Big-name acts like Against Me!, The Stone
Meanwhile, SunSquabi will be at Shady Park in Tempe on Friday, electronic/noise artist Perturbator is headed for Club Red in Mesa on Saturday, and experimental act GoGo Penguin will be at the MIM on Sunday. Add in an Alice in
Read on for more details or hit up our online concert calendar for even more music events this weekend.
SunSquabi
Friday, September 15
Shady Park in Tempe
It shouldn’t seem surprising a band with
Boulder has long been a hotbed for musical improvisation, a place where String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, and Big Head Todd and the Monsters all rose to national prominence. Like those bands, SunSquabi harnesses an improvisational/jamming approach that allows the band to follow any whim or sudden directional shift within set song structures. What sets SunSquabi apart is working off a live looping platform that offers bassist/synth player Josh Fairman and guitarist/keyboard player Kevin Donohue the ability to switch instruments midstream, adding musical layers on the fly. Glenn BurnSilver
Toad the Wet Sprocket
Friday, September 15
Marquee Theatre in Tempe
Formed in 1986 by high school chums Glenn Phillips – the group's designated singer, songwriter, and guitarist – drummer Randy Guss, guitarist Glen Todd Nichols, and bassist Dean Dinning, Toad the Wet Sprocket borrowed their unusual name from a fictional band profiled in a Monty Python comedy sketch. It was clear from the start, however, that they took their music seriously, and with their third album Fear, they scored a pair of certifiable hits "All I Want" and "Walk on the Ocean," kicking off a chart trajectory.
Soundtrack appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and So I Married an Axe Murderer raised their profile, culminating in their fourth album, Dulcinea, which included another series of successful songs — "Fall Down" and "Something's Always Wrong" chief among them. In Light Syrup, a collection of B sides and rarities, and their initial swan song, 1997's Coil, followed, but a year later the band opted to call it a day. Sporadic one-off reunions took place in the first decade of the new millennium, eventually creating the momentum for an official full-scale regrouping in 2009. Lee Zimmerman
EDX
Friday, September 15
Maya Day & Nightclub in Scottsdale
There are many ways for dance-music artists to make a name for themselves, such as blowing up dance floors as a globe-trotting DJ, crafting original tracks as a production wizard or fixing and remixing others' material into new forms. Italian-born EDX carved out his niche with that last option. He's built a reputation as a "genius" (according to Mixmag) by taking good tracks and remixing them into greatness. His style is a high-gloss, club-smashing take on progressive house that incorporates the best elements of trance without undue indulgence in its excesses. You've heard his stamp
Future Islands
Saturday, September 16
The Van Buren
The music of Baltimore-based synthpop trio Future Islands is meant to be experienced live. The group’s interactive shows are bursting with energy, as frontman Sam Herring has a background in performance art and draws inspiration from the likes of Elvis Presley, Ian Curtis, and James Brown. Herring’s improvisational style — ranging from almost uncomfortable eye contact with audience members to weird interpretive dancing and growling — has gone viral and even landed him in the hospital a few times.
Future Islands’ songs pair heartbreaking, earnest lyrics with bouncy beats, so be prepared to move and be moved. Their fifth and most recent album, The Far Field, is propelled by dynamic bass lines, sparkling synths, and pure emotion. The upbeat tracks ease listeners into somber stories of lonely mountain drives, breakups, and unshakeable anxieties. Meagan Mastriani
Perturbator
Saturday, September 16
Club Red in Mesa
Paris musician James Kent is at the forefront of a recent movement of electronic music artists that have developed followings among heavy metal fans. Performing under the name Perturbator, Kent puts together aggressive synth-wave compositions that aesthetically evoke
Initially self-releasing his music through Bandcamp and SoundCloud, Kent’s haunting songcraft positions him as a next-generation cyberpunk Giorgio Moroder, but the layout and buildup of his best tracks also match the power and atmosphere of contemporary heavy metal. Kent genre-hops even more than that on his latest effort, as he seamlessly puts together instrumental odes inspired by ’70s disco, ’80s film
Cigarettes After Sex
Saturday, September 16,
Crescent Ballroom
Not many band names are self-explanatory. You might dig Modest Mouse, The Smashing Pumpkins, and The Arctic Monkeys, but their monikers don’t exactly capture what those bands are about. It’s different for Cigarettes After Sex. The El Paso band’s ambient pop sound is as cool and relaxing as a post-coital smoke.
Front man and songwriter Greg Gonzalez’s dreamy vocals pair off with a simple lineup of delayed lead guitar, ambient reverb, and barely-there bass lines. Although the majority of the songs are about love, they aren’t always rosy. “We had made love earlier that day with no strings attached / But I could tell that something had changed how you looked at me then,” Gonzalez sings on one track. “Well I know full well that you are the patron saint of sucking cock,” he intones on another.
