Nada Surf once ruled the airwaves, but their reign was briefer than that of the homecoming queen, destining them for the cultural curio shop along with Monica’s beret. Cast off by Epic when their second album, The Proximity Effect, failed to prove as, um, “popular” as their debut, the band…
If you’ve ever wanted to just feel stoned, turn out all the lights and watch the image generator on your computer’s MP3 player. Without some green, the closest parallel to being blissfully baked lies in the glow of those gurgling, psychedelic screen savers. The best of these, ones my friends…
With Map of What Is Effortless, Telefon Tel Aviv marks a radical departure from the opaque ambiance of its 2001 debut, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, toward a rich brew of soul and IDM electronics. Much of it, in fact, features the Loyola University Chamber Orchestra, which lends the proceedings a regal,…
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. How long has it been since your last confession? Uh, what’s today? Let me see . . . I guess that makes it . . . two . . . divide by three . . . carry the four . . . uh,…
“When I was in England once, my aunt said to me, You know, that’s a dangerous business you’ve got there.'” David Lowery pauses. The highest-profile member of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker — touring together now — wants us to know his mother and her sisters are “working-class intellectuals” from…
Maybe it was a sign from God. In June 2002, the owners of Nita’s Hideaway were fighting for the club’s life. About to be booted from their longtime location near Rio Salado, owners Mark and Abby Covert fought hard to move to a much larger vacant building at Price and…
With Americano!, Roger Clyne and his caballeros have returned with the most potent album in their Southwest-loving canon. Before we pin gold stars on each of their ponchos, though, let’s examine this song cycle from its effective starting point, “God Gave Me a Gun.” Released in advance of the album…
Relying on a cheap pun isn’t normally the best way to start a review. But given Sigmatropic’s origins, as well as its strange mix of sounds, the oft-quoted expression “it’s all Greek to me” somehow seems appropriate. Taken literally, Sigmatropic refers to Greek producer/multi-instrumentalist Akis Boyatzis, who recruited several musicians…
If any other genre birthed a compilation featuring 34 different bands, the project would likely be sold as a boxed set. Yet the Valley enthusiasts who run AZPunk.com have succeeded in packing that number of acts from around the state onto a single disc — with plenty of room to…
Oof, tough times for nü-metal these days, huh? Skinny, Schmotz, Pig Benis, and the rest of the Cleveland octet Mushroomhead may be feeling a bit like Donnie, Joey, Jordan, Danny and Jon circa 1992, but that just won’t stop these masked, malevolent misfits — these punk-thrash provocateurs — from soldiering…
One’s first encounter with the phrase “punk-rock karaoke” may summon the aural gag reflex the same way anchovies ice cream would assault the palate. But once you wrap your noggin around the notion that Punk Rock Karaoke is performed with a live backing band of punk luminaries, the desire to…
It was approximately 3:30 in the morning, as I sat in my parents’ basement loading my father’s Hank Williams Jr.’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 CD into my brand-new Dell MP3 player, that I realized my Christmas gift may completely ruin my life. The Dell player is basically a clone of…
Last week, after pouring my tortured relationship with pornography into print in anticipation of the SuicideGirls Burlesque show (“Suicide Squeeze,” January 8), I walked out of the show pissed because there was no chance of seeing the ladies, models from the SuicideGirls.com punk rock pinup site, over the mass of…
Give English post-Radiohead band Elbow one thing — it succeeded in picking a name as unashamedly average as the music that’s filled the vacuum Thom Yorke and his mates created in U.K. guitar rock when they stopped playing guitars. (What, Coldplay was already taken? Oh, right.). Asleep in the Back,…
One can’t say for sure whether Montreal’s The End went into the recording of Within Dividia intending to make a sort of metal-core answer to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but that’s pretty much what it turns out to be, impressively enough. Don’t get too excited: People who loved…
Jim Henson, Sesame Street’s visionary founder and lead puppeteer, was famous for never looking back. Bursting with creativity, Henson moved so swiftly from one project to the next that little attention was given to curating the countless music albums that sprang from his popular children’s TV show. Parents, toddlers and…
Fear’s musical cocktail of anger, beer and combustible live shows etched the band’s name in punk rock — if not musical — history. A product of the late ’70s Los Angeles scene, the band was so focused on their performances that, even though they formed in 1977, they didn’t bother…
When Waylon sang, “I don’t think Hank done it this way,” he couldn’t have foreseen the musically bipolar grandson of Hank Sr. that is Hank III. A little bit country and a little bit, um, demonic metal, the 3 is a pioneer in a new demographic, namely the country-lovin’ thrash-metal…
Not your milkman’s heavy metal band, Sweden’s Opeth stands out among a crop of identical, young wanna-be demonic metal acts. In the space of one eight-minute-long opus, they combine death metal’s Cookie Monster vocals, black metal’s creepy-Scandinavian-forest vibe, prog rock’s variegated chord progressions and elfin mystique — and find room…
Grooves wound like tight metal coils, rinsed-out Rastafarian rhymes at 180 beats per minute, dark and dirty bass lines, jazz vocals sung over rolling rhythms — these are the sounds of drum and bass. Old hat in the U.K. — where it originated as “jungle” — and relatively fresh to…
Be it a lousy sitcom, an episode of Crossfire or the audible blow-by-blow of the drunken brawl in the apartment next door, we all love eavesdropping on a good argument. Which probably accounts for our attraction to the indie rock dueling-vocalist assault — the howling poetry of Rainer Maria, the…
It’s impossible to avoid comparing Tony Furtado to Béla Fleck, a fellow explorer in the rarefied realm of ambitious banjo composition. But Furtado gets that notoriously loud, cranky instrument to sing with even more soul. It makes just as much sense to link Furtado with former Bad Liver Danny Barnes…
