Music

We’re debuting a new feature with Up on the Sun where every Friday we’re gonna give you the heads up and 411 on any just announced kick-ass or big-ass concerts that will be visiting Valley venues in the coming months.

Whether it’s because he just finished watching some classic Queen concert footage on the bus, or because he generally likes to think big, Stars of Track and Field co-founder Kevin Calaba’s got some grand visions in mind for his own band’s live show. “In a perfect world, we’d headline and…

One or two of the acts on the “Hippiefest” tour would’ve spiced up the typical take-the-money-and-run oldies packages that plow through town every summer. But together, this package of ’60s acts truly shows remarkable breadth. The acts have retained their critical cachet and haven’t worn out their names with nostalgia…

Reading lengthy excerpts from Nikki Sixx’s memoir, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star (out September 18 from First MTV Books/Pocket Books), and listening to its accompanying soundtrack by his band Sixx: A.M. (out now on Eleven Seven Music) is like running up to…

Cary Brothers isn’t a household name yet, but it’s been pretty hard to escape his music ever since his acoustic ballad “Blue Eyes” appeared on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to 2004’s Garden State. In the interim, Brothers has released two EPs, and his folksy pop has served as the emotional backdrop…

Perhaps the anemic audience at the Sunset Festival caused Stiletto Formal singer Kyle Howard to dive off the balcony inside the Venue of Scottsdale toward uncertain injury (or at least certain expulsion from the club). Perhaps a caffeine binge caused Chronic Future to play an extra-long set. Maybe mental lapses forced Peachcake to eat itself upon a big plate of silly string. Whatever the reasons for the all grandstanding, everybody who wasn’t among the 400-or-so people at the show missed a spectacle. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I was a young squirt, I used to marvel at the crude horsepower chugging beneath the hoods of the buses that carted me to school each morn. The vaguely angry man who sat astride the driver’s seat of our mighty yellow stallion would struggle and wrestle with the great steel stick shifter, and our bodies would lurch and thud around the seats as we hurtled towards our educational destinations. More tank than Cadillac, they weren’t thoroughbred prizewinners, but they still wore the pants in the child-transportation business.

Well, a similar dosage of horsepower seems to lie behind the motormouth indie rap songs of the other busdriver, Busdriver, nee Regan Farquhar, whose surreal, tongue-twisting, jazz-influenced outbursts splatter the listener with tales of liberal failure and indie rap woes. Busdriver is the spawn of Project Blowed, the L.A. underground rap collective responsible for attacking the typical boring rap status quo (bitches/hos/etc.). He blasted off in the early nineties doing open mic nights at the Good Life Café in South Central L.A., and has since been weaned on the fulsome dugs of such luminaries as Abstract Rude and Aceyalone.

In his songs Busdriver takes a good look around, whittles folkloric-type figurines from what he sees, and deploys them in a rapid fire barrage of abstract metaphors, surreal images and sarcastic brickbats that lodge in your language centers and blossom into pleasurable interior explosions. His flow is fast as tarnation and he works with producers ranging from Nobody and Boom Bip (on his latest platter, RoadkillOvercoat) to Daddy Kev, who aren’t afraid to cop licks from Bach, Can, and vocalese jazz records. His voice has been described as “Aesop Rock impersonating Will Smith impersonating a white guy,” a description I can’t top, and his delivery is generally staccato and heavy on ye olde sarcasm.

by Matt Neff
Photographs by Luke Holwerda

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The Stray Cats, The Pretenders, and Don Henley
Jobing.com Arena
August 8, 2007
Better than: 12,000 years of human thought, art, technology and history

~”It’s All a Bunch of Hipsters”~
A Review in Three Parts
In Which the Reviewer Considers the Artistic Merits of Those Three Groups Involved
In Addition to the Chutzpah They Put Forth in Displaying It

I. Setzer

Retro-rock is a hackneyed tactic and I generally have better things to do than catatonically ingest the wild gesticulations of aging MTV superstars but then again I figured that old dog Setzer knew how to mangle a Gretsch so I thought, “Hey, why not head down to the Jobing dot-com coliseum and catch a few good-time rockabilly tunes from my main man Brian” and wouldn’t you know it gee golly gosh wow gee, I was right. The man can sling an axe like it’s 1957 all over again. I technically haven’t experienced 1957 because I was but a twinkle in my old pappy’s nutsack at the time but I’ve read it was a very important year because Elvis got drafted (although he hadn’t yet been forced to kiss ass by singing with Sinatra) and Jerry Lee set an innocent piano on fire but skies were still sunny because the Big Bopper was in his prime putting the fear of god into every Mr. and Mrs. Smith who cared for their little Sally’s virginal sanctity and Eisenhower could go golfing whenever he felt it and wait wasn’t that the year Fonzie went water-skiing??? In any case the point is that the Stray Cats rocked the house LAME-ASS RETRO-SHTICK OR NOT and they should be COMMENDED FOR IT.

Cousins Of The Wize may be the closest thing to a hip-hop “supergroup” in Phoenix. Some members of the 8-piece collective have played with local luminaries Trik Turner and Phunk Junkeez, COTW MC Pie has released some much lauded solo work as Magnum P.I.e, and the group’s played with a host of hot acts that includes Incubus, Cypress Hill, Run-D.M.C., House of Pain, De La Soul, Fishbone, and Pharcyde.