Sam Cooke spent his career trying to mesh his earthy, soulful instincts, steeped in gospel, with his drive for mainstream success. Although that dichotomy was not unique to Cooke, in his case it created a nice tension that puts even his most lightweight offerings on notice. Now, a newly remastered…
Like Rob Thomas before her, Michelle Branch got a shot of cred last year when she turned a Santana song into something better than it had any right to be. But “Game of Love” is no “Smooth,” and Branch, a 19-year-old who wants nothing to do with her generation, isn’t…
Sure, it might be possible to put together a better adult indie-rock double-bill in this day and age — but you’d have to really strain. Here, then, is a night of songs about being grown up, with potential, vision and a certain kind of warped love in your heart, but…
Hip-hop albums are an often-precarious exercise. Most are disappointing. The best-case scenario, in most cases, is pumping a couple of hot tracks onto a CD with 15 other songs and a few skits, intros, outros and promos — and those are the cuts that seem to get the most play…
Kellen Fortier amuses his Where Eagles Dare bandmates. While the other four members of the Valley punk band lounge at Coffee Plantation in Tempe, Fortier, their guitarist, excuses himself to quench a growing thirst. He returns with a neon sensation. The bizarre concoction doesn’t go unnoticed. “He’s got a purple…
is, at.
Matt McAuley, the guitar-playing half of A.R.E. Weapons, says the unusual band name came to him in a dream. “In the dream, [singer] Brain [F. McPeck] was a futuristic Blade Runner detective, and he had like a Philip Marlowe office and the name on the door was A.R.E. Weapons,” says…
I was listening to Neil Young’s 1983 album Trans before I wrote this column. Arguably one of the strangest albums made by a pop artist of Young’s stature, the album features six songs recorded with the now-antiquated synthesizers of the day and vocals filtered through a vocoder to sound like…
Tricky’s ascension to worldwide critical acclaim and not-unimpressive commercial prosperity was one of the more unlikely success stories of the 1990s, since for all it shared with the down-tempo chill-out fluff it’s inspired, Tricky’s music was the singularly difficult and complex product of a singularly difficult and complex mind. Maxinquaye…
With music that lingers somewhere between nü-metal and screeching performance art, the Locust has grandiose plans to change perceptions of what metal can be. Plague Soundscapes, a blitzkrieg of razor-blade-sharp intricacies and non-audible lyrics, is a 23-track tour of debauchery that kicks indie rockers in the teeth and flips off…
Hip-hop albums are an often-precarious exercise. Most are disappointing. The best-case scenario, in most cases, is pumping a couple of hot tracks onto a CD with 15 other songs and a few skits, intros, outros and promos — and those are the cuts that seem to get the most play…
General consensus long held that in the history of popular music, avant-garde elements are rarely digested easily by the masses, and that when they are, they go down best when sugarcoated. So, music progressives, let’s be thankful that one of the consequences of pop culture speeding up from “famous for…
Years in the countryside tend to mellow a fellow. It clearly worked on Matt Sharp, who materializes from a four-year hiatus with a haunting acoustic four-song EP titled Puckett’s Versus the Country Boy. If you didn’t know Sharp played bass for and co-founded Weezer and created the New Wave pop…
Melissa Etheridge must enjoy coming to Phoenix. This will be the popular and evidently tireless singer-songwriter’s fourth trip to town in the last three years, even though she hasn’t released a new album since 2001’s Skin. She’s been on the road virtually nonstop ever since. She played a show here…
StarTime International, the nascent one-man label, sits in the heart of a lo-fi cultural revolution, namely the parade of swaggering, throwback rockers and skinny-tie, ripped-fishnet fashion plates crawling these days out of Brooklyn and into parts unknown. Two years ago, Isaac Green’s creation signed the Walkmen and French Kicks, easily…
Joe Pernice, 35, has a kind of Clark Kent dichotomy to him, a surreptitious strength under a sensitive façade. In most of his photographs, Pernice looks like he just stepped out of a television police drama — tough, a little sensitive, very urban and very ethnic, which fits well with…
Willie Nelson turned 70-years-old this past April 30. Seems like Willie’s been an old, grizzled cowboy staring down the apocalypse for at least 35 years — “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Help Me Make it Through the Night” were not young-man music — but he’s officially old now,…
I can’t blame the bands that have skipped town or gone into hibernation for the summer. Hell, I have to carry a bottle of water with me just to drive down the block, and that’s with the air-conditioning blasting. In the local lexicon, I suppose that makes me a pussy…
Mogwai’s music is a web of contradictions. The band is given to grand gestures, yet the music finds its power in subtlety: Delicate moments accumulate into something bigger than the sum of those parts, and then, for an instant, the bottom drops out. Multi-instrumental and dense, yet the wall of…
Lee Konitz’s name may not trigger the household recognition that other jazz icons command, but it should. Although the alto saxophonist was a contemporary of Charlie Parker’s, Konitz developed his own airy horn style early on and remained true to his sound throughout an era dominated by Parker and his…
On their fourth album, Clem Snide show they have a Soft Spot for the other side of summer, the mellow melancholy that creeps up on you at the end of a lazy backyard barbecue or the ash-end of a bonfire at the beach. It’s a narrow window of time when…
Hip-hop, not rap. Charming, not tough. Suburban, not street. Taste the Secret, Ugly Duckling’s latest laugh-in-the-face-of thug-life “realism” assault, continues the group’s brave struggle to carve a niche for intelligent, playful B-boy culture. Over the course of an engaging EP and a terrific full-length debut, Ugly Duckling sought to reanimate…
