The Impossible Ones I was almost made a liar of back in June when I wrote about the Impossible Ones reuniting for the fourth time; I promised that the trio – Gentleman John, Neil Impossible, and Raubnoxious – would be playing an unannounced show sometime in the near future as…
We Fly Our Kites At Night My favorite freakazoids, We Fly Our Kites At Night, are getting their album, Killing Ray Brower, ready for public consumption (pity their public) any time now (if you don’t know who Ray Brower is, watch Stand By Me again). Since I was unintentionally responsible…
I’m a bit unnerved when I meet up with North Side Kings singer/guitarist Danny Marianino to drink beer and discuss the band’s new record, Suburban Royalty. Danny’s sporting a cast on his right arm, a broken hand being the latest injury he’s sustained. He says that just a couple of…
It wasn’t easy getting Ian Metzger off his ass to play some rock ‘n’ roll again. He’d burned out on the band life early, when his high school Christian rock group, Justified, turned out to be the kind of shitty life experience that leaves a person thinking, “No real good…
In the 1997 Groovie Ghoulies song “Graveyard Girlfriend,” bassist/vocalist Kepi sings, “One day I’ll lay next to you in a beautiful coffin built for two.” And sure enough, according to guitarist Roach, Kepi’s graveyard girlfriend — actually his wife and musical conspirator of more than a decade — “We do…
If you followed alt. country’s flirtation with finding an audience bigger than the readership of No Depression in the ’90s, then you’ll need to own the Bloodied But Unbowed: Bloodshot Records Life in the Trenches DVD (Bloodshot), a 31-song celebration of the first 12 years of Bloodshot Records, boasting videos…
Jack Ripper A couple of nights ago I hit up a private company party (some masonry outfit, i was just crashing it for the buffet & drinks), and witnessed this kid who calls himself Jack Ripper annihilate his guitar, giving Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” a run for its money, busting…
or make fun of your band, at the very least. Send mp3’s, show information, gossip, etc. to Brendan Kelley. Otherwise I’ll be listening to “Just Lose It” by Eminem all day long…..
Glass Heroes The spot to be tonight is at the Clubhouse, to see longtime local rawkers the Glass Heroes open up for UK punkers Vice Squad, which has been around in various forms since freakin’ 1979. You want some old school punk rock authenticity, this is the show for you…
courtesy of Bryan Sandell of AZPunk.com Don’t Piss this Dude Off Tomorrow, 11/2, I dig into the trouble magnet that is Danny Marianino of the North Side Kings, and scope out the local hardcore legends’ (the dude beat down Danzig, that certifies him as a rock legend) new album, Suburban…
Elmo Kirkwood There’s been rumors flying since mid-summer that we’d soon see a reunion of the ‘Nix’s weirdest rock legends, Curt & Cris Kirkwood’s Meat Puppets, with Primus drummer Tim Alexander joining the brothers. After years of estrangement and Cris suffering drug and a prison sentence (you may remember a…
The members of Psychostick are explaining how they came to pack a CD as crushingly heavy as We Couldn’t Think of A Title with lyrics weighing in on everything from itchy balls to beer and diarrhea when guitarist Josh “Special J” Keys comes clean about his deep respect for “Weird…
There is a street in Omaha called Happy Hollow. But the characters who live in Cursive’s Happy Hollow are fictional Middle Americans dealing with actual Middle American dramas in a tiny rural town where people aren’t particularly bright or wealthy. And because Tim Kasher grew up Catholic in a small…
XrayOk was one of the most promising indie rock/electronica groups in the Valley. Formed in Phoenix in December 2002, the band’s self-released first album, Reflex, debuted at No. 158 on the CMJ Music Charts and stayed there for three weeks. At the time, it looked like XrayOk was going to…
In the last week of September, an odd thing happened: A Phoenix rap group managed to light up controversy all over the nation via an article that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times by staff writer Chris Lee. The article, titled “Rap’s Captive Audience,” was about…
Face it, drummers don’t get much respect. There’s an overabundance of easily quoted jokes illustrating this fact, usually underlining surly sentiments about how skinbeaters are viewed as useless and interchangeable, including one oft-quoted barb asking, “What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?” (A drummer.) But for local…
Self-described “redneck woman” Gretchen Wilson rose from poverty in western Illinois to become a country music superstar, winning critical and popular acclaim for her 2004 debut CD, Here for the Party, and for her sophomore effort, All Jacked Up, released last year. A firebrand singer and crafty balladeer, she writes…
Let’s get it out of the way up front: KMFDM stands for “Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit,” a German phrase that translates literally to “no pity for the majority.” But KMFDM founder Sascha Konietzko is perfectly okay with the popular theory that his industrial dance band’s name stands for “Kill…
Just a few Fridays ago, in the broad lobby of U.S. Airways Center, I, along with another hundred or so other people, got to witness the latest fusion of turntablism and classical instrumentation envisioned by DJ Radar and his longtime composer and collaborator, Raul Yañez. This time, unlike the Concerto…
If, as he suggests with the title of his new CD And Now That I’m in Your Shadow, Damien Jurado stands behind his whisper-voiced folk brethren like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, he undoubtedly moves front and center when it comes to delivering the somber smackdown. Jurado’s…
In the opening track of What the Toll Tells, Adam Stephens of San Francisco’s Two Gallants plays the role of a murderer facing the gallows, yowling like a tortured young Black Francis over country-punk guitars while keeping counsel with the dead. He’s shot his wife and dumped her body in…
Alfred Weisberg-Roberts, a.k.a. Daedelus, looks like a man from another time. He adheres to a style he calls “Victorian dandyism,” and sometimes he wears clothes that make him look like an 19th-century British gentleman. He grows his sideburns thick and long to accentuate his appearance. He calls himself a romantic…
