Features

Can Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic album be one he’s hardly even on? Like an absentee landlord, the masked but hardly anonymous Robert Z appears only four times to deliver a song and maybe change a fuse or two. Yes, it’s the soundtrack to his insta-cult film Masked and Anonymous, but…

From the department of “You can’t teach epic,’ it’s either bestowed on you or it ain’t”: In a single five-song EP, TV on the Radio has set up camp to scale an art-rock Everest whose previous existence no one but Björk fanatics noticed. Well, this expedition’s from Brooklyn circa now…

Simply labeling Los Angeles duo People Under the Stairs as old-school hip-hop heads misses the point. Thes One and Double K are more like docents at an imaginary Museum of Old-School Hip-Hop Praxis, a pair who deal exclusively with hip-hop’s basic building blocks — rhymes, scratches, and rare-groove funk samples…

Chingy’s debut album rides into record stores on the strength of “Right Thurr,” an insanely catchy single full of chest-swelling keyboard melodies. It sounds like the inside of a strip club, spewing out snare effects and lewd drum patterns (inspired by the Neptunes) that twirl and clap like dancers spinning…

Boyd Tinsley, Dave Matthews Band’s buff, breathtaking violinist, probably could have sold a helluva lot of records had he simply released an instrumental album of virtuosic fiddle-dee-dee jams. In fact, when the annoyingly-redundant-yet-undeniably-talented band’s legions of frattooed fans first caught wind of the dreadlocked 39-year-old’s debut release, that is probably…

Yes, only God can make a tree, but only England can produce the rock stars who routinely plow into them. Or, when a tree is not readily available, an irate parking attendant. What other choice did Iron Maiden timekeeper “Nicko” McBrain have when he found himself late for a show…

Any emo-band front man who decides to bare his soul via the acoustic singer-songwriter route has much more to contend with than David St. Hubbins’ fine line between stupid and clever. There’s an even finer line between wrenching and retching. Fortunately, Seattle’s Rocky Votolato has the proper tools, primarily the…

Revisit the history of the Valley’s music scene, and in those annals you’ll find an anomaly: In 1996, four youngsters, barely in their teens, self-released (with a little help from the ‘rents) an eponymous debut, Chronic Future, which propelled them onto local radio and eventually to national prominence in the…

As Queens of the Stone Age’s crew preps the Lollapalooza stage for the droning stoner-rock band’s set, a silence falls over the Verizon Wireless Center in Noblesville, Indiana. It is July 5, the opening night of the 1990s powerhouse festival’s return to the national touring stage, and the sky is…

Club Next, a danceteria-style lounge in Old Town Scottsdale that embodies some of the stereotypes you might expect, doesn’t seem like an ideal joint for low-key Phoenix house DJs Pete Salaz and Senbad. But the partners found themselves there after changing priorities and schedules forced them this past spring to…

Perhaps this is the saddest commentary about the apathy of American popular musicians, or about the stranglehold corporate entities have on radio right now. The best protest songs in the wake of the Iraqi conflict come from a band of Welsh oddballs willfully influenced by late-period Beach Boys — as…

The word “punk” is like one of those pesky zombies in Night of the Living Dead: You kill it again and again, but it just won’t die. Punk’s death has been dragged out for the more than two decades since that winter of ’78 when the Sex Pistols dissolved. The…

Back in the day, jazz musicians had movements to latch onto, whether it was bebop in the 1940s, cool in the ’50s, free jazz in the ’60s or fusion in the ’70s. At the age of 28, Brooklyn pianist and bandleader Jason Moran — whose fourth album, Bandwagon, captures his…

George Harrison may be dead, but Americans can’t help but turn their heads, as he did, toward India for spiritual and artistic inspiration. While Madonna attends self-help seminars with Deepak Chopra, city-dwelling hipsters rent Bollywood features, and it all plays nicely into the hands of Rajinder Rai, a.k.a. Panjabi MC…

In 1983, Brian Eno released Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks with his brother Roger and protégé Daniel Lanois. It’s an ambient album about the moon they composed for Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind. Reinert’s film uses NASA footage from various Apollo missions, and the accompanying soundtrack shows three studio virtuosos…

Following a new album of spaced-out orchestral pop called Built on Squares, the Starlight Mints are fresh from touring the country — not Phoenix, though, like too many other good bands — with fellow Norman, Oklahoma, residents the Flaming Lips. Since its 2000 debut The Dream That Stuff Was Made…

Near the end of the Roots’ sixth album Phrenology is a song (the 10-minute-plus “Water”) that underlines, italicizes and boldfaces the problem that has always plagued the group: It is too smart, too thoughtful, too much for hip-hop. Sliding over drummer ?uestlove and bassist Leon Hubbard’s stuttering strut, head voice…

The “slap” comes about three and a half seconds into Jack Johnson’s new album, On and On. The unplugged mellow gem’s opening song, “Times Like These,” begins with a single, perfect Cat Stevens glissando elegantly strummed on Johnson’s guitar. Then the 28-year-old singer-songwriter and, not insignificantly, diehard surfer smacks the…

At first blush, Fat Cats and the Clubhouse don’t seem to have anything in common. For starters, Fat Cats is housed in a historic building in a rough arts district in downtown Phoenix; the Clubhouse sits in a Tempe strip mall. But both have opened at a time when the…

Funerals can suck. But for singer and songwriter Matt Ward, the memorial service for John Fahey was a formative artistic experience. “It opened some doors, I feel, for me,” says the 29-year-old resident of Portland, Oregon, who performs as M. Ward. “It provided ways for thinking about what music can…

Target me now. I’m a thief. I blatantly disregard laws for my own fulfillment. The fuzz needs to come to my central Phoenix house, confiscate my computer, hand me a subpoena, and fine me a bunch of money. I’ll open the doors and gladly invite them in. To borrow a…