Want to know what new release discs and platters are moving across the Valley at local record stores? We’ve got you covered with another installment of What’s Selling. Looks like Fleet Foxes are doing pretty well this week, with their heady folk album Helplessness Blues. Foo Fighters are rocking solid,…
The Best Friends’ CD release show is coming up on Saturday, May 21 at the Trunk Space. Prepare to have a good time with your own best friends at 7:30 p.m.If you and your friends wish the show would come sooner, keep yourself in check with this video of Liam’s…
Chicago indie-folk troubadour Joe Pugliese, known better as Joe Pug, has a baby face and an old man’s soul. The 25-year-old former carpenter and aspiring playwright emerged a few years ago with his Nation of Heat EP — a temperate yet self-assured collection of songs that seemed more the work…
Love it or hate it, but Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist is the closest thing that contemporary industrial music has to a bona fide rock star. While his promotional materials and highly publicized boozing and philandering have gone a long way to create and perpetuate this reputation, his band’s music and…
When you see the name White Denim, it’d be understandable to assume that the band would be some type of hair-metal tribute act. And while White Denim would make an awesome name for a ’80s cover band, this act is definitely not stuck in the Reagan era. Instead, White Denim…
Ska punk’s come a long way since its beginnings in the late ’70s with bands like The Specials and Madness. While those bands helped pioneer the 2 Tone music genre by combining elements of reggae with New Wave, the ska punk wave that hit in the ’80s was a lot…
It takes real skills to maintain staying power in the realm of hip-hop. Just look at such one-hit wonders as Buck 65, The Ying Yang Twins, and Das EFX, all of which have faded into rap history. Thankfully, the proficient peeps behind The Blunt Club have little in common with…
Bad news for any hipsters who like to stay up late in style: The Quincy ain’t gonna be hosting any more after-hours affairs until the end of the summer. Photographer Quincy Ross is taking a break from presenting parties at his CenPho studio and gallery for the next few months.There…
Seether’s sixth studio album, Holding Onto Strings Better Left to Fray, comes out today. The good news is, fans of the band will find that this is Seether’s best album yet. The bad news is, it’s still not good enough to garner the band a whole lot of new fans…
Danger Mouse has done a lot of things over the course of his career, but Rome, his new album released yesterday with composer Daniele Luppi, may be one of his best projects. As a producer, Danger Mouse (born Brian Burton), has received accolades for his work with artists like the…
Sound Strike, the movement in which musicians boycott Arizona as a statement of opposition to the state’s anti-illegal immigrant law, SB 1070, is still going strong. As we reported in recent months, acts like Maroon 5 and My Chemical Romance, who had concerts booked in the Valley, canceled them as part…
Everyone had a reaction to last weekend’s downing of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, even the superstars of hip-hop.Rappers ranging from Public Enemy’s Chuck D to Soulja Boy had something to say about Bin Laden’s death via Twitter. For instance, Lupe Fiasco tweeted “Osama Dead!?! Afghan Operation done now??? Now kill…
Like they always say, “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.” In honor of this most important credo, I now present my list of the top ten best You Asked For It songs…
Genre revivals are interesting phenomena that don’t always occur in chronological order. For example, the current thrash metal revival has been going strong since the early 2000s, but the New Wave of British Heavy Metal sound that served as a precursor to the original thrash uprising in the 1980s is…
Jared Alan used to be the hipster king of Saturday nights. Back during the heyday of the weekly Cheap Thrills wingdings (which have since become a monthly), Mr. FauxShow himself packed ’em by the hundreds for a night of dancing and debauchery. Alan’s flipped the script and switched over to…
It’s fitting that the first song on The Black Angels’ recently released album, Phosphene Dreams, is titled “Bad Vibrations.” The album is chock-full of them. That isn’t to say that the latest record from the Austin psych-rock band is bad, just probably not the type of thing you want to…
In the nearly five decades The Moody Blues have been around, they’ve sold almost 70 million records worldwide, a pretty staggering number that seems almost incomprehensible by today’s standards. But one of the nice things about being a musician before the Internet existed was that people actually bought your music…
For me, Brian McKnight will forever live in a clip from the original 90210, performing for ill-fated couple Donna and Noah in a restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles. Even though I may not need to hear anything from McKnight ever again, after his early 2000s urban adult contemporary heyday slowed…
Michelle Shocked’s sophomore album, Short Sharp Shocked (1988), was a best-selling rebuke of the walkin’-on-sunshine Valium binge that ruled pop music in the late 1980s. Filled with pissed-off-sounding folk-rock paeans to the American condition, the album also sported a magnificently jarring cover image: A black-and-white photo of Shocked (born Michelle…
With a name like Dirty Pretty, you’d expect lots of gorgeous gals, and if you’re lucky, ladies that want to get down and dirty. I’m not sure about the dirty half of the equation, but the pretty were out in full force. Check out this week’s Club Candids to see…
Such is the case for today. Pala — the sophomore album from British dance rockers Friendly Fires — is now streaming in full thanks to the fine folks at the Hype Machine. Details about the album — plus the stream itself — are after the jump…
Today, The Cars release their first record since 1987’s Door to Door. The new album, Move Like This, also marks the band’s first album without bassist and co-lead vocalist Benjamin Orr, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, twelve years after The Cars broke up.Orr’s harmonies and bass lines are…
