Who ever thought of having vocal harmonies in heavy metal? Well, System of a Down, Evanescence, and Lacuna Coil, for starters, but the debut CD from Eyes Set to Kill proves that you don’t have to be innovative to be sonically savvy. The core of ESTK — 17-year-old lead vocalist…
Like Donny Osmond, South Carolina singer-songwriter Edwin McCain is a little bit country, and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. He’s a whole lot of heartthrob, too, penning some of the most poetic tunes ever to make the women in the trailer parks swoon. Over the course of seven albums…
On August 8, thrash metal legends Slayer will unleash Christ Illusion, a blistering, brutal atom bomb of an album that some critics are calling the band’s heaviest audio assault since the cataclysmic 1986 classic Reign in Blood. The record is also Slayer’s first studio album in 16 years to feature…
St. Madness singer Prophet (né Patrick Flannery) won his battle with testicular cancer earlier this year, and now he’s ready to rock hard again with St. Madness’ newest album. Musically, St. Madness’ sound has always harked back to the old-school days of heavy metal, with crunchy power chords, screaming guitar…
At the intersection of First Street and Garfield, near a health clinic for indigents and an Arizona Public Service substation, there’s a burnt-orange brick building that stops pedestrians. Most of the time, you don’t see many people walking this part of town, but it’s the First Friday in May, and…
Steve Albini, arguably the most influential and prolific recording engineer in the history of “alternative” music, has left his sonic signature on more than a thousand albums, including the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me; Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile; Flogging Molly’s Swagger; and Nirvana’s In Utero. He’s…
Legendary blues drummer Chico Chism turns 79 years old on May 23, and details from much of his seven-plus decades on Earth still remain a mystery. We know that Chism was born on a riverboat in Louisiana, to a mother of Cherokee ancestry. We know his birth name is Napoleon,…
This is the first release from local music maven Will “Vil Vodka” Tynor’s Vodka Tonic Media, and rather than highlight the talents of one band via a studio album, Tynor’s opted to showcase the sounds of six Arizona bands on this quirky comp. The synthesizer-saturated “Come On Feel It,” a…
If you tell a true ’80s punk fan that the Subhumans are playing a gig, you’ll need to clarify which Subhumans you’re talking about. There’s the Subhumans from the early ’80s Vancouver punk scene, who rocked alongside bands like D.O.A. and the Pointed Sticks, and then there’s the Subhumans from…
Jesus drives a lightning yellow Trans Am. That’s one of a litany of revelations on Seattle band ROY’s latest album. Of course, revelations might be hallucinations for a band that takes its moniker from a sad little meth-lab trailer town outside the Rainy City, but that doesn’t matter. The quartet…
Heather Gargon, 22, has logged many miles since dropping out of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. After taking a cross-country trip to scope out a new place to live two and a half years ago, the redhead from rural Ohio chose Phoenix for its warm climate and low-key…
Don’t fuck with Joan Jett. The leather-lovin’ singer-songwriter turns 46 this year, and she’s come a long way since her prepubescent days with Kim Fowley’s all-girl garage band, The Runaways. And if you thought she looked tough in the 1982 video for “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” you should see…
Few people dispute that Wu-Tang Clan is the supergroup of the hip-hop world. The eight remaining members of the group — RZA, GZA/Genius, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon, U-God, Ghostface, and Masta Killa — have all enjoyed some amount of individual success or notoriety, and it seems like everyone’s curious…
Vinyl records may seem as ancient as the Pyramids in the evolutionary chain of audio technology — the phonograph record, the eight-track tape, the cassette tape, the CD, the MP3 — but yet they’ve somehow survived even while cassettes and eight-tracks went tits up. Before shareware programs like Napster and…
Anar Badalov, one-half of the lo-fi duo Metal Hearts, could really benefit from some self-esteem seminars. Granted, Metal Hearts’ musical style (quiet guitars and haunting harmonies layered over subtle, programmed drum beats, à la Mazzy Star on a booze bender) begs for melancholy musings, but Badalov takes a lyrical turn…
Here’s a band that could easily contribute to the soundtrack that G.G. Allin, Stiv Bators, and Johnny Thunders are probably making in Punk Rock Hell. Big Vinny & the Cattle Thieves sound like old-school gutterpunks, spewing about anal rape and violence from a graffiti-covered garage. “I Was a Teenage Premature…
One of the things that’s great about local hip-hop artist Jawa is that he doesn’t give a crap about mainstream success. He could have had it — Priority Records had him working with artists like Brian McKnight and Method Man in the mid-’90s — but he didn’t like being told…
This melodic indie rock quartet sounds a bit like another local band, radio rulers Jimmy Eat World, whom SLP once joined on a Midwest tour that included a gig in a barn. The A-side, “Hold Your Flashlight,” is a chugging, hard-edged pop number full of images of summer camp, canary…
Horror novelist (and recovering goth) Poppy Z. Brite once said, “You can only maintain a gothic frame of mind for so long before you either go crazy or kill yourself.” To wit, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis and Christian Death singer Roz Williams both shuffled off the mortal coil, but…
As the six-string slinger for Georgia raunch ‘n’ roll band Nashville Pussy, Ruyter Suys has all the finger-chops and flash of her idol, AC/DC’s Angus Young, plus big boobs that never manage to stay contained onstage. But rather than go off on a whole “respect me for my music only”…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is the musical equivalent of stumbling side-by-side with Satan through a surreal horror movie on bad acid and rotten peyote. TKK’s influential 1990 album, Confessions of a Knife, opens with a track called “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” and the first thing the…
The band’s moniker is a reference to the jacket of an old hardback book, and front man Conan Zimmerman is an avid reader of literary legends like Salinger, Hemingway, and Chekhov. It’s no surprise, then, that Dust Jacket’s poetic lyrics stand out like Bob Dylan next to that first, infamous…
