Pop songs, more often than not, employ a narrative. The lyrics tell a story: a tale of broken hearts, a paranoid ditty, an adolescent anecdote. Choruses and solos fill the gaps and tidy the proceedings by song’s end. Yet Glendale’s quirky Rum Tenor may just make you reconsider that conventional…
Wanda Jackson covers a telling old Carl Perkins anthem on her new album Heart Trouble. Bopping along a chugging rhythm and fueled by a twangy electric guitar lead, the song sounds like it’s meant to be seminal. Naturally, the tune is called “Rockabilly Fever,” and Jackson sings it with understated…
The advertisements are meant to fool you. “The Last Real Record Store.” That’s what Zia Record Exchange proclaims itself on TV commercials and banners, as if there were still some fiery independent spirit fueling the company like there was before founder Brad Singer died. After Singer’s sudden death in 1998,…
There was a time when the Mr. T Experience (MTX for short) was just another hack pop-punk band in a swell of them emerging from the clubs of Berkeley and other East Bay dives. While the group definitely had its moments — Love Is Dead from 1996 is probably its…
Never met a tribute album worthy of its appellation. They’re doomed, if not outright damned, endeavors that make you wonder whether the artists involved ever listened to, learned from or felt the musicians to whom they’re paying homage. The Clash has already suffered such an insult — Burning London, it…
Increasingly these days, you’ll find that first-time visitors to New York feel compelled to prove they were actually on the island of Manhattan — you know, where that terrorist attack happened and all those people were, like, heroes. Yeah, she was so there! Your well-traveled friend will spout off the…
Nothing screams “nothing new” quite like a “Battle of the Bands” contest. It’s not so much the groups themselves competing for cash or valuable prizes or beer sponsorship that inspire yawns so much as the non-delivery of a real blood-drawing battle. What’s so special about bands performing the same sets…
In the heady, right-on 1970s, an article in the magazine P’Alante!, published by radical Nuyorican political outfit the Young Lords, once called U.S. prisons “concentration camps” for young black and boricua men. Deep. At that time, the stars of the new Nuyorican musical movement known as salsa sang about crime…
The venue for the Suicide Girls Burlesque Tour has changed. The show is now scheduled for the Big Fish Pub, 1954 E. University in Tempe on the same date, Monday, January 12. Call 480-861-5010 for more information. Coming of age as a punk-rock kid in the early ’90s was an…
Extravagantly gruff-voiced Mississippi rapper David Banner loves the motherfucking shit out of cursing. On Mississippi: The Album, the first of three CDs he released in 2003, his swearing took the form of a mad-as-hell Southerner unable to decide between succumbing to the virulent misogyny and violence swirling around him and…
I mean, shit, Ryan Adams is prolific, you’ve got to give him that: He released almost 30 new songs in 2003. Reportedly, what happened is that Adams made a record titled Love Is Hell but scrapped it after he and his label couldn’t decide if it was the right collection…
The weird and wild Elephant Man’s new record Good 2 Go seems neither overly wild nor especially weird as 2004 begins. Blame Missy Elliott and a gaggle of Southern pop-rappers for that. Born O’Neil Bryan, the 29-year-old Elephant Man has been a creative force in the Jamaican dance-hall underground for…
Many will recognize Viggo Mortensen as the intrepid, benevolent Aragorn from the cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, in particular The Return of the King. Mortensen is a delightful rarity — poet, painter, publisher, photographer — a major league movie star who also happens to be an underground…
Henry Rollins’ press notes call him a renaissance man — and why not? He’s a bandleader and champion screamer who fronted one of the greatest Los Angeles punk bands of all time, Black Flag, and later the Rollins Band. He’s an actor, most recently seen in Bad Boys II, and…
“Here, put this on.” Nearly everyone you met in 2003 came with a personal soundtrack. From the little middle school “sevvie” in your car pool who carried a personal mix CD in her backpack to the businessman in front of you at the ATM playing Dido just a little too…
Calexico’s 2003 album Feast of Wire is a gem, a smidgen more accessible than the Tucson band’s earlier full-lengthers and stellar from start to finish. The band’s versatility continues to amaze. Their default setting — mariachi-infused country-rock with touches of jazz — is unusual enough, but what really astonishes is…
Live music in downtown Tempe doesn’t get much better than a Phunk Junkeez show at the Bash on Ash. But after one last performance December 27, the veteran rap-rock fusion band will be scrambling for a new place to play. The Bash on Ash, the 600-person-capacity downtown Tempe club that…
What does it say about the state of beat production in 2003 that as the Top 40 grows weirder (Kelis’ “Milkshake,” anyone?), songs that used to pass for normal are the rage of the underground? You know it’s a topsy-turvy pop land we live in when the alternative wears the…
How one feels about Diamanda Galás depends largely on how one feels about the term “serious art.” We Americans don’t have much use for the stuff usually; nor does anyone else, really, though college students who spend a semester in continental Europe tend to return with the idea that everyone…
The concept for this collection is dubious on paper — Christmas classics refurbished by electronic producers, who, when given too long a leash, can ruin just about any timeless favorite. Christmas Remixed, though, while something of a mixed bag, has enough redeeming moments to make it a suitable stocking stuffer…
Contemporary R&B singers can be divided evenly into two camps: the style-over-substance troupe, who believe in futuristic production tricks and outré hairdos; and the neo-soul crew, who cling to classical vocal dexterity and the warm ooze of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Alternately, you could divide the field another way…
The common wisdom regarding the Beatles’ final record, Let It Be — which was released in 1970 to a dispirited public and critical response — is that it was tarted up and defiled by the evil pop producer Phil Spector, who was called in to remix the album after the…
