When you scribble about bands for a regional publication every week like I do, it’s an occupational hazard that shitloads of crap local CDs arrive in the mail daily, destined to become coasters for cans of Budweiser. It’s rare that a local’s disc I come across is beyond lackluster, and…
Rise Against is finally headlining a tour. No longer needing the big boys there to hold its hand, the Chicago punk-rock outfit is stepping out of the shadows of mentor bands like Bad Religion. With its first major-label release, Siren Song of the Counter-Culture (DreamWorks), Rise Against has shown it…
If a band is known for its kooky costumes and outrageous theatrics, people might assume there’s something lacking in its sound. Not so with the J-pop punkers in Peelander-Z, who back their whack with some solid songs. Their origins are a closely guarded secret, but news reports from Area Z…
The recurring mental image I get while listening to High on Fire’s latest molten sludge-metal opus, Blessed Black Wings, is that of Lemmy Kilmister being strapped into that electric chair on the cover of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, then bellowing a soul-paralyzing shriek as the searing juice jolt smokes his…
On her latest album, Ani DiFranco exorcises ghosts, feigns death, and once again opens herself up to the world. While she’s never separated the personal from the political, Knuckle Down comes across as a direct reflection of her recent personal heartbreaks. DiFranco’s divorce is the subject of a few songs,…
I love audacious titles like The Only Doo-Wop Collection You’ll Ever Need. How can you argue with such bravado? But in this case, the handle is more than just marketing-department bluster. Shout! Factory got it right: This may be the only such anthology that most of us require. Just about…
If Ike Turner’s name only draws mental images of a man violently mashing cake into Tina Turner’s face, that’s a great example of the instant karma that has beset one of the greatest guitarists in the history of R&B. Everything you’ve heard about Ike Turner may be true, but you…
It’s going to be a beautiful Apocalypse. That is, if San Diego trio Via Satellite’s new album, Cities Are Temples, is the soundtrack. A stunning ode to love in the end times, opener “Seven Winged Lions” begins with a bell-clear laptop melody that unfolds into dreamy percussion, snippets of squelch,…
With a name cribbed from a mysterious Air Force base that houses UFOs, you would expect Hangar 18 (the latest group to emerge from underground hip-hop stalwarts Def Jux) to sound like your usual X-Files nerd rap, i.e., long on consonants and light on grooves. But while its jittery, effects-laden…
Scratching, mixing, beat-juggling, all the elements of hip-hop DJing — they’re all good, but sometimes you just wanna hear a song you can dance to straight through, the way you know it, the way you loved it in the first place. And especially if you’re a dance-music recidivist, you need…
Thursday 27 Acme Bar & Grill: DJR (all genres) Acme Roadhouse: College Night with DJ J. Alan (Top 40) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Tsunami (Top 40, hip-hop) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Panic! with DJ Manchester (Britpop, indie, New Wave) Big Fish Pub: Reggae Thursdays with Selector J-Cut & DJ Blackstar (reggae,…
It’s fitting that the band name Avail evokes the word “alive.” The best rock, like all the best art, is not some rarefied air breathable only to people who wear puffy shirts and pointy shoes. It’s music that makes everyday life feel alive. Richmond, Virginia’s Avail — perhaps the only…
When I run into Phoenix rapper Pokafase a few days before his record release party for Mastermind, the long-overdue LP he recorded back in 2002, I remind him we met several times years ago when he was in the hip-hop group Know Qwestion, back when his moniker was Cappuccino. “Shhh,…
Kyle Howard will make himself throw up for the Stiletto Formal. Dedication of that extent is rarely called for, but sure enough, on the third night of its first tour, the slender vocalist has to heave for his band. For the December show in Omaha, Nebraska, the Stiletto Formal wants…
Past a certain point in their careers, musicians tend to get more serious, putting away childish obsessions with pop culture in favor of creating something of more importance (or self-importance), sometimes with mixed results. The career of Mike Park, former vocalist/saxophonist for the ’90s third-wave ska supergroup Skankin’ Pickle, certainly…
Carson Daly prefaced Citizen Cope’s network TV debut with some blubbering comparisons to Bob Dylan and John Lennon, which Cope obliterated by performing a first-rate single (“Bullet and a Target”) that sounded like neither. Clearly the new Dylan/Lennon analogy has more to do with the engineer’s cap Cope sports on…
If any indie band could be reconstituted with a properly calibrated mix of the mood, pop and rock quarks, Early Day Miners would require practically a whole shaker of mood, seasoned with a sprinkle of pop and but a dash of rock. Like the paintings of Winslow Homer, their watercolor…
Shortly after last week’s Revolver column appeared (“Tom’s Tax,” January 13), detailing the hidden charges tacked on to the face value of tickets for events promoted by Lucky Man Productions, the Marquee Theatre, and its owner, Tom Lapenna, New Times’ sources contacted us to let us know that Lapenna had…
Call me cynical, but when someone approaches me and offers up a review copy of a CD unavailable in stores, the first thing I think is, “How many different ways is this going to suck?” However, I’d just seen Chopper, L.S. perform “one for the ladies” titled “Baby What Up?”…
The roster reads like a list of things you wouldn’t want to relate to: Heroes Dead and Gone, Obskurity, Coercion, Lifeless Embrace, Kill the Last Hour, And the Hero Fails, Learn to Suffer, Men Shall Fall, Fate to Fall, and Desolate Demise. But really, death comes sooner or later, so…
Laurie Anderson worked for the Olympic organization in Athens, was NASA’s artist-in-residence for a time, and has been finding some satori taking long walks down archaic roads in Greece, Sri Lanka and England. Add on the fact that Anderson lives only a handful of blocks from the scar of 9/11,…
There’s something about an emo band that talks shit about emo — the genre dedicated to self-deprecation — that seems overly appropriate. The Letter Kills are that band. The Southern California five-piece is highly vocal about its disapproval of the notion that being classified as emo makes one popular. Sure,…
