Music

Compile the best of R.E.M.’s earliest output on one CD, and it’s easy to see why they ultimately became one of the biggest bands in the world: optimism. That’s the overwhelming feeling pervading Fine, a smartly sequenced collection spanning the Athens, Georgia, then-quartet’s pre-major-label years. R.E.M. had nothing to lose…

There are memorable collaborations throughout Will “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy” Oldham’s musically promiscuous career, including recent ones with Tortoise, Matt Sweeney, and Jason Molina. The latest to bear fruit is with Drag City labelmate Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables, whose contributions to The Letting Go are understated by such adjectives as…

The drummers of rock ‘n’ roll lore are either dead (Cozy Powell, John Bonham), notorious chick-magnet partyers (Tommy Lee), or both (Keith Moon, Benny Benjamin). The drummers on Drum Nation Volume 3 are none of the above. But they are some of the heaviest hitters in metal and hard rock…

For those who miss the raw, adolescent, power-crunch pop of Superchunk’s early days, Mac McCaughan’s new Portastatic album may be disappointing. The Merge Records head honcho has crafted his most adult effort to date, full of oboe, flute, and string arrangements over a lazy, North Carolina drawl of guitars, bass,…

Connecticut’s Hatebreed comes out of that whole late-’80s/early-’90s Youth Crew, “We’re all about unity and positivity, and we’ll kick the ass of anyone who says different” mindset fostered by the New York and Boston hardcore scenes. It has managed to bash out four albums of monochromatic metalcore — the latest…

Celtic Frost is one of the few ’80s thrash giants that hasn’t been co-opted by the forces of hipster irony. The Swiss hellions released an inexplicable (and excellent) hair metal album in 1988’s Cold Lake, but that’s not what you want from the death/doom/black-metal pioneers. (Kurt Cobain was a big…

Listening to tracks off Sugarcult’s new album, Lights Out (V2), you would never know this is the same group of four men that annoyed MTV viewers senseless with its Van Wilder-tie-in video for “Bouncing Off the Walls” a few years back. Two albums — and one giant tour with Green…

Let’s face it. Most singer-songwriter music is lukewarm high school poetry without the hooks and energy that seem to make the lukewarm high school poetry you get with Fall Out Boy — or even Ashlee Simpson — that much easier to swallow. Then, there’s James McMurtry. It’s not that the…

Over the course of the past decade, and with four highly innovative — and sadly underrated — indie albums, L.A.-based hip-hop artist Busdriver built a reputation in the underground by spitting poignant rhymes with a sense of humor set against fiercely danceable street beats and eclectic instrumentation. He never seems…

Although temperatures might be cooling down with the onset of fall here in the PHX, San Francisco’s DJ Jacaranda and the flame-flinging freaks of local fire performance troupe S_T_3 are gonna be heating up your Thursday nights over at Ichiban Japanese Restaurant, 1435 East University Drive in Tempe. At their…

Be careful what you ask for. Detractors of the emo scene have complained since guys started wearing girls’ jeans and combing all their hair over their faces for something less wrist-slittingly depressing and overall less, well, emo. Well, here it is: From First to Last, a young band (the members…

There’s a goofy little beach scene on the album cover that could fool you into thinking these guys made a surf-rock record. But it’s nothing like that, really. Sure, they do a track called “Surf” that starts off as a shameless “Pipeline” knockoff, but before the song is through, they’ve…

The first CD from local bluesician Paris James harks back to the back-porch country blues of the 1920s, when players like Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson were finger-picking through a mix of folk, gospel hymns, and Delta blues. The sounds of spirituals and the South that dominate James’ CD…

Surrounded by mountains of amps stacked and cranked to unhealthy heights, Jucifer can shatter half of generic modern metal’s fibulas with just its feedback. The coed Atlanta duo literally rattles plaster loose, and drummer Edgar Livengood pounds the skins so hard he has broken his bones mid-set. The smash-riff-bash stoner-rockers’…

Rap producer James “J Dilla” Yancey, who died of lupus at age 32 in February, didn’t yet have the industry clout of peers like the Neptunes or Kanye West, but he sure had their respect, working with everybody from Ghostface Killah to Janet Jackson. This spring’s Donuts, an instrumental disc,…

Marriage is all about communication, compromise, and . . . psychedelic indie rock. At least it is for Kevin and Anita Robinson, otherwise known as Viva Voce, who have popped out four albums of the stuff since 1998. The Portland, Oregon, couple’s latest, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, channels marital…

Last fall, Art Brut was the hotness du jour, the toast of all things hipster and good. A year later, the South London band is still touring behind its now-old album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll. The quintet, whose album was issued this spring by New York label Downtown Records…