“It would mean so much to me to know mystery,” Brock Ruggles announces early on in The Great Saturday Night Swindle, but he and his new band Tierra del Fuego have crafted a debut album even Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe in the study would have no trouble figuring…
If Las Vegas can have its homegrown Britpop, why not Tucson? The Killers acclimated us to Yanks and synths again, but The Year of Acceleration is here to say, “What about surliness and passionate songs about the sun never shining and prescription medicine, then?” This is no ironic re-creation of…
Anyone with a dog-eared copy of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ debut The Gilded Palace of Sin knows the concept of old-school R&B played by a traditional country-and-western band is nothing new. But Tucson’s Hacienda Brothers don’t have to wage an awareness campaign for country-rock like the Burritos did, leaving them…
If you were a 13-year-old local gangsta rap prodigy suddenly blowing up all over the place, you’d need all the trappings of instant success just to maintain credibility that you weren’t fronting, that you were in the game to stay. For starters, you’d need a crew of people like so…
Christina Aguilera’s new double disc, Back to Basics (RCA), is a sonic nod to the music of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. But a closer look reveals how the album also draws inspiration from classic double albums of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Blonde on Blonde (1966) On Back to…
It’s not exactly like unraveling there’s no Santa Claus, but it’s not unlike it, either. When a friend tells you about a three-day festival of stoner rock and doom metal and mentions that the organizer is a guy by the name of Ancient Rob, your thoughts naturally gravitate toward the…
Michael (a.k.a. MYKELL) Geyman, 40, former drummer of Phoenix retro glam band Psycho Gypsy, was found dead August 1 in Iowa, where he relocated in 2000 to become a pig farmer. He had been missing for four days since leaving a party at a Zearing campsite, reportedly in good spirits…
The story you are about to read is basically true. The names have been changed because, shit, that’s what rappers do. It’s Sunday, July 23, and I’m wondering just how much of The Society of Invisibles’ veil of secrecy is for effect. Having two or three aliases per crew member…
It’s laughable how many Valley bands still insist on using a “rising from the ashes like a phoenix” analogy in their bios when all they’ve struggled with is the climate change from the living room to the garage to the gig. But in the case of the Walnuts, it’s totally…
If you think you know a singer-songwriter and want to be sure before you buy him a beer, check these qualifiers courtesy of Wikipedia: must “write, compose and sing their own material,” “appear primarily at house concerts, coffee houses, folk clubs and festivals,” and be “better known for their meaningful…
The lousy CD cover to Knives in the Attic’s 5 song EP, Death Pop, does it a great disservice. Sure, the blood-spattered, knifed teddy bear doodle fits the angst/death-obsessed lyrics, but it comes off amateurish. And this is a band that should be in the midst of a bidding war,…
How did you spend your day of reckoning? Expectant mothers, fearful of a 06/06/06 due date, were asking doctors to induce labor a day or two early to spare their babies from the mark of the beast, which would not only adversely affect those terrible twos, but could keep the…
You’d have to search mighty diligently to find another set of hardcore punks who voluntarily put an “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning” on their independently released CD. But Sigma already distinguishes itself as perhaps the only group in any musical genre outside of Up With People to list a “band meaning” on…
Three years ago, producer/engineer Otto D’Agnolo was of two minds about the decline of originality and forward thinking in the record industry, so he did something about it. He split himself in two — literally. Sick of being told by A&R people with the musical impulses of a hand buzzer…
From Nirvana to The Donnas in just three moves! Those of you who only remember the post-grunge urgings of “Get Free” but let The Vines suffer the slings of sophomore slump alone might be surprised to find the abundance of tambourines, handclaps and songs under two minutes (seven out of…
Whenever indie rock has veered too close to becoming like a traditional form of music — whether it’s by-the-book Class of ’77 punk, emo with sanctioned sad chords, press-the-distortion-pedal-here grunge, or power-pop that eschews anything Big Star or Cheap Trick hasn’t already tackled — that’s when it’s failed us as…
A lot has been said about this Tucson man and his trademark public address system/helmet. Like, if Evel Knievel had been wearing Bob Log headgear back in the day, we would’ve heard “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!” a whole mess of times as he plummeted down Snake River Canyon. And if Bob…
March 5 will find most of the world gearing up for the 78th Academy Awards, but here in Phoenix, everyone with more than one use for a safety pin will still be coming down from the AZ Ska Punk festivities the night before. These two gala events would appear to…
Before 2005, the only memorable thing Las Vegas had to offer rock ‘n’ roll was a kick-ass Elvis movie with Ann-Margret in it. Then along came The Killers with their painted peepers and Duran Duran pinches, and now following close behind in public consciousness is Panic! at the Disco (these…
In the 2003 documentary Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop, Prime Minister Tony Blair gets more screen time for his contributions to the genre than Supergrass. Maybe that’s because Gaz Coombes, Mickey Quinn and Danny Goffey weren’t directly responsible for ’90s Britpop’s rise or fall as much…
Compared to the pandemonium you’d encounter on, say, a Mariah Carey tour when the wrong color limo arrives, the relative bedlam of a well-oiled machine like the Taste of Chaos tour might seem sedate. Created by Warped Tour mastermind Kevin Lyman as a successful off-season counterpart to Warped, Taste of…
For aging punks still enamored of nihilism but tired of playing all those pneumatic downstrokes, the allure of country music isn’t hard to see. After all, three out of four of The Ramones are dead, but those guys in Alabama still rise each morning to kick the shit once again…
