Curious about what's going on around town this weekend? Need some suggestions where to rock, dance, or krump in the Valley of the Sun?
Don't fret: These are our Five Shows to See This Weekend.
Earlier this year, two of heavy rock's biggest performers, Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson, took to performing on the same stage.
It's a combination that makes perfect sense. Throughout the '90s and into the 2000s, the two have dominated pop culture with their theatrical blend of heavy metal and pop, B-movie glee, and often controversial run-ins with the media and parental-concern groups. That the two would team up for the massive "Twins of Evil" tour is a given.
That their tour stop coincides with Phoenix's biggest metal festival of the year? Now, that's less expected, but it's a terrific boon to metal fans.
KUPD's Desert Uprising combines the "Twins of Evil" tour with this year's installment of the Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival at Ashley Furniture HomeStore Pavilion, packing in a whole weekend of heavy sounds, the kind of "active rock" that's never gone out of style in Phoenix: Friday features Manson and Zombie, along with Buckcherry, Corey Taylor (of Slipknot), Redline Chemistry, All That Remains, New Medicine, Otherwise, and the Valley's own Digital Summer. Saturday takes a more melodic turn, featuring P.O.D., HellYeah, Godsmack, Fozzy, Adelitas Way, Shinedown, and more.
But even with the stacked lineup, the main attraction will no doubt be Friday's headliners.
"This kickoff show in Phoenix will be different from what we've done before," says Rob Zombie. "We're in the process of building a new show."
Zombie's guitarist, John 5, says that the stage setup will be worth the price of admission.
"There's something that's going to happen that I haven't seen yet," he says. "I've only heard about it." -- Lauren Wise (Read more about Desert Uprising.) Friday, September 28: The Lumineers @ Marquee Theatre "New York had lied to me. I needed the truth." So sing The Lumineers, who fled the city, stifled by the hard realities of high rent, limited practice space, and constant demands on their free time. Songwriting partners for years, Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites moved to Denver, where The Lumineers found space to grow. And though The Lumineers are folk revivalists, Shultz and Fraites found their missing piece with a purely 21st-century stroke of digital luck, recruiting Neyla Pekarek on cello and mandolin via Craigslist.
The band's breakthrough success this year -- fueled by the rollicking single "Ho Hey" -- stems from the slow and steady effort they put into writing songs over three years before releasing The Lumineers on Dualtone Records in April. With a boost from TV -- The Lumineers have performed on The Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Tonight Show, and Conan -- the band has sold more than 260,000 copies and climbed to number 11 on the Billboard albums chart.
You know "Ho Hey," but check out "Flowers in Your Hair," with its rolling, finger-picked guitar and Schultz's been-there-done-that lyrics: "It's a long road to wisdom, but it's a short one to being ignored." Or the barroom love song "Classy Girls," or the aching ballad "Dead Sea," or the piano ditty "Flapper Girls." -- Eric Swedlund
Saturday, September 29: Sound Wave Music Festival @ Big Surf Waterpark
In 2006, a study by National Geographic revealed that a shocking 50 percent of teenagers were uninformed when it came to geography, many of them even failing to identify New York on a map.
Six years hence, we're willing to bet that members of the 18 to 25 demographic are far better at picking out cities on a map, particularly if they're fans of electronic dance music and the burgs in question host any of the dozens of blockbuster music festivals that take place across the country and around the world.
Miami, for instance, has both the Winter Music Conference and Ultra; Rothbury, Michigan, has Electric Forest; San Francisco hosts LovEvolution; and Las Vegas and NYC each boasts the great godhead of 'em all, the much-ballyhooed Electric Daisy Carnival.
Until 2011, Phoenix pretty much had nothing. Enter local nightlife promoter Steve Levine, who debuted the Sound Wave Music Festival last April. The DJ-laden extravaganza, which takes over Tempe waterpark Big Surf, finally gave Arizona a bona fide yearly EDM massive to call its own in a time when there aren't many big, locally oriented festivals in the Valley, period.
This year's Sound Wave promises to be bigger than last year's event, offering three stages, each of which will features more than a dozen artists, including Calvin Harris, R3hab, Crizzly, Seven Lions, Burns, DJ 40 Ford, DJ Munition, EM Boys, DJ Luke Romero, DJ MCB, DJ Silent J, DJ Thomas James, and more, performing for club kids, raveheads, EDM aficionados, or fans of DJ artistry. -- Benjamin Leatherman
Saturday, September 29: Menomena @ Crescent Ballroom
When Menomena announced in early 2011 that, after some well-documented in-fighting, singer and multi-instrumentalist Brett Knopf was leaving the band to focus on his solo work as Ramona Falls, it didn't feel like a typically band break-up. More so than most bands, the Portland group's sound is a collaborative effort, with each member sharing songwriting and singing duties while juggling multiple instruments.
Menomena's highly democratic structure might be why "Heavy Is As Heavy Does," the first single from the band's new record, Moms, doesn't sound too different from their past work.
It's a tinge darker, but there's pensive piano, lyrics about strained relationships, and a noisy breakdown two-thirds of the way through. They may have lost a third of the band, but their sound has hardly changed. -- Andrew Gospe
Sunday, September 30: The Australian Pink Floyd Show @ Mesa Arts Center
At this very moment, in a dorm room far, far away, the MGM lion is roaring for the third time just as some guy named Alec presses play on his Panasonic CD boombox, ushering in the confusing opening silence of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon over the black-and-white credits of The Wizard of Oz.
What happens next is either transcendental synchronicity or cannabis-inspired confirmation bias, but no one can deny that the 1973 magnum opus of the trippy British foursome is one of the greatest rock albums of all time, a large chunk of which you are likely to hear from Australian Pink Floyd. The only Floyd tribute band ever asked to play for the band itself, Aussie Pink Floyd re-creates the sound, the light shows, and even the giant inflatable pigs and kangaroos of the original tours as part of "one of the best live rock shows you will ever see," according to the London Times.
Be sure to wear your ruby-red slippers. -- P. Scott Cunningham
