Hole Celebrity Skin (DGC Records) Courtney Love is nothing if not self-aware. So it makes sense that she titled her first post-Hollywood album Celebrity Skin, because this album documents the period in which Love’s celebrity–and infamy–grew from mere distraction to overrriding theme. When Love’s late husband Kurt Cobain was confronted…
Tom Anderson has seen a lot of DJs over the years. Many of them have spun for him over the past 16 years at his Scottsdale dance club, Anderson’s Fifth Estate. But he says he’d never seen anything to prepare him for what he experienced a few months ago, when…
Frank Black and the Catholics Frank Black and the Catholics (spinART Records) Frank Black’s fourth CD begins with a brief guitar goof on the Green Acres theme, followed by a messy false start. His band then lunges into one of those absurdly speedy tempos that Black uses, not to convey…
Legend has it that the day George Gershwin’s parents brought a piano into the house, the untutored 12-year-old plopped himself down in front of the keys and a flood of music came pouring out. If the story has long carried with it the ring of Hollywood exaggeration, it still helps…
How do you build a record store in six days? That was the tough question Steve Wiley and his partners, Lloyd Hummel and Kristian Luce, surely asked themselves a couple of weeks ago. Wiley, until recently the general manager of Zia Enterprises, had put together a proposal for a record…
Snuff Garrett leans forward. He pulls a smoke out of his bronze, sombrero-shaped cigarette holder, takes a puff and dumps the ashes in one of his many silver, spur-shaped ashtrays. He tries to describe the laid-back life he leads at Idle Spurs, his six-and-a-half-acre spread amongst the lush, green hills…
The Spice Girls don’t do a lot of talking onstage, but about 20 minutes into the second half of their August 22 show at Desert Sky Pavilion, Emma Bunton, known to the world as Baby Spice, looked like she had something important to say. “We all know about Girl Power,”…
About halfway through the after-the-fact Seattle music-scene documentary Hype, there’s a piece of footage that has the authentic feel of history. You see Nirvana ripping into “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for what the subtitles proclaim to be the first time ever. The hand-held camera work is amateurish, the picture is…
Was it Debora Iyall of Romeo Void who once crooned “never say never”? Well, apparently, the chunky songbird knew what she was singing about, ’cause in the fast-paced world of rock ‘n’ roll, nothing is permanent. Best friends are liable to sue each other one week and share the mike…
Whenever rock is in the doldrums, it usually revives itself by looking to foreign sources for a fresh infusion of energy. These days, with American alt-rock a joyless mountain of mediocrity, it’s easy to see why pop-music critics are getting so hot and bothered about the movement known as Rock…
Liz Phair whitechocolatespaceegg (Matador Records) In a way, it shouldn’t matter that Liz Phair took four years to put together her third album, whitechocolatespaceegg. Sure, Bob Dylan released his first seven albums in the time it took Phair to craft this set of ditties, but times have changed since those…
Local jazz drummer Dave Cook has three bands, and he plays a variety of different venues around the Valley. But for most of his fans, this 39-year veteran of the local music scene has long been defined by the Monday-night jams he hosted for almost a decade at the Melody…
Haggis What’s Up Haircut? (Epixuti) In a live setting, Haggis is a source of pure astonishment. The group’s hard-driving guitar-rock–while taking some influence from punk and the early ’90s grunge revolution–initially seems kinda plain and conventional. Before you know it, though, you find yourself bowled over by this band’s overpowering…
When Zia Record Exchange’s founder Brad Singer died in May, the official word from his family was that “business as usual” would be the order of the day for his empire. After all, by this point, Zia seemed to be such a sturdy, self-sustaining entity that it made little sense…
Keith Richards once made the point that all good rock music should basically aim for the crotch. According to his theory, rock is a primal, visceral force free of intellectual hang-ups, and anything directed at the cerebral cortex is a self-conscious perversion of the music’s essence. Scott Miller loves rock…
James Mather and Mike Heffington have two consuming passions: recording punk-rock bands and drinking as much Natural Light as they can get their hands on. Fortunately, they live in a world where their hobbies frequently intersect. It’s well-known in local punk circles that Natural Lights are as essential a component…
Beastie Boys Hello Nasty (Grand Royal/Capitol Records) Along with Beck, the Beastie Boys have become the embodiment of postmodern music in the late ’90s. The comparison goes beyond their shared use of the Dust Brothers or the perpetual ironic distance they both maintain, which allows them to simultaneously celebrate and…
For the past four months, word has been out that Nita’s Hideaway was up for sale. During that time, it became a kind of parlor game to speculate on what shape Nita’s would take when owner Nita Craddock found a buyer for the Tempe club. The optimists among us imagined…
Brian Wilson Imagination (Giant Records) In the months leading up to the release of Brian Wilson’s second solo album of new material–and first in a decade–the buzz was that Imagination marked a return to the innocence and warmth of 1965’s Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). In the hands of co-producer…
Andre Williams doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t have time for that. He’s seen a promising R&B career go up in smoke, he’s fallen victim to drug addiction, and he’s spent more time hustling his way out of the gutter than he’d care to remember. So when this resuscitated soul man…
Tricky Angels With Dirty Faces (Island Records) Anyone can build a majestic structure if you give him unlimited materials and resources. The real test is what you can achieve with the sparest of tools. Tricky, the Bristol studio alchemist who brought trip-hop to the ears of dance mavens before the…
Exactly 10 years ago, the mass media was abuzz with a new phenomenon in the music biz: the sudden rise of women in rock. The startling success of Tracy Chapman’s debut album–along with the rapidly growing profiles of Natalie Merchant, Suzanne Vega, Sinead O’ Connor, and Toni Childs–had the likes…
