This Japanese rock band is huge in its home country, and it’s starting to make waves here in the States, despite being way too cool for us. Dir En Grey is seriously the hippest hard metal band to hit the Western world in a long time. Originally part of Japan’s…
My buddy B-Boy looks like he could kick some serious ass. At 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds, he strikes an imposing figure in his baggy Dickies pants and stained T-shirts. His shaved head and scraggly beard add to the intimidation factor, so it’s a good thing he’s not a bully. In…
The new CD by local industrial metal band The Iris sounds like a sonic blueprint for a band that’s finding its sound, and getting hotter by the minute. But the blueprint isn’t new — Marilyn Manson, Deftones, and a dozen other bands drew it. What’s great about The Vanity Fair…
Dear Gods of Rock: It’s me, The Mullet. Please kill me. My time on this Earth — hanging off Richard Marx’s head as it sang “Don’t Mean Nothin’,” going to Indigo Girls shows, and bathing in NASCAR exhaust fumes — has been fun, but I just can’t take being the…
UK chanteuse Amy Winehouse is quickly becoming known for two things: her drinking habit and her amazing voice. She combines the two on “Rehab,” the opening song on her second album, Back to Black, in which she sings, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no no no”…
Even if the night hadn’t ended with whip-its and Adult Mad-Libs, my recent Saturday night excursion onto Mill Avenue in Tempe would still be among my most fun forays into Valley nightlife ever. It was a pleasant surprise, because I don’t usually hang out on Mill, the main drag in…
On a cool, clear Friday night in early February, about a hundred people are packed into the Casa Blanca Lounge on Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix. Many of them have come for “communion” with local punk/thrash quartet NunZilla. But the “nuns” here aren’t anything like the ones who rapped…
Tucson native Roger Clyne had some amount of success in the mid-’90s with his rock band The Refreshments, whose sound fit well with the post-college rock explosion of the decade. But with the Peacemakers, Clyne’s songwriting is culled from three similar styles — Americana, Tejano, and the ol’ “white man…
As the singer for namesake L.A. fusion metal band Otep, as well as a self-published poet, Otep Shamaya views herself as a serious artist and Otep’s music as a serious art. Most of the band’s fervent fans, with whom Otep interacts extensively online, agree with that idea. And right now,…
“Ten bucks says I can get one of these guys to show me their wiener,” my friend Toxic JuJu tells me, as we grab some seats at the bar inside Pumphouse II to take in a gay male revue. I look around the bar. The place is packed with men,…
Musicians working solo in the singer/songwriter category don’t have it easy — the label alone scares off a lot of listeners, thanks to a stigma of ceaseless sameness and average acts flooding the genre with acoustic guitars, granola warbling, and philosophical-hippie-shit-meets-posturing-confessional lyrics. And they lack the attention-grabbing power of a…
British post-punks/pre-New Wavers Echo & The Bunnymen released Songs to Learn and Sing in 1985, and 10 of the tracks that made the first comp are included here, most notably hit singles like “Rescue,” “Do It Clean,” “The Cutter” and “The Killing Moon.” But this new collection contains 10 more…
“I may be an ice queen, but I like it fucking hot,” Siouxsie Sioux says from the stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall, site of the Dreamshow concert DVD (Rhino). The disc was shot over the course of three shows in June 2004 and, in between continually bitching about the…
J.J. Grey, front man for country-fried funk ‘n’ soul band Mofro, comes from the Florida swamplands and a rich storytelling tradition. Hints of both seep into the songs on Mofro’s latest, Country Ghetto, which contains a few tracks originally penned for neo-blues diva Cassandra Wilson. We recently caught up with…
For the past several years, Alabama Thunderpussy has been on an unwitting journey to become the Van Halen of stoner doom metal. ATP started with no singer, picked up Johnny Throckmorton for its first four albums, replaced Throckmorton with Johnny Weils for one album, and replaced Weils with Kyle Thomas…
Otep, the L.A.-based metal fusion quartet led by singer/poet/self-described “mental pugilist” Otep Shamaya, released one of the most dense, disturbing debut albums in the history of metal with 2002’s Sevas Tra, a fiery confessional wherein Otep screams about being raped by her father against a searing sonic backdrop of eerie…
Good news for metalheads who are still living in 1983 — Age of Evil (whose members are half your age) is making new music that sounds like outtakes from Iron Maiden’s Killers album and Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather. The Scottsdale quartet (composed of two sets of teenage brothers)…
This Detroit band found some success in the swing revival of the late ’90s, even though they were really an eight-piece jump blues band. They had the horn blasts and boogie beats to steal Cherry Poppin’ Daddies fans, and the good sense to make their second (and last) album, Torch…
It’s the bee’s knees, daddy-o. I love to swing, but I can’t dance. I can’t swing dance, either. But here I am at a VFW hall on Thomas Road in central Phoenix on a Sunday evening, taking a swing dance lesson and getting ready for some move called “the sugar…
Few hard-edged punk bands were as blatantly pissed off about politics in the ’90s than Naked Aggression. Formed in 1990 by singer Kirsten Patches and guitarist Phil Suchomel among the breweries and cheese factories of Madison, Wisconsin, Naked Aggression’s original purpose was to protest the first Gulf War. The band’s…
In the theoretical “school of rock,” Isis front man Aaron Turner would be the kid at the head of the class who has an eloquent answer for every question and writes the essays that the teacher always reads aloud to the rest of the class. Or maybe he’d be the…
Not only does Shane Ocell play all the instruments in Via Vengeance, but he plays them all at once. With his Gibson guitar on his lap, he sits behind his drum set and feeds fat, gritty guitar sounds through effects pedals and Sunn amps with one hand while drumming with…
