General consensus long held that in the history of popular music, avant-garde elements are rarely digested easily by the masses, and that when they are, they go down best when sugarcoated. So, music progressives, let’s be thankful that one of the consequences of pop culture speeding up from “famous for…
Years in the countryside tend to mellow a fellow. It clearly worked on Matt Sharp, who materializes from a four-year hiatus with a haunting acoustic four-song EP titled Puckett’s Versus the Country Boy. If you didn’t know Sharp played bass for and co-founded Weezer and created the New Wave pop…
Melissa Etheridge must enjoy coming to Phoenix. This will be the popular and evidently tireless singer-songwriter’s fourth trip to town in the last three years, even though she hasn’t released a new album since 2001’s Skin. She’s been on the road virtually nonstop ever since. She played a show here…
StarTime International, the nascent one-man label, sits in the heart of a lo-fi cultural revolution, namely the parade of swaggering, throwback rockers and skinny-tie, ripped-fishnet fashion plates crawling these days out of Brooklyn and into parts unknown. Two years ago, Isaac Green’s creation signed the Walkmen and French Kicks, easily…
Joe Pernice, 35, has a kind of Clark Kent dichotomy to him, a surreptitious strength under a sensitive façade. In most of his photographs, Pernice looks like he just stepped out of a television police drama — tough, a little sensitive, very urban and very ethnic, which fits well with…
Willie Nelson turned 70-years-old this past April 30. Seems like Willie’s been an old, grizzled cowboy staring down the apocalypse for at least 35 years — “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Help Me Make it Through the Night” were not young-man music — but he’s officially old now,…
I can’t blame the bands that have skipped town or gone into hibernation for the summer. Hell, I have to carry a bottle of water with me just to drive down the block, and that’s with the air-conditioning blasting. In the local lexicon, I suppose that makes me a pussy…
Mogwai’s music is a web of contradictions. The band is given to grand gestures, yet the music finds its power in subtlety: Delicate moments accumulate into something bigger than the sum of those parts, and then, for an instant, the bottom drops out. Multi-instrumental and dense, yet the wall of…
Lee Konitz’s name may not trigger the household recognition that other jazz icons command, but it should. Although the alto saxophonist was a contemporary of Charlie Parker’s, Konitz developed his own airy horn style early on and remained true to his sound throughout an era dominated by Parker and his…
On their fourth album, Clem Snide show they have a Soft Spot for the other side of summer, the mellow melancholy that creeps up on you at the end of a lazy backyard barbecue or the ash-end of a bonfire at the beach. It’s a narrow window of time when…
Hip-hop, not rap. Charming, not tough. Suburban, not street. Taste the Secret, Ugly Duckling’s latest laugh-in-the-face-of thug-life “realism” assault, continues the group’s brave struggle to carve a niche for intelligent, playful B-boy culture. Over the course of an engaging EP and a terrific full-length debut, Ugly Duckling sought to reanimate…
Phish begin their first summer tour in three years here in Phoenix, giving the locals an opportunity to witness what may prove to be a positive resurrection of the 90s most dynamic live band, which in its prime could turn an amphitheatre into a glowing bolt of aural lightning. It…
Dwight Yoakam first became known in the mid-80s as part of the new-traditionalist movement in country that included the more mainstream artists Randy Travis, George Straight and Vince Gill. The rise of these new traditionalists was a reaction to watered-down country they felt relied too heavily on pop elements, and…
Behind every successful rock star today, it seems, stands a couple of lousy parents who couldn’t care less. From Eminem’s pill-popping momma to Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte’s absentee dad to Staind frontman Aaron Lewis’ neglectful hippie procreators, dysfunctional couples with the poorest of parenting skills have inadvertently…
Dub is not a genre! It is a state of mind, with funhouse mirror eyeballs, a drop floor, a love of the unknown, and the knowledge that if a philosophical truth really does exist, it can be found in the mysterious, malleable ether. It’s been the soundtrack of a righteous…
Adam Panic found there was a better way to scrounge up lunch money than his boring drug store job. He recorded a full-length album at his home last November, titled it The Vamp, and set out for Chapparal High School in Scottsdale, which he attends. “I’d go to school, and…
Mississippi: The Album contains some of the funniest swearing ever committed to tape on a hip-hop record. When David Banner of the duo Crooked Lettaz cusses on his solo debut, it’s purposeful and ugly. When he says “bitch ass nigga,” a frequent insult, the delivery is so over the top,…
I’ve got absolutely no problem with the Y2K-pop model of producer-as-star: Timbaland; the Neptunes; Jermaine Dupri; shit, Jerry Finn–these folks practically guarantee a good time, with high-level artistry an occasional fringe benefit and brand-name consistency a handy way to organize skipping around the radio dial. But the Matrix, as much…
Brooklyn’s Freddie Foxxx (aka James Campbell, who also performs under the alias Bumpy Knuckles) seems to share a lot with 50 Cent, the rapper who rose from the streets of Jamaica, Queens, to offer the Dr. Dre-produced and Eminem-endorsed multiplatinum-selling album Get Rich or Die Trying. Both rappers look similarly…
“Dear fans, where to start?” Jewel writes in the liner notes for 0304, what she describes as a “lyrically-driven . . . modern interpretation of big band music.” While that sounds as appealing as Morrissey fronting Chicago, it actually resembles a smarter Shakira or a folkier No Doubt. And there’s…
As founding member Chris Dreja tells it, making a new Yardbirds album after 35 years seemed daunting: “That’s a long holiday. We’ve been dormant like some bacteria for all that time. Waiting to unleash itself.” While some might question the worth of a Yardbirds album without Eric Clapton or Jimmy…
To a certain fan of a certain subgenre of rock ‘n’ roll, and certainly to any rock critic, there are few things in life more agreeable than the disagreeably somnambulant snarl of Mr. Lou Reed. There’s just something relaxing about the deep, nasal croak that drones on like a distant…
