Give English post-Radiohead band Elbow one thing — it succeeded in picking a name as unashamedly average as the music that’s filled the vacuum Thom Yorke and his mates created in U.K. guitar rock when they stopped playing guitars. (What, Coldplay was already taken? Oh, right.). Asleep in the Back,…
One can’t say for sure whether Montreal’s The End went into the recording of Within Dividia intending to make a sort of metal-core answer to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but that’s pretty much what it turns out to be, impressively enough. Don’t get too excited: People who loved…
Jim Henson, Sesame Street’s visionary founder and lead puppeteer, was famous for never looking back. Bursting with creativity, Henson moved so swiftly from one project to the next that little attention was given to curating the countless music albums that sprang from his popular children’s TV show. Parents, toddlers and…
Fear’s musical cocktail of anger, beer and combustible live shows etched the band’s name in punk rock — if not musical — history. A product of the late ’70s Los Angeles scene, the band was so focused on their performances that, even though they formed in 1977, they didn’t bother…
When Waylon sang, “I don’t think Hank done it this way,” he couldn’t have foreseen the musically bipolar grandson of Hank Sr. that is Hank III. A little bit country and a little bit, um, demonic metal, the 3 is a pioneer in a new demographic, namely the country-lovin’ thrash-metal…
Not your milkman’s heavy metal band, Sweden’s Opeth stands out among a crop of identical, young wanna-be demonic metal acts. In the space of one eight-minute-long opus, they combine death metal’s Cookie Monster vocals, black metal’s creepy-Scandinavian-forest vibe, prog rock’s variegated chord progressions and elfin mystique — and find room…
Grooves wound like tight metal coils, rinsed-out Rastafarian rhymes at 180 beats per minute, dark and dirty bass lines, jazz vocals sung over rolling rhythms — these are the sounds of drum and bass. Old hat in the U.K. — where it originated as “jungle” — and relatively fresh to…
Be it a lousy sitcom, an episode of Crossfire or the audible blow-by-blow of the drunken brawl in the apartment next door, we all love eavesdropping on a good argument. Which probably accounts for our attraction to the indie rock dueling-vocalist assault — the howling poetry of Rainer Maria, the…
It’s impossible to avoid comparing Tony Furtado to Béla Fleck, a fellow explorer in the rarefied realm of ambitious banjo composition. But Furtado gets that notoriously loud, cranky instrument to sing with even more soul. It makes just as much sense to link Furtado with former Bad Liver Danny Barnes…
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…
