The Pizza Underground is so last year. In terms of this year’s hit junk food parody cover band, it’s so-called “drive-through metal,” brought to you by the greasy sarcasm of Mac Sabbath, who turned Crescent Ballroom into a corporate cesspit for two hours on Friday night. I had a flat…
On one of the last, sickeningly hot days of June, Numb Bats are a little on edge. The punk trio are still deciding on a set list for their gig at the Echo in Los Angeles while also trying to wrap up an EP and prep for an extensive Midwestern…
Yo, you wanna smoke some weed? Chances are, this is the first thing you’ll hear from HotRock SupaJoint once he walks through the door. This particular Saturday night, he’s crashing through the gates of Chop N Wok, a Chinese takeout bar in North Scottsdale. The instant the tall, gangly rapper…
By sheer coincidence, when we call Aaron Weiss, it is exactly one year to the day from his getting married. If you know a little about the mewithoutYou frontman, you understand how bizarre tying the knot was for him. But for a band that is consistently and creatively reinventing itself,…
Serving the Self Clap Your Hands singer likes the new album, and that’s enough for him. A decade ago, bassist Tyler Sargent began mailing out copies of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled debut from his home in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t long before the indie pop band caught the attention…
Symphony of Butter Knives Meet Harrison Hufman, Phoenix’s 13-year-old experimental musician. With a giant red sock pulled over his face, Harrison Hufman pounds a cheap, red electric guitar with two butter knives, occasionally smacking a crash cymbal. He softly groans threats to call the cops into a mic awash in…
When Will Butler struck out on his own with his debut solo effort, Policy, it was expected that the Arcade Fire synth whiz would explore much of the same territory as his band. In some ways, he did. In discussing Arcade Fire, it’s imperative to talk about the nature of…
It’s hard to believe, but EDM wasn’t always the heavily commercialized glut we see raving in Mountain Dew commercials during the Super Bowl. Infected Mushroom, the psytrance DJ duo formed in the Haifa District of Israel, can remember when EDM was considered a fringe genre. But now, thanks to the…
Like a front snap punch to the throat, Melt-Banana’s erratic noise will shower you with peals of explosive abandon not unlike Foetus’ or Drive Like Jehu’s. The Japanese noise duo — Yasuko Onuki, responsible for the band’s chirping, hyperactive vocals, and Ichirou Agata, who likes to layer his guitar riffs…
Expectations can pollute an experience, but you’d assume a Saul Williams show would incorporate spoken word, hip-hop, and theater, the trifecta the New York rapper is known for. In this regard, Williams did not disappoint when he performed at Club Red on a Tuesday night in Mesa. In other areas,…
If any paradigm were to most accurately sum up existence on this blue marble, it would describe the dichotomy of good and bad. In plain English, we would marvel at What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World it is, which happens to be the title of The Decemberists’ latest…
Socially-conscious hip-hop has been an important theme since the genre’s infant years, but actor/poet/rapper Saul William’s industrial slam poet’s approach to social injustice has the ability to rise above mere proselytizing. His third full-length, 2007’s The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (produced by NIN’s Trent Reznor) was a messianic…
Even with all the great gifts the internet blesses us with (gag me), booking shows can still be a frustrating chore. For musicians, knowing which venues are ideal or which promoter might actually, you know, promote you can involve a lot of who-knows-who and nepotism. For promoters, it can be…
Whether you’re going through a midlife crisis (complete with the ponytail and motorcycle) or you don’t know how to deal with the fact that your son is gay (gasp! I knew he shouldn’t have gone to art school!) Fathers Day knows how you feel. But more so than usual, the…
Aly Spaltro, known to the masses as Lady Lamb, manages herself, but most of all, she challenges herself. Her second full-length, After, is 12 songs of radio-friendly, bright-eyed folk pop, but it’s a departure from her previous long-winded efforts. “I arranged the drums on the record, which was a new…
Before indie rock was a thing, like the hip, Urban Outfitters thing we know today, there was Built to Spill, one of the most indie of indie bands to ever indie. Which is kind of confusing, because the band has been on Warner Bros. Records for most of its career,…
Nobody makes sullenness seem so stylish as New York’s brooding post-punk band Interpol. As part of the so-called post-punk revival in the early- to mid-2000s, the quartet (now a threesome) helped re-popularize a genre largely forgotten by the huddled masses. Alongside the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the White…
At first, Dick Dale peeks his face around the corner of the stage door, grinning, being coy, but then he marches onstage, guns blazing, his golden guitar already screaming. He’s looking limber, arching in his New Balances, all smiles. He was a tailor, already sewing into us, then cutting us…
“If I stop, I’ll die,” Dick Dale says over the phone, then laughs. “When I die, it’s going to be an explosion of body parts onstage.” The term ‘legend’ should never be used lightly, but Dick Dale certainly deserves it, having not only practically invented surf music, but his upside…
On the gorgeous spring afternoon that Dinosaur Love agrees to meet me, he insists on rendezvousing in front of the giant red Tyrannosaurus Rex outside the Phoenix Art Museum, because of course he does. The singular mind behind this obsessive music project, better known as Peter Kulikowski, arrives modeling a…
That epileptic seizure warning at the beginning of “Tony,” the new music video by Instructions, isn’t a joke. Directed by Ryan Lee Caldwell, the video is a psychedelic spinout through a nostalgic maze of blown-out color. In order to better represent their core dynamic, Instructions made their video for “Tony”…
Death via noise may be Oliver Ackermann’s end goal, but A Place To Bury Stranger’s frontman says he doesn’t have tinnitus yet. “Maybe things are a little bit quieter,” the guitarist tells us. “But I still feel like I can hear the full spectrum of sound. I guess I’m pretty…
