The atmosphere at O’Mallys on a late spring Tuesday night is pumped. The west Phoenix nightspot, an odd mix of sports bar, swank lounge and dance club, is an urban hip-hop magnet. Especially this night, when an amateur freestyle rap battle has drawn a triple-digit audience. Up-and-coming rhyming hopefuls throw…
“I wasn’t planning on doing this. It was just something I did out of necessity, and then it just kind of turned into my life.” Larry Elyea, veteran musician and guitarist for the hard-core metal band Gift, is the most sought after hard-rock producer in the Valley. He estimates he…
Radiohead have mastered the prog-rock singer-songwriter album — finally. Hail to the Thief, the British band’s latest, is at once an intense personal statement by bandleader Thom Yorke and a celestial dose of guitar heroics, blips, echoes, rattles, moans and other distortions. But the new album also matches mood with…
Marilyn Manson’s appetite for destruction needs sustenance. After 10 years of singing fight songs in fishnets, Manson has been advocating the end of everything for so long that he’s in danger of negating even himself. The shock-rocker’s last disc, 2000’s half-baked Holy Wood, was dismissed by critics and passed over…
The PC forces may not want to hear this, but the porn industry of the 1970s wasn’t all bad. It created numerous professional opportunities for artists, and I’m not necessarily talking about Bambi Woods and John Holmes. Writers like Nick Tosches and Sam Shepard helped fill up countless pages in…
The success of country singer Kenny Chesney — he of the shiny face and black cowboy hat pulled far below his brow — slyly parallels his hit “Big Star.” The Luttrell, Tennessee, native was playing clubs until songs like the ever-so-romantic “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” fell into his lap…
Fruit Bats are yet another example of a side project eclipsing a musician’s once main commitment. The Chicago band was first created to give head Fruit Eric Johnson (no, not the Archers of Loaf guy or the rad guitar rocker) an outlet from his main band, the now defunct and…
By 2000, Tuba City native and Navajo singer James Bilagody had seen his name recognition in Native American musical circles spread like the proverbial wildfire. In 1998, he contributed vocals to several tracks on Canadian Mohawk and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Robbie Robertson’s album Contact From the Underworld…
It’s three suburban white girls doin’ hip-hop like the Beastie Boys — only better. That’s the first thing I said to someone after hearing Northern State’s four-song, already-out-of-print EP Hip Hop You Haven’t Heard last summer, and I’m not changing my mind anytime soon, especially after hearing the Long Island…
Robin Wilson and Scott Johnson walk into Restaurant Mexico in Tempe on a Wednesday afternoon. They look tired. Johnson has just come from his 13-year-old daughter’s orthodontist’s appointment and can’t stay long; there’s a laundry list of other chores to perform. Wilson is itching to resume work on a solo…
Neko Case is hosting her fellow New Pornographers with care. Maybe it’s because five of them have flown in from Canada for a photo shoot, instead of her making the less costly trip to meet them, but I sense that she wants the evening to go well. Moving away from…
Idlewild formed in an era when rockin’ in the U.K. was as close to trendy as it’s been in recent memory. “We came up in 1995 and 1996. Everything was Oasis and Blur,” says Roddy Woomble, lead singer of the band, a five-piece from Edinburgh, Scotland, whose new album The…
A ballet rehearsal space seems an unlikely rock venue, but for more than 200 bored kids in Mesa last week, Jeanne’s Dance Studio filled the bill. The crowd turned out on May 24 for the third installment of a growing East Valley guitar pop festival known as Americopa Mantle. Eight…
The Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Staind’s Aaron Lewis are two of metal’s most emotive front men. Unlike most headbangers, they trade in tears as much as testosterone, though the two take different routes to your heart. The subtler of the two lyrically, Moreno conveys emotion through his voice more than…
San Francisco resident Topher Lafata has the same bright idea lots of other former indie-rockers are riding these days: Ditch the electric guitars, mopey breakup songs and human drummers that the mid-’90s proved could be so useful and feed all that pent-up postgrad angst into the computer instead, sharpening a…
With artists increasingly mining the base elements of hip-hop — beats and rhymes — and channeling them through electronica’s synthetic DNA, is it any surprise that we’ve now christened the term “post-hip-hop”? With their respective takes on the concept, Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher and A Grape Dope’s Missing Dragons…
Damon Albarn, lead singer of the Brit-pop band Blur, hasn’t made it much of a secret that he’s unhappy with his act’s lack of U.S. success. Initially, the only blip it made on the U.S. music radar was a media bitching match against Oasis, who shared a mutual disdain for…
These Bastards earned permission to use the Man in Black’s name from Johnny Cash himself, and while they are not really his blood, they do offer up a nice helping of working-class outlaw country that some of Johnny’s cronies ably could have made in the 1970s. While BSOJC have taken…
Jim James answers his cell phone on a very windy Sterling, Colorado, evening, about 140 miles from his band My Morning Jacket’s next gig in Boulder during a stop to get some grub. The limited food choices find the band settling for self-explanatory diner Country Kitchen. James, bandleader, songwriter and…
Good Charlotte is the punk band named after a kids’ book. Its young fans know Black Flag only as something that kills roaches. So it’s no wonder critics dismiss Good Charlotte’s anthemic pop as child’s play. In a number of ways, it is. “This song is dedicated to every kid…
On the newly released DVD Meat Puppets Alive in the Nineties, there’s a particularly alive moment from the early ’80s that Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore fondly remembers. “I had heard they were rambling across the country in a van and playing doughnut shops and they were coming to New York…
About 15 minutes into their set at the new Marquee Theatre in Tempe last Tuesday, Idaho guitar ambassadors Built to Spill blasted into “The Plan,” a bombastic, subtly melodic rocker. As 700 fans or so looked on, lead singer and ax man Doug Martsch sang the lyric, “The plan means…
