Sure, Starbucks’ in-store music — which has begat its own record label, Hear Music, and, since last August, “Media Bars” listening stations in selected coffee houses — gets all the buzz. But what about all the other “third places” we go to between home and work, where we’re treated to…
When I was fresh out of high school, I took off on a pilgrimage to Berkeley, California, the punk rock mecca of the early ’90s. While that was a hell of an adventure, my post-grad exploits ain’t shit compared to what the five Gilbert High School grads in the band…
Famed producer Rick Rubin, the man responsible for signing the now über-successful System of a Down, recently told the L.A. Times that SOAD guitarist/songwriter/vocalist/mastermind Daron Malakian is “a true artist.” Malakian, said Rubin, “doesn’t really live in the world. He lives in a bubble and the bubble is filled with…
Someday, somebody is going to trace the origin of these debilitating computer viruses to some well-paid nerds working for Sony, EMI and BMG trying to put the kibosh on your Kazaa and tangle up your Limewire. I can go out and purchase a second home in the time it takes…
All hail Lester Bangs! Bow down to the chosen critical few who light our way through the caverns of music. For there is an upstart we have let slide for far too long, but who we will indulge no longer. Source, here is your critical fatwa! Source, you have been…
If the Pernice Brothers’ newest full-length, Discover a Lovelier You, sounds just a little more optimistic than earlier releases, it’s an unintended nuance. Singer-songwriter Joe Pernice really doesn’t see it as a radical departure from 2003’s Yours, Mine and Ours, although the press has called it everything from his poppiest…
“You want road stories?” says Alfie Lucero, lead singer and bass player in the six-year-old Phoenix rock band Redfield, sharing some after-work drinks with the rest of the quartet at the George & Dragon pub on South 48th Street. “Oh, man! Where do we begin?” Mike Sandoval, the big, hulking…
You don’t ordinarily expect to find a young white woman from San Francisco digging deep into the heart of Crunk Country. But Tamara Palmer did just that in the course of researching her new book, Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip-Hop, which includes interviews with such playas, impresarios,…
When I visit Cory Spotts in the control room of his north Phoenix studio, he’s got his finger on the Valley’s musical future — quite literally. With a click of the mouse, a sizable chunk of the best stuff being produced in town reverberates through the room, and Spotts is…
From their perch on the stage of Denver’s Bluebird Theater, the members of Matson Jones look almost like shadows. Drummer Ross Harada, limbs splayed, pounds a beat as bare as a rattling skeleton. Next to him, Matt Regan coaxes notes from his upright bass. Seated before them are cellist/vocalists Martina…
Bottom line: Judas Priest forged, in iron and molten steel, the very foundation of heavy metal. The stoned-out, low-end pummeling of Black Sabbath seems a distant cousin to Priest’s screeching-eagle sound. Unlike their neo-satanic brethren, historically the Priest boys have largely concerned themselves with individual rights — specifically, the right…
In early June, we carry with us a touch of the reverse Midas. We are the black cat in your path. We are the ladder you walk underneath. Yea, verily we say unto you, everything we touch turns to shit. And it just might be contagious. Two months into a…
When I was a teenager working in a skateboard shop called G&B up in Anchorage, Alaska, skateboarding was an insular scene that even had music of its own: a blend of punk, hardcore and thrash known as skaterock. Personified by acts like Arizona’s own J.F.A., Gang Green, Suicidal Tendencies, Drunk…
Pouyan Afkary is oblivious to how successful he is. He’s a 19-year-old kid who graduated from Highland High School in Gilbert two years ago and immediately left for a life on the road with five of his classmates — the other members of emo-rock band Scary Kids Scaring Kids. After…
A confession: I like sad, introspective music by mopey boys who sing about their broken hearts, a.k.a. emo. At the same time, I also like to make fun of the stereotypical emo fashions and emo kids’ self-absorbed affected moodiness. I’m too grown-up to define myself by the music I listen…
7:41 a.m. Get a wake-up call from my 14-year-old nephew, Jeremy, who I’m taking to his very first Warped Tour. He asks to borrow my faded old Bad Brains tee shirt because his Bowling for Soup tee makes him “look like a noob.” 10:06 a.m. Traffic slows as we near…
I’ve been having nightmares lately, populated by drug addicts, orphans, a woman with her mouth sewn up, and occasionally two skinny Afroed Chicano guys who whisper sinister things in Spanish. They didn’t go away even after I saw the band that’s causing them — the Mars Volta — play live…
Last year, in the dead of summer — you know, the time of year when the sidewalks are still too hot to touch at midnight, and the heat sucks the sweat right out of your pores — Robbers on High Street played the very first show of their West Coast…
If there were windows in Joe’s Grotto, they’d be steamed up tonight. Almost 400 people are packed into the small Phoenix club, fanning themselves with magazines and ordering extra ice with every drink. The crowd’s getting restless, jockeying for position near the stage and chatting away excitedly. Proprietor Joe Grotto…
“Hey, you got your Rancid in my Mars Volta!” “You got your No Doubt in my Postal Service!” “Now you’ve got your Sublime in my Radiohead!” No, I’m not talking about the latest mash-ups by Z-Trip or Danger Mouse. Rather, this was my internalized conversation with local independent alternative radio…
“Everybody thinks we’re assholes,” Sum 41 guitarist Dave Baksh says. “We’re Canadian; it’s impossible.” Phoning from one of the asshole capitals of Los Angeles, the Bel Age Hotel near Sunset Strip, Baksh and his band are taking a breather from an extended road trip with punk legends Unwritten Law. The…
I’m completely out of my indie rock element, but it’s quite the scene at the Sail Inn on a recent Sunday afternoon: pretty (and friendly) granola girls twirling around in flowing skirts, squealing little kids running around with bubble-blowing machines, gray-haired guys in tie-dyed shirts with their guts stretching the…