The band has mastered a balance of sweet romance reminiscent of old-school love songs offset with the inescapable realities of modern-day
Touché Amoré
Saturday, September 16
The Underground in Mesa
Touché Amoré has been one of the shining stars of the emo/post-hardcore scene over the last few years. Their style sits comfortably alongside the genre's mainstream forerunners from the past decade like Thursday, but just as easily places them among heavier, more aggressive counterparts like Converge. Sitting on that middle ground has led the
Their 2013 record, Is Survived By, hit No. 85 on the Billboard 200, which is a pretty damn impressive showing for a band that credits little-known screamo acts like Ampere as inspirations. "It's all kind of overwhelming," says front man Jeremy Bolm. "When the band started, I never thought it would be anything outside of playing house shows ... it's pretty crazy." That is where Touché Amoré started, but the band has quickly evolved into something much bigger. They've upgraded from house shows to playing mid-level venues. Perhaps some of their success can be attributed to their lyrics, which Bolm writes with a stunning emotional honesty that truly resonates with fans. Corey Deiterman
Read on for even more great concerts this weekend, including Against Me!, Bishop Lamont, and The Stone Foxes.
Alice's Wonderland II: Gone Mad
Saturday, September 16
Location TBA
Electronic dance music is something that’s typically best enjoyed loud. There’s something about the beats and booms of EDM that just sounds better when its playing at higher volumes.
As you may have guessed from
Bishop Lamont
Saturday, September 16
The Rebel Lounge
A veteran of the hip-hop game for 20-plus, Bishop Lamont’s lengthy career as a rapper has been through a few phases. A former protege of Dr. Dre in the mid-aughts, Lamont made a big splash under the tutelage of the hip-hop legend, appeared on several soundtracks, and put out a few notable mixtapes and albums (including collaborating with the Fat Beats-signed, Motown-based, Black Milk on 2009’s Caltroit).
Lamont wound up walking away from Dre’s Aftermath label in 2010 and pursuing his own path, including dropping the his long-promised album The Reformation, originally announced as far back as 2009 was finally released last year under the title The Reformation: G.D.N.I.A.F.T. (We’ll allow you to seek out the meaning of that particular acronym. Known for their nimble wordplay and uncompromising attitude, which should make for an exciting, unpredictable night on Saturday when Lamont performs at The Rebel Lounge. Lord Kash and ZeeDubb of The Stakes will open and DJs Blesd1 and Les735 will be in the mix. Andy Hermann
Against Me! & Bleached
Sunday, September 17
The Van Buren
Laura Jane Grace inspired people far beyond the sometimes-insular world of punk rock when the Against Me! vocalist announced she was transgender in 2012. Even with all the support she received as the leader of a popular band, Grace still had to struggle with the negative reactions she received from some friends, fans and family members, which was nothing compared to the crippling self-doubt she revealed about the difficult process in her 2016 memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.
Grace’s saving grace has always been her wicked wit on such proudly defiant tracks as “Delicate, Petite & Other Things I’ll Never Be,” from the 2016 album, Shape Shift With Me. Opening act Bleached
Epica
Sunday, September 17
Marquee Theatre in Tempe
Epica is not to be taken lightly. Yes, the Dutch symphonic metal band features string instrumentals and choral scores juxtaposed with mad-crazy guitar licks and death grunts. Yes, angel-voiced front
The Stone Foxes
Sunday, September 17
Crescent Ballroom
The Stone Foxes have been anything but conventional since the rock band formed over a decade ago. For starters, the San Francisco-based outfit opted to self-release their albums, while supplementing with placements on TV shows like Shameless and commercials for Jack Daniels.
That’s given The Stone Foxes the freedom to explore new ideas, like the time they recorded 12 songs in a breakneck 12 days. They released their most recent album, 2015’s Twelve Spells, over the course of several weeks, dropping a new song every Friday. Then, the band released all the tracks together with live versions, bonus tracks, and photos. The group’s also had their hand in philanthropy, starting the Goodnight Moon Project to raise awareness of homelessness through music. They collected donations at their shows and wrote music with shelter patrons. They released a new song called “Fight” in July and will kick off their Fall Gigantour with the release of a new EP called Visalia on September 15. Ashley Harris
GoGo Penguin is a whirlwind of experimental sounds.
Courtesy of Blue Note Records
Sunday, September 17
Musical Instrument Museum
The forward-thinking Manchester, England-based trio GoGo Penguin is a squarely acoustic act with a piano, an upright
Take “Initiate,” from last year’s Blue Note album Man Made Object. When drummer Rob Turner brought an electronic-music project he had built to pianist Chris Illingworth and bassist Nick Blacka, it had African and tribal samples and wild percussion, but no drum kit or piano. “It had really weird synth sounds and then just loads and loads of really sine-wave sub-y kinds of bass,” Illingworth says. “I remember just thinking, ‘I can do that.' I was saying to Rob, ‘Give me that tune. I’ll go out and do some work with it.’”
Even when the songs are reinterpreted on acoustic instruments, they sometimes sound like electronica songs thanks to Turner’s inventive drumming and percussion. The music evokes Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Orbital and Massive Attack, all bands the musicians admire. Jon Solomon
Editor's note: The original version of this list incorrectly identified the current lineup of SunSquabi. It has since been corrected. New Times sincerely regrets the error.
