Welcome back to our continuing series The Grand Tour, a feature where PHXmusic.com takes you inside practice spaces, tour vans and seedy apartments occupied by Phoenix-area bands. This week we give you a look inside Seven Car Pileup’s rehearsal space. If you’d like your band featured, tweet @PHXmusicdotcom or leave…
You can call him Raconteur Number Two, but Brendan Benson, the other songwriter in Jack White’s first side project, has been pumping out tuneful, classic power-pop on his own since 1996’s One Mississippi. Despite his modest solo success, he’s definitely been overshadowed — a fact to which he seems comfortably…
Here’s our second installment of The Grand Tour, a regular feature where PHXmusic.com takes you inside practice spaces, tour vans and seedy apartments occupied by Phoenix-area bands. This week we give you a look inside Source Victoria’s rehearsal space & recording studio. If you’d like your band featured, tweet @PHXmusicdotcom. …
I’m loathe to admit it, but I went into last night’s Scott H. Biram show at The Rhythm Room a bit skeptical, or worse, even a bit cynical. Don’t get me wrong. I like the whole punk-blues-country-bluegrass thing as much as the next guy, but I tend to find the…
The best cover songs are born when an artist takes a song written by someone else and not only performs it, but fundamentally changes it, imbues it with something new, and alters the song’s DNA in a way that claims the song and makes it their own. Think of Cat…
While it’s practically impossible for a white dude with an acoustic guitar and harmonica to achieve anything genuinely surprising, it’s nearly as difficult for such an artist to achieve anything approaching genuine. Joe Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs,” from his excellent 2008 Nation of Heat EP, is one of…
While it’s practically impossible for a white dude with an acoustic guitar and harmonica to achieve anything genuinely surprising, it’s nearly as rare for such an artist to achieve anything approaching genuine. Joe Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs,” from his excellent 2008 “Nation of Heat” EP, is one of…
Welcome to The Grand Tour, a regular feature where PHXmusic.com takes you inside practice spaces, tour vans and seedy apartments occupied by Phoenix-area bands. This week we give you a look inside the glamorous rehearsal space of Gospel Claws.Smells Like: Cigar smoke. The boys were puffing away the whole time…
Despite the fact that heavy music is experiencing a renaissance, with diverse bands like Converge, Baroness, Torche, and Mastodon raising the bar artistically while nipping at the heels of the mainstream, it’s bands like Five Finger Death Punch that still have a stranglehold on modern-rock and heavy metal radio stations…
Is there anything more punk than being able to play anywhere, at anytime? Chances are, if you asked the crusties who make up the folk-punk collective Blackbird Raum, the answer would be a strident “fuck no!” The group channels the anarcho ethos of gutter-punks like Crass, but don’t bother with…
Though the electronic indie rockers have long since ditched the Valley of the Sun for the Big Apple (via the Lone Star State) local music fans still hold Lymbyc System in high regard. And they should, as the duo, comprising brothers Mike and Jared Bell, have collaborated with Her Space…
I’ve got no shortage of reasons to despise Watchout! Theres Ghosts, and perhaps it’s a mark of my growing pettiness that their music is pretty low on my list. Near the top of the list is the fact that they are willing to toss an exclamation mark after “watchout,” but…
“Thanks,” Thurston Moore of legendary noise-rockers Sonic Youth laughs, hoisting up a Bethel Wildcats letterman jacket, an unusual gift from a crowd member at the group’s packed performance at Tempe’s Marquee Theatre. Moore, a 1976 graduate of the Connecticut high school, seems bemused by the offering. “You know, in high…
There’s nothing duller than a “retro” band. You know the type: decked out in the fashions of some bygone era, carefully assembling each song into a pastiche of genre signifiers, purposefully oblivious to outside influences that could spoil the illusion of their just having stumbled out of a time machine…
It’s a wonder that Sonic Youth manages to even release Sonic Youth records, given the flurry of activity that envelops Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Mark Ibold outside of their work in the band. Their combined creative enterprises include books of poetry, ‘zines and record reviews,…
It’s a wonder that Sonic Youth manages to even release Sonic Youth records, given the flurry of activity that envelops Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Mark Ibold outside of their work in the band. Their combined creative enterprises include books of poetry, ‘zines and record reviews,…
Up on the Sun is counting down the days until the unveiling of music editor Martin Cizmar’s personal Best of 2009 list with some other lists from Phoenix New Times’ stable of excellent freelancers. Today we bring you a list from Jason P. Woodbury, a New Times contributor, a staff…
So even if your grandma didn’t get you an awesome new sweater for Christmas just begging to be shown off downtown, there are still plenty of reasons to drag your butt to Trunk Space Fest. Namely, reunion sets from some of the scene’s most sorely missed acts, like Shizz founder…
God bless the Internet jukebox. There’s not much more glorious than sitting in your favorite neighborhood watering hole with the power to hear pretty much anything at your fingertips, offered up at the mere price of a couple of bucks. Upset that someone is ruining your G & T with…
“The music in there is terrible,” says a customer to Revolver Records co-owner Steve Zimmerman, referring to the warbling tones of saxophonist Lol Coxhill spinning on the turntable as doom-metal one man band Via Vengeance sets up. The bands gathered to perform at the record store’s Sunday night experimental showcase…
Is it just me, or is “folk” as a descriptive term battling “indie rock” to the finish line of complete uselessness? Take the Monsters of Folk, the singer/songwriter collective that spawned an eyesore mural on Roosevelt and that lots of folks bitched about. Their self-titled debut leaned heavily on blue-eyed…
Is it just me, or is “folk” as a descriptive term battling “indie rock” to the finish line of complete uselessness? Take the Monsters of Folk, that indie-singer/songwriter collective which spawned an eye-sore mural on Roosevelt lots of folks bitched about. Their self titled debut leaned heavily on blue eyed…
