The psychedelic effects shine through sonically on Blanche Davidian’s second album. Songs like “Queef Action” and “Rottweilers Keep Following Me” brim with fuzz and roar with reverb behind singer Jamie Monistat VII’s spacey, snarky vocals, and the title track is a 61/2-minute raging jam. There’s even the occasional hippie vocal…
Ignore the cheesy cover art. Though it resembles a no-budget local LP pressing from 1970, Talk of the Town is one humdinger of a vocal album. For 40 years — you read right — Jerry Lawson was a singer with the long-lived a cappella group the Persuasions (who can count…
No one can accuse Gilbert’s Scary Kids Scaring Kids of lacking ambition. The local sextet’s self-titled second album is an epic song cycle characterized by the album-opening anthem “Degenerates,” which casts us into a jackbooted future, judging from all the clicks of pistol safeties and ominous helicopter hovering. The song…
Legend says that blues great Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil at the crossroads in exchange for ungodly musical skill. Dax Riggs, former singer/guitarist of indie-rock duo Dead Boy and the Elephantmen, seems to have had a similar meeting with Satan before recording this album. “Have mercy on…
Goodbye Tomorrow might sound like a ridiculously cynical name for a band that hasn’t even released its first album, but . . . well, okay, it is. One can’t help but imagine that lead singer Travis Bryant and his Phoenix-based crew are on some sort of suicide watch and, judging…
Digital Me is the perfect title for Step Kid’s debut EP. Combining the organic rhythms of hip-hop and jazz with the synthetic sounds of electronica and drum ‘n’ bass, the album has a pleasantly bipolar feeling that is slick and futuristic, but profoundly intimate at the same time. The solo…
From blandly cute child stardom to booty-licious, cold isolationism to diva-level, so-in-luv obsession to pan-media omnipresence — that’s the trail former Destiny’s Child centerpiece Beyoncé Knowles has blazed, and whether any of these poses/phases were sincere seems almost beside the point today. Knowles’ career has been such a master class…
If one band could be held responsible for the nü-metal phenomenon that rose in the wake of grunge, it’s safe to say that Korn would single-handedly take the blame. Defining the genre’s funky rock-meets-rap sound with the down-tuned guitars on their hugely influential 1994 debut, the group created a unit-moving…
Seriously swanky pool parties have been the “in” thing this summer, with tons of hotties and himbos hanging out at superchic swimming holes like the Mondrian and the Scottsdale Inn while downing designer drinks, catching some rays, and listening to DJs work the ones and twos. This weekend’s Wet Pool…
We’ve been spending a lot of time on www.dirtyscottsdale.com lately, so when the weekend rolled around, we were properly inspired to guzzle vodka somewhere in Scottsdale. We checked out Mickey’s Hangover on Friday, August 17, and to our relief, the boozers in attendance didn’t quite fit the bill for the…
I’m sad and I feel like crap because a close friend is moving away. That calls for some goodbye libations. I’m lonely enough in this conservative, transplant-filled, call-center-laden convection-oven Valley, and my only respite (well, aside from cocktails) is my close friends. The bigger this Valley swells, the more it…
Not content to sit still and merely conquer the real world, local b-boy legend and undisputed King of Beats DJ Z-Trip has expanded his empire to include video games. His newest effort is the soundtrack to All-Pro Football 2K8 for X-Box 360. The CD starts out with a stadium shaker…
If you took a hand counter to a televangelist, you’d click six times as many references to Satan as to his former boss — it’s way better for the play-acting to grouse and growl than it is to ape a stoic and benevolent Christ. So why should a screamo gospel…
I can hear the ghost of Billie Holiday now: “What the hell is that, a programmed drum beat? Why is it burying my vocals? How could they turn all my winsome wails into sound bites and samples? This is NOT the blues!” Perhaps the blues legend would be honored that…
It’s hard to tell if the musicians in Eroticide received too much attention from their mothers or if they received too little of it. Whatever the situation, it seems likely that the members of the band developed their rabidly misogynistic stage personas and live antics in response to some form…
Here’s a reconstituted ’70s classic-rock group with an otherwise engaged leader. Deep Purple’s grumpy guitar hero, Ritchie Blackmore, probably hasn’t even played the “Smoke on the Water” riff around the house since 1993, but clearly, Purple is the headliner. Besides the added value of having Dixie Dregs/Kansas guitarist Steve Morse…
This is not Frank Sinatra Jr. embarrassing his dad by warbling “My Way” for the Geritol geezers, nor is it Mercer Ellington working hard to do the Duke proud and missing the mark. And this is not a mixed bunch of ex-sidemen doing a songbook while a disembodied star with…
Most of the time, the songs that come to represent an artist in the public’s memory don’t do justice to the full scope of the artist’s musical accomplishments across an entire career. How many times do we find ourselves telling other people things like, “Yes, such-and-such band is really cool,…
Bust out the guyliner and yer Jack Sparrow duds, landlubbers, because the raving lunatics of Karma Productions and Nightowl Entertainment are, err . . . pirating Disney’s blockbuster high-seas adventure flicks for the theme of their latest all-night dance spectacular, Ravers of the Caribbean. SoCal spinsters DJ Jayvon and FESTER…
This week, Club Candids showed up to work with a hangover because we hit The Door on Wednesday night for the one-year anniversary of Groove Candy. The midweek hip-hop/R&B dance night was packed with folks dressed to the nines in their favorite urban garb. (Click here for more photos.) The…
Last weekend, we decided to bite the bullet and inconvenience ourselves with light-rail construction to visit one of our favorite central Phoenix standbys, the George & Dragon. (Click here for more photos.) With a decent crowd filling the pub, it was obvious that we weren’t the only ones ready to…
It’s not uncommon to jam some wax or silicone noise-stoppers into your ear holes while at the club, especially when hearing the Tempe-based, normally short-form punk trio of percussionist John Ryan Nelson, guitarist/effects-pedal fiddler James Fella, and saxophonist/vocalist/sometimes knob-twiddler Ashley Hohm, collectively known as Soft Shoulder. But when listening to…
