There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success. — Max Beerbohm There’s the blackness that’s tethered to an overwhelming sense of failure. That point where you see no joy, so you figure there is no joy. No joy anywhere. That’s the kind of shit…
Back in the day, kids, there used to be this shaggy musical wildebeest called the triple album. Great bloody sprawling affairs were these, six sides of the ultimate exercise in artistic hubris, implying that there was more utter wonderfulness to this particular artist’s contemporary output than even a double album…
Once upon a time, Led Zep front man Robert Plant plaintively inquired from the stage, “Does anyone remember laughter?” Not so much flower-powerish drivel as a genuine lament for rock ‘n’ roll’s loss of innocence, it could be paraphrased these days along the lines of, “Does anyone remember aggression?” “Aggression,”…
David Bowie is the Peter Sellers of rock ‘n’ roll: He’s all blank slate, the chameleon who adapts to his surroundings without actually adopting an identity. He commits only to schlock, tailoring the disguise — mod rocker, dickless spaceman, fashion faux pas — to fit the delivery, which is somewhere…
The best thing about being a fan from way back is experiencing the delight of listening to a young band become better than you ever imagined. It’s easy, after all, to fall in love at first sound; there’s the thrill of getting turned on to a singer or a song…
Writing lyrics? Well, nothing rhymes with “orange.” Or “Arpaio.” Except maybe, a joint got me six months and now I want to die-o, which only works if you have an Irish brogue or can excuse it with a speech impediment. The artists listed below represent Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Criminal Element:…
These days many DJs lay claim to either a “purist” or “eclectic” style. For most turntablists, “purist” means only shopping in the house section, while “eclectic” means throwing on a heavy-metal record after a breakbeat record after a hip-hop record, with no hint of rhyme or reason. See Armand Van…
With Electric Waco Chair, the bloodshot, burly bunch from punk country has muscled its manly rage to a mature sound. And the sound is great. Chair is the most consistent of the band’s five full-length releases, proving that edgy aggressiveness can be even more effective when it’s hardly sloppy at…
Blues history is fraught with lurid tales of ballers and brawlers, so much that the fans of the genre usually take in as much lore as music. Consider how few neophyte blues aficionados would know of ’30s-era Robert Johnson if it wasn’t for the sold-his-soul-at-the-crossroads legend (lots of Johnson boxed…
It’s just another Friday night at a Tucson java hut with the usual folk singer serving up some low-key strum ‘n’ hum as accompaniment to young coffee achievers’ nonalcoholic mating rituals. However, on this particular evening the entertainment is provided by longtime scene veteran Chris Holiman, late of the Old…
It gets so you don’t even read the adjectives in the press releases. Week after week, brown envelopes full of this typescript hooey come sliding through the mail slot, each one painted in the broadest histrionic strokes: “a band to make even the most jaded postpunk listener pump his fist…
It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Isaac Brock, lead singer, guitarist and lyricist for Modest Mouse, wakes and wipes the sleep syrup from his eyes for the second time today. After a morning spent drinking beer and a mid-afternoon nap, Brock has awakened to discover he has a strange, unattributable…
Downtown L.A. during the Democratic National Convention has the eerie, abandoned feel of a circus after the tents have been collapsed. Standing in the shadow of the Staples Center, Stew and girlfriend Heidi Rodewald — bandmates in the Negro Problem — are checking out the activist pageant. Trudging along for…
It’s late April, well after midnight, and there’s something strange going on at the Arizona Roadhouse. The pleasant, somewhat upscale Tempe brewery is in a state of near chaos. Walking in, your gaze naturally turns toward the stage. The first thing you notice is the indelible image of a cream-colored…
Garage rock was not about taking rock ‘n’ roll and handing it to creepy label guys with shaky checkbooks. Nor was it about having your parents, teachers, priests and rabbis giving it the thumbs up. It was none of that. It was all about your own, about breathing some kind…
You just gotta do things. There was unfinished business with the Plimsouls and it still seemed like there was a lot of life in it. I just went for it,” says singer/songwriter Peter Case on what he was thinking when he re-formed his New Wave garage band nearly 15 years…
For those of you going through Survivor withdrawal, this month’s Mail or Muse has been conceived with your shallow needs in mind. If you ask us, that series signed off a few weeks too soon. What good is calling Richard Hatch a “survivor” and then shipping him home? Let him…
Maybe it’s his rubber-tight britches — pants so snug they’d make the Michelin Man squirm. Or maybe it’s his countrypolitan image and those knock-kneed maneuvers he’s made famous — Presleyan gyrations that make the ladies smile and the men snicker. Whatever the reason, despite his place as a trailblazer in…
If Phoenix is a place where gun shops outnumber bookstores, where your neighbor’s house could suddenly explode because a junior chemist bungled his meth lab starter kit and mixed too much Coleman 7 fuel with acetone, then, on likeness alone, the White Trash Debutantes should be huge here.They could be…
“Musicality” — and all that the term implies — has long been the most misunderstood and undervalued element of punk rock. It’s the kind of thing that so-called “real” punks have frowned upon ever since Glen Matlock was drummed out of the Sex Pistols for being too fond of the…
Musicians really shouldn’t do press if they don’t want their words to come back to haunt them. In the case of Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado, he’ll be living with Nick Drake comparisons for some time; his frequent admission that Drake’s second release, 1970’s Bryter Layter, is one of his two…
Patty Larkin plays a hell of a guitar. Specifically, she plays a 1946 Martin D-18 acoustic, and if you don’t understand how cool that is, bad on ya. That was the era — up to the late 1940s — when Martin & Co. was making instruments that went far beyond…
