Perhaps this is the saddest commentary about the apathy of American popular musicians, or about the stranglehold corporate entities have on radio right now. The best protest songs in the wake of the Iraqi conflict come from a band of Welsh oddballs willfully influenced by late-period Beach Boys — as…
The word “punk” is like one of those pesky zombies in Night of the Living Dead: You kill it again and again, but it just won’t die. Punk’s death has been dragged out for the more than two decades since that winter of ’78 when the Sex Pistols dissolved. The…
Back in the day, jazz musicians had movements to latch onto, whether it was bebop in the 1940s, cool in the ’50s, free jazz in the ’60s or fusion in the ’70s. At the age of 28, Brooklyn pianist and bandleader Jason Moran — whose fourth album, Bandwagon, captures his…
George Harrison may be dead, but Americans can’t help but turn their heads, as he did, toward India for spiritual and artistic inspiration. While Madonna attends self-help seminars with Deepak Chopra, city-dwelling hipsters rent Bollywood features, and it all plays nicely into the hands of Rajinder Rai, a.k.a. Panjabi MC…
In 1983, Brian Eno released Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks with his brother Roger and protégé Daniel Lanois. It’s an ambient album about the moon they composed for Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind. Reinert’s film uses NASA footage from various Apollo missions, and the accompanying soundtrack shows three studio virtuosos…
Following a new album of spaced-out orchestral pop called Built on Squares, the Starlight Mints are fresh from touring the country — not Phoenix, though, like too many other good bands — with fellow Norman, Oklahoma, residents the Flaming Lips. Since its 2000 debut The Dream That Stuff Was Made…
Near the end of the Roots’ sixth album Phrenology is a song (the 10-minute-plus “Water”) that underlines, italicizes and boldfaces the problem that has always plagued the group: It is too smart, too thoughtful, too much for hip-hop. Sliding over drummer ?uestlove and bassist Leon Hubbard’s stuttering strut, head voice…
The “slap” comes about three and a half seconds into Jack Johnson’s new album, On and On. The unplugged mellow gem’s opening song, “Times Like These,” begins with a single, perfect Cat Stevens glissando elegantly strummed on Johnson’s guitar. Then the 28-year-old singer-songwriter and, not insignificantly, diehard surfer smacks the…
At first blush, Fat Cats and the Clubhouse don’t seem to have anything in common. For starters, Fat Cats is housed in a historic building in a rough arts district in downtown Phoenix; the Clubhouse sits in a Tempe strip mall. But both have opened at a time when the…
Funerals can suck. But for singer and songwriter Matt Ward, the memorial service for John Fahey was a formative artistic experience. “It opened some doors, I feel, for me,” says the 29-year-old resident of Portland, Oregon, who performs as M. Ward. “It provided ways for thinking about what music can…
Target me now. I’m a thief. I blatantly disregard laws for my own fulfillment. The fuzz needs to come to my central Phoenix house, confiscate my computer, hand me a subpoena, and fine me a bunch of money. I’ll open the doors and gladly invite them in. To borrow a…
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is many things to many people: shrewd record-industry mogul, sharp producer, shiny-suited bon vivant, inventor of the remix. Yet the CDs that bear his name suggest that, above all, Combs is a master of organization, of corralling the right people to the right location at the…
It’d be reductive to call Madlib the last of hip-hop’s true jazz believers, but it’d be close to the truth. The Stones Throw Records studio rat may have become an all-star as the cartoon monster Quasimoto and one third of the massive Lootpack crew, but he’s gone hall-of-fame by embedding…
Serart is the fascinating debut collaborative art project from the gifted Armenian multi-instrumentalist Arto Tunc Boyaciyan and System of a Down lead vocalist Serj Tankian. Damn if it ain’t bangin’. You can ask my neighbors. I’ve listened to this record 15 times in the past three days, and now they’re…
Jazz lizards paid scant attention to Thelonious Monk’s 1960s Columbia releases. Where once Monk was revered as a revolutionary, fickle LBJ-era critics and enthusiasts had moved on to the pointy-headed and pompous sounds of Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor and others. The irony, of course, was that most of the “space…
What happens when the line between dystopia and the daily grind disappears? Is this indeed the robot-policed future that science fiction has been hinting at for decades? It is according to Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, but he seems surprisingly calm about it all. It’s a calm that infects the protagonists of…
We don’t normally pay much attention in these pages to happenings in Sedona, our lovely day trip to the north. The Sedona Cultural Park, though, booked itself a doozie of a show in its efforts to turn itself into an elite Western musical destination, much in the way Red Rocks…
Mark Oliver Everett, known to discriminating music fans everywhere as “E,” headmaster of Eels, is the guy everyone wanted to be friends with in high school. Blisteringly smart and deadly funny, he’s cool enough for the boys and cuddly enough to make the girls swoon. He’s a natural-born smart-ass. Everett’s…
There is an austerity to the Lifesavas that some will find off-putting or atypical of underground hip-hop acts. One skit on their debut album, Spirit in Stone, “Thuggity Skit,” clumsily parodies monosyllabic Southern rappers. On “Livin’ Time/Life Movement I,” Vursatyl proclaims, “We pro-life and we’re pro-longevity/Procreation/Produce/Provocative/And pro-prosperity,” while “State of…
If one strictly adheres to the tenets of the hipster Bible, which can be as narrow as Bush Republicanism, it is dogma that the Eagles sucketh. To say so comes as easy as shooting duck decoys in a wading pool with a bazooka. And from the group’s myriad excesses, the…
Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s ultra-high voice sounds something like what would come out of Wayne Coyne’s mouth if he weren’t a man. She is by turns Nico-cold and Hello Kitty naive, and her lyrics sound like bizarre, lost-in-the-translation Haiku. The experimental Bay Area band’s repetitive song fragments appear held together…
