Even if the night hadn’t ended with whip-its and Adult Mad-Libs, my recent Saturday night excursion onto Mill Avenue in Tempe would still be among my most fun forays into Valley nightlife ever. It was a pleasant surprise, because I don’t usually hang out on Mill, the main drag in…
UK chanteuse Amy Winehouse is quickly becoming known for two things: her drinking habit and her amazing voice. She combines the two on “Rehab,” the opening song on her second album, Back to Black, in which she sings, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no no no”…
For Amon Tobin’s Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 Soundtrack, the Brazilian-born UK resident and producer/DJ spun delicately assembled cinematic instrumentals into epic nightmarish video-game backdrops, boasting chopped organ and string section bits over boisterous drum breaks. It was another impressive exercise in Tobin’s venturesome sound manipulation, but Foley Room presented…
In a progressive jazz culture dominated by New York and Chicago, other towns with improvised music scenes tend to get the shaft. That’s too bad, because pockets of experimental sounds — from Santa Cruz, California, to Montague, Massachusetts — continue to challenge and imbue eardrums. A perfect example is Look…
It’s funny how trends turn in terms of the cool becoming passé and the unspeakably lame becoming “the shit.” For first-wave punks, guitar solos were as voguish as a Three’s Company T-shirt; the ascendance of Meat Puppets and Dinosaur Jr. made nimble-fingered six-string aerobics stylish again. Generations of indie-rock aesthetes…
Though there is no shortage of young, angst-ridden musicians with angst-ridden tales to tell, ultimately, the power of a story is in its telling — a notion that puts Dave Smallen, the brains and emotion behind Oakland’s Street to Nowhere, at the top of his game. Comparisons to Bright Eyes’…
Santa Cruz’s Comets on Fire. D.C.’s Dead Meadow. Japan’s Ghost. Add Atlanta’s Deerhunter to the list. With the summer of ’07 fast approaching, a new slew of bands is channeling the ghosts of the Summer of Love, 40 years after the original hippie counterculture movement. Like their parents in the…
Yes, it’s been too long since ZZ Top has made a song half as brilliant as “La Grange” or “Tube Snake Boogie.” But if classic rock has taught us anything, and we both know it has, it’s that it doesn’t matter if an old band’s new stuff isn’t fit to…
Even though Camp Crystal Lake ain’t anywhere near P-Town, the dance demons of ClixBagofTricks and Mafiatic will channel the teen-slashing spirit of Jason Voorhees for their latest raucous rave event, My Friend Jason’s House. The horrifying all-night hootenanny on Friday, April 13 (natch), sounds like something the hockey mask-clad killer…
The new CD by local industrial metal band The Iris sounds like a sonic blueprint for a band that’s finding its sound, and getting hotter by the minute. But the blueprint isn’t new — Marilyn Manson, Deftones, and a dozen other bands drew it. What’s great about The Vanity Fair…
We’ve been on a roll with the weekday party circuit, so Club Candids decided to make a humpday run for one of Tempe’s favorite neighborhood drinking digs, Casey Moore’s, on Wednesday, April 4. We can always count on this old standby for attractive twentysomethings looking to unwind on a school…
Mesa may not be known for a totally bumpin’ night life, but when we heard about “Sound in the Ground: Jelly/Belly” on Thursday, March 29 at Mesa Contemporary Arts, we thought it might be worth checking out — especially because Mesa Arts Center is one of the most sleek and…
Axel Willner’s debut album stutters so much, sometimes it’s as if the speakers will wobble off the table’s edge and crash to the floor in pieces. As The Field, Willner casts his ubiquitous, reliable software looping techniques in a frequently satisfying light on From Here We Go Sublime, one of…
“I’ll await you, while you’re cheating/lightning strikes you when you’re moving,” sings Blonde Redhead frontwoman Kazu Mikino, whose vocals float atop rhythmic looping riffs in “The Dress,” as she delves into loving-you-less and proves that early-’90s dreamy art-rock can still survive in today’s power-pop-oriented world. The album’s title track opens…
West Coast electro-shoegaze outfit Languis took its already compelling sound to towering heights last year on the mysterious, electronically enhanced stoner pop of Other Desert Cities. For Split, their shared platform with Bay Area leftfield hip-hop duo Meanest Man Contest, Languis apparently developed the medicated-drone end of what comes out…
A recurring problem with many Americana/neo-roots-music performers can be summed up thusly: Terminal Earnestness, an affliction that compels a songster to prove how salt-of-the-earth “authentic” s/he is, no matter what graduate program they recently opted out of. Of course, some take the opposite (though equally tedious) tack of Excessive Irreverence,…
This band named its latest effort The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. And it sounds like the devil is getting all the better punches in as Jesse Lacey leads Brand New through moments as explosive as the chorus hook of “Sowing Season,” howling “Yeah” as though the word…
November 2000: With filming on the multimillion-dollar Lord of the Rings trilogy almost complete, New Line Cinema’s mercenary cavalry teams silently scour the moors and mountain peaks of New Zealand in a desperate search for the three experimental vat-grown hobbits who have escaped the top-secret holding pen. Raised on a…
Combining the dulcet tones of the Beach Boys with melodies so infectious the Beatles might turn green with envy, The Shins typify what’s right with early 21st-century pop music. This is not Clear Channel’s contrived cookie-cutter pop. This is indie pop, complete with ’80s nods, country flourishes, and truly clever…
They were able to sell more than five million copies of their bottom-shaking, New Wave-flavored debut, Hot Fuss. But the Killers clearly learned a thing or two about playing the long odds in their Vegas stomping grounds, returning last October with a second effort, Sam’s Town, that, surprisingly, owes less…
Although he’s already won a Grammy, remixed such folks as Madonna and the Rolling Stones, and sold out dance clubs around the world, superstar spinster Ali Shirazinia (a.k.a. Dubfire) ain’t about to rest on his laurels just yet. The Iranian-born turntablist, who serves as one half of DJ duo Deep…
Fu Manchu’s King of the Road was a modern-day stoner-rock classic, kicking off the new millennium with a shit-eating grin that said “Maybe we’re joking and maybe we’re not, but either way you will be rocked beyond all recognition by the time we’re through.” And get this: Nearly every song…
