski Mask is everything…

A new source of intensity adds to the fiery, riff-heavy attack on Red Fang’s third album. With a relentless touring schedule leaving little time for songwriting or recording, the band felt the deadline pressure seeping into their music. Sandwiched between the Australian Soundwave Festival in February and a European festival…

“Somehow I guess Lou Reed was my evil mother.” In the wake of Lou Reed’s death, Arish Ahmad Khan couldn’t help but shade his stories – that span from his juvenile delinquency to the years that went into making his latest record – with memories of the rock poet who…

Audacity’s third album finds the band pushing in opposite directions at the same time. The Fullerton, California, garage-punk quartet plays with a homemade, youthful, and defiant style that makes the most out of its chaotic and unpredictable twists, all served up with an endless stream of hooks. Butter Knife, released…

For Mike Doughty, revisiting songs he wrote in some cases more than 20 years ago felt like walking into a ghost town. The former frontman for Soul Coughing — the distinct 1990s alternative band he once described as “deep slacker jazz” — decided to record an album of reimagined old…

Born out of the breakup of long-running Philadelphia hardcore band Jena Berlin, Restorations reach for a balance between energy and melody. Fed up with the with the hassles of touring and record labels and having decided the band had reached the limits of what it could do with hardcore, singer-songwriter-guitarist…

Bigger, louder, deeper and weirder, the second album from Youth Lagoon is the sort of follow-up that exceeds its predecessor in every way.   Boise’s Trevor Powers, 24, toys with expectations – both his own and those from the indie rock world that was watching his development closely – on…

Charles Bradley, his voice dripping with raw emotion, sings as though his life depends on it. It’s a voice that, in essence, gave Bradley a new start in life at 61, when his debut album, No Time for Dreaming, at long last found its way into the world, via Daptone…

The soul-rock-blues quartet Vintage Trouble see themselves as not just practitioners of what they call “live-wired, straight-shootin’, dirty-mouthed, pelvis-pushing juke music,” but protectors of a long and fruitful legacy. The band of veteran musicians — Ty Taylor on vocals, Nalle Colt on guitar, Rick Barrio Dill on bass, and Richard…

Rather than stick to vague genre tags or invent new hybrids, the members of Sun Bones offer the term “malleability.” It’s fitting for a classically trained band that somehow manages to fit four-part harmonies, bursts of punk, comforting pop melodies, avant-garde excursions and more under a single umbrella and make…

“Free at Dawn,” the opening song of Small Black’s second full-length album, is the sound of a band reclaiming itself at the start of a new day. Gone is much of what characterized the band’s eponymous 2008 EP and 2010 debut album New Chain — the chill synths and preset…

Billy Bragg @ Crescent Ballroom|3/26/13For his first-ever Phoenix show, Billy Bragg gave his all, of all of his sides — the young punk firebrand, the activist, the lover, the Woody Guthrie acolyte, the folk malcontent, and the Bard of Barking hawking his new album. Though the new record, Tooth &…