Today’s kickoff day for the music industry’s biggest orgy of shmoozing, boozing, and trying to see far too many bands in a brief period of time – the 2007 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. I won’t be there – my illustrious music editor Niki D’Andrea is on her…
My apologies for my brief absence from the interweb blogging thing recently; a trip to San Diego without the appropriate power source for a laptop left me unable to play with all the angry people that Marshall Beck, who I blogged about here a while back, recruited to cry and…
After last year’s Rock N The Seas cruise from Los Angeles to Ensenada, which featured a shitload of booze consumption and music from a grip of Arizona bands like the Gin Blossoms, Dead Hot Workshop, Sand Rubies, Rich Hopkins, and Ghetto Cowgirl, I was kicking myself for not going this…
The Black Parade had all the makings of a total drag. A concept album devoted to death? Yeah, those are always fun. But New Jersey rock darlings My Chemical Romance stared death in the face and decided to send out for Liza Minnelli, who sounds right at home on an…
Meg & Dia, a four-piece power-pop outfit out of Utah, is bulwarked by a strong confessional singer-songwriter sensibility and fronted by sisters Meg (21, guitars and lyrics) and Dia (19, vocals) Frampton. In shorthand: They’re everything Ashlee Simpson likes to imagine she is. More interesting, though, is the relationship between…
The Inimitable George Tabb What seems like a million years ago — but was really just half-a-lifetime, when I was 15 or 16, I was a faithful/fanatical reader of Maximum Rock N Roll. If you don’t know, it was the bible of punk rock, a newsprint compilation of all the…
SiOP The band SiOP’s press release begins, “SiOP was formed in the summer of 1998 and has been on the rise ever since.” Truth is, SiOP never left 1998 and its plethora of shit bands: Static-X, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, the Bizkit, etcetera. Here’s the goods on SiOP’s latest album,…
A little over three years ago, I wrote here in my column Revolver about the sad descent of Zia Records from a truly indie and customer oriented record store into an algorhythmically stocked clone of chains like Tower and Best Buy. I would venture to guess that a lot of…
Other than a few years of classical piano as a preteen, I never learned to play music. My parents wouldn’t buy me a guitar or a drum kit, I never got to sing in front of an audience (thankfully, since I can’t sing), and I never had a rock band…
In the 30 years since its inception, hip-hop has grown from a means of expression for oppressed black youth to a major force in American popular culture. As such, hip-hop has been appropriated by all segments of our society — most controversially, by young white suburbanites. Fortune Small Business editor…
For nearly 20 years, the Queers have made a crude pop art of thrashing through their most infectious songs with the reckless abandon of a hardcore band — a really funny hardcore band that worships the Ramones and The Beach Boys. They actually cover the Beach Boys in one of…
“I thought it was garbage,” says guitarist Kenny Florence, recalling the first time singer/songwriter Adam Baker let him hear the new songs he’d been writing as Annuals. “The first few songs, I really didn’t like. And he’ll admit to you that they’re just not that great,” Florence says. “But then,…
Skerlak Dead’s tunes from the vault Sometimes some really weird shit comes across my desk, like this album, Remnants Resolved, by Skerlak Dead with four songs this Phoenix-based guy M. Skerlak recorded back in 1984, and two that he recorded in 1961. According to his myspace page, dude is 61…
don’t buy this I happily admitted in a previous column that I was a fan of Authority Zero frontman Jason Devore’s solo album, Conviction. But I also made it clear that I don’t appreciate or understand AZ’s music; I find it generic, formulaic, and oftentimes a bad blend of genres…
trippin’ out with the Squid A few weeks back I wrote here in my column Revolver about the instrumental sensation that is Attack of the Giant Squid, and in the blog I’ve mentioned Squid homeboys An Aesthetic as well. Both are fucking great bands, and I just received word from…
these guys scare me I’m not sure what it is about me that attracts the dregs of humanity; there are numerous examples I can site — I spent a year dating a stripper, then my friends try to hook me up with a (half-assed) recovering heroin addict as a girlfriend…
Upstairs at the recent One Stop Shop hip-hop producers’ conference (sponsored by G-Unit), I’m at the booth of Money Management, the company that manages 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, Young Buck, Tony Yayo, and more, talking to a cat named Kasper about the state of music in Phoenix. I tell him…
In the theoretical “school of rock,” Isis front man Aaron Turner would be the kid at the head of the class who has an eloquent answer for every question and writes the essays that the teacher always reads aloud to the rest of the class. Or maybe he’d be the…
The pioneering British gore-metal band Carcass may’ve disbanded in 1995, but its legacy has never been stronger. In fact, not content merely to borrow from the masters, an entire new subgenre of unashamed copycat bands has arisen in Carcass’ wake, each one an attempt to cut closer to the heart…
“I think we all strive for some sort of identity or knowing of self,” says 30 Seconds to Mars drummer Shannon Leto from his car in Los Angeles. “The way to go about it can be a little rough around the edges, but I don’t think there’s an arrival date…
Occasionally I receive CD’s from local bands that need some constructive criticism, to put it politely. Today I’ve got two for you… The first, and least offensive, is Captain Squeegee and the Soap Suds, which other than earning an honorary doctorate in dumb-band-naming, really need to figure out what the…
Impossible Ones vs. the World Finally, the Impossible Ones are releasing the album that I wrote about what seems ages ago… and the band already has a video finished for the first single, “Bats in the Belfry.” See if you can catch any lip- or instrumental-synching, they didn’t film this…
