Stupidity can’t really be called a cultural offense anymore, especially in pop music, where seemingly every successful act now can be evaluated in degrees of dumb. Eminem? The king of dumb — white trash as satirical commentary. Hilary Duff? Too dumb to write her own songs. Those annoying smiley guys…
Calling punk an attitude has become an MTV-generation cliché. It’s used as a post-mortem tribute to a musician’s rebelliousness: Johnny Cash, yo, that guy was punk. But there’s more resonance, now, in punk as an attitude than in its descriptiveness of a sound or a scene — if you accept…
A voice made of crumpled paper, guitar straight from Highway 61, tempo that wavers like the consciousness of porch-sitting bluesman: “The Muss of Paradise” sounds like many of the songs Tucson’s Howe Gelb has done with Giant Sand and other bands. And then, the song, by Gleb’s freewheeling vernacular-music collective…
Americana is real big with the underground right now — the deep underground, a mini-movement The Wire magazine dubbed the “New Weird America.” A loose confederation of noise-rock refugees and various other beatniks deeply suspicious of technology and progress, the New Weird America bands are all about “freedom” — freedom…
Don’t look for any glossy dental work on Heartworn Highways. No rounded biceps. No Venetian Blind-like abs. These days, such equipment is as vital to up-‘n’-comin’ country stars as big hats, but such trappings are refreshingly absent in this raw and riveting look back to Nashville music circa 1975. Just…
It may be no coincidence that Summer Hymns chose Clemency as the title for its latest album. While most people associate the word these days with a governor’s mercy toward death row inmates, this Athens, Georgia alt-country band clearly prefers the alternate meaning: mildness. The 14 songs on the album,…
Bands are usually one thing or another. They either rock out with roaring guitars, beguile you with catchy melodies or awe you with the majesty of rich, soaring arrangements. Heavenly States is rare in that they’re capable of all three. The San Francisco quartet’s self-titled debut is assured and well…
No doubt you’ve gotten on with your life since 1991, but we here at the Muso Band Institute have been torturing ourselves for more than a decade with one persistent, nagging question — “Is Primus a muso band?” Year after excruciating year of listening to slap happy bassists thwack a…
The Mason Jar is a metal club. Can’t deny it. The Phoenix institution was a metal club when it opened 25 years ago. It really became one under the ownership of Franco Gagliano, a gregarious Italian immigrant whose booking turned the Jar into Spandex central in the ’80s and early…
Once you’re nearing your fourth decade as a recording artist, your audience has every reason to expect you will never again make an album that hits the ball out of the park 13 out of 13 times. Hell, they’ll be happy if you lumber around the bases even once like…
Prior to 2003, Death Cab for Cutie were merely one more articulate bunch of emo kids. One glimpse of their alabaster pigmentation told the story: Sensitive, brokenhearted, anxious, awkward and only occasionally compelling. Disappointments? Abandonment issues? Frontman Ben Gibbard had plenty of both. Learning how to make these gripes worth…
Sticking The Bled with the “hardcore” tag seems unfair. Pass the Flask, the young Tucson quintet’s 10-song, 38-minute full-length debut, is a much more ambitious undertaking than most of the so-called “screamo” records that have flooded the punk market over the past year. “A lot of the times in hardcore,…
Hip-hop progresses deep into the 21st century with the arrival of Quannum Projects producer Lyrics Born’s debut album Later That Day, an imaginative, future-looking, ass-quaking work of art. From the crew (once called Soulsides, now Quannum Projects) that first came together on the university campus in Davis, California, in the…
With Hot Shit, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss of Qusai continue the get-in-the-van good fight. In the past, Quasi existed as a kind of musical juxtaposition: The duo was married but formed the band after its divorce, and though the music consisted of a big happy organ, in-the-pocket drums and…
“People accuse me of being a pussy. But that’s cool. I don’t care. ” Shawn Harrington sits quietly on the patio of the crowded sports bar McDuffy’s in Tempe, nursing a Corona. He squirms as he searches for the right words to describe his songwriting process, which has enabled him…
“My focus is on trying to convey the mood, the atmosphere inside his head, the red-headed stranger,’ the preacher that finds his wife and lover, kills them, and goes off on a killing spree. I wanted to convey the maelstrom, the loneliness he is feeling, instrumentally. I want the person…
Phoenix-bred duo The Format won a coveted major-label deal and got to tour on the WB’s dime and borrow Guns N’ Roses’ newest drummer — on the strength of just five songs and five live shows. Calling these guys unlikely rock stars is like calling an AK-47 a water pistol…
How can you not like a band that invites you to stop and sniff the glue in Teletubbyland? On Guitar Romantic, Portland’s Exploding Hearts restore the exuberance to rock ‘n’ roll. They make the White Stripes sound like a modern art installation. The dye may be fading on the Exploding…
In 2001, the unreleased album cover to the Coup’s Party Music, which showed group leader Boots gleefully detonating a bomb to blow up the World Trade Center, became a symbol of the post-9/11 debate between civil liberties and patriotism. Two years later, Sonic Jihad, the fifth album by Paris, the…
Sad and beautiful, the Handsome Family sounds like an eerie prairie wind knocking over a freaky-looking scarecrow. Singing about strangled women, insane farmers and blind men who hear angels whispering inside potatoes, this married couple of 15 years, Rennie and Brett Sparks, write lovely but gloomy songs that take place…
Kenny Chesney must be stewing. The cowrie shell, black-hat-wearing country star thrives on all things beach and Jimmy Buffett (see the song “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems”). For crying out loud, the guy’s new album is called All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan. So Chesney,…
Tattoos fade, piercings close, bad attitudes mellow — every punk’s gotta grow up. Unfortunately, the shoulders of the punk-rock highway are littered with the rusting remains of many a veteran outfit that refused to surrender their thrashy, sloppy, wanna-be-youthful fuck-all approach even after it had veered well into the caricature…
