Although prefab teen pop is no longer a dominant force in the cultural Zeitgeist, the idea of authenticity still overshadows the popular canon. Are shaggy hipster bands really starving Lower East Side garage rats, or does Daddy bankroll their bohemian, post-liberal arts lifestyle? Do pretty girls still validate the whines…
We laughed at your tales of hazing former bassist Jason Newsted. We screamed when you cut your hair and helped shut down Napster. But now it’s time for us to be wholly and quietly attentive for the official “Very Special Episode” in the long-running heavy metal series you call Metallica…
Waylon and Willie spearheaded the outlaw movement in country music, but if you separate their stylistic felonies like fiddle shunning and pigtail wearing from the real ones, what’s mostly there is pill popping and tax cheating. Johnny Cash did a few nights in the cooler for drunk and disorderly, and…
The Great Super Bowl Rogue Breast Disaster of 2004 has reached truly epic levels of overexposure, with every pundit, columnist, blogger and dude-standing-behind-you-at-Subway scrambling to weigh in on the moral outrage of it all. But in our haste to denounce either our shot-to-hell sense of human decency or the Puritan…
The most noticeable change trance DJ Sandra Collins undergoes between her last mix CD, 2001’s Cream, and her new one, Perfecto Presents . . . , is visual. On the cover of the old disc, she’s hyper-modernist Euro, wearing a skintight vinyl top and an impossibly smooth gray skirt, looking…
It’s shaping up to be a stellar year to see touring indie acts in metro Phoenix, and it couldn’t have happened soon enough for our atrophied live music scene. Just in the next month we have NYC’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Canadian twee popsters Stars shortly afterward. Hold on, wait…
Air makes great soft-core-porn music. At least seven of the 10 songs on the new Air album Talkie Walkie could back the drawn-out slow-motion sex scenes to those old dubbed-in-English Emmanuelle skin flicks and, in some of those instances, actually improve the aesthetic. The tunes really are that evocative of…
Rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp isn’t just for baby boomers who were never in bands in the first place. It can also be for ex-punks with closets full of metal albums, whose current mainstream-alternative bands aren’t providing the pure chewing satisfaction they’re after. Thus, Dave Grohl, weary of platinum sales…
It’s only fitting that the Zombies enjoyed their biggest-ever hit posthumously. The group’s excellent 1964 debut chart entry “She’s Not There” set the tone for pop over the next three years — moody minor-key masterpieces where breathy singer Colin Blunstone sighed about not getting the girl while Rod Argent trilled…
CLUBS ACME Roadhouse: In its original Scottsdale location, ACME catered to Harley-Davidson weekend warriors. In its new Tempe incarnation, it entertains the college set with dancing and, on Saturdays, local rock bands. Dance space is at a minimum, but there’s plenty of room for other social rites. Sun: Live music…
Intra-band love — past or present, real or imagined — is the simplest way to ensure that chumps (like this one) endlessly obsess over your personal life and ignore the damn tunes. Ask the White Stripes: Everyone else has. But if Fleetwood Mac represents the benchmark for post-relationship acrimony, Mates…
When Survivalist became the first Arizona hip-hop group to crack Billboard’s Top 10 Hot Rap Singles chart in 2001 with the aptly named “Bounce,” its members felt they were strapped in for a rocket ride to Ballersville. Instead, when all the big-label contracts the suits flaunted like origami for their…
Mabybe Jesus Christ invented hard-core. Christians, after all, believe the man from Nazareth died for our sins with nails through his hands. It just doesn’t get much hard-core than that. Perhaps that explains why the Christians who release their music through the independent punk label Tooth & Nail Records have…
Ryan Breen is best known locally as the guitarist for Chronic Future, the young, progressive rap-rock band whose first Interscope album is scheduled to drop in April. But in his latest musical endeavor, Back Ted N-Ted, Breen doesn’t touch a guitar. If you hit up a Back Ted N-Ted show,…
Black 47 has been invisible for several years now. These stout-rock stalwarts of the New York Irish rock scene — veterans of places like Connolly’s and Paddy Riley’s — have kept busy with gigs and side projects. But now they’ve released their first new CD in several years, New York…
Shuffling between pseudonyms like Delarosa and Asora (currently retired), Prefuse 73 (his most popular), and Savath & Savalas (now the intelligentsia favorite), Scott Herren has created a steady string of productions ranging from digitally flecked folk to frayed hip-hop. Yet he has also suffered from an identity crisis in the…
Lots of acts attract fans who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Reuben Khan wears his devotion to Cut Throat Logic on the back of his shaved head. “Cut Throat Logic is a way of life. That’s the only one I need,” says an emphatic, enormous Khan, a childhood friend…
Ansel Averitt is a closet rapper. The Phoenix twentysomething has a loyal audience of three friends, and his finest piece of music equipment is the tape recorder he keeps in his back pocket. But soon, Averitt and any other talented underground rapper could be as big as an American Idol…
If you weren’t at last Saturday’s D-Styles show at the Old Brickhouse, you missed several of the country’s best scratch DJs: D-Styles, Ricci Rucker, Mike Boo, and the Valley’s own DJ Radar. A lineup this solid hasn’t hit town in ages. It’s about time some top-tier turntablists started coming through…
The Thin White Investment’s got a new album, his best since — Scary Monsters? There are two possible reactions to this news. The more common one — rolling your eyes — is what you are probably doing right now. The other is to discard a Bow Wow Wow disc to…
Nada Surf once ruled the airwaves, but their reign was briefer than that of the homecoming queen, destining them for the cultural curio shop along with Monica’s beret. Cast off by Epic when their second album, The Proximity Effect, failed to prove as, um, “popular” as their debut, the band…
If you’ve ever wanted to just feel stoned, turn out all the lights and watch the image generator on your computer’s MP3 player. Without some green, the closest parallel to being blissfully baked lies in the glow of those gurgling, psychedelic screen savers. The best of these, ones my friends…
