[The Valley is a big place, and it puts out more interesting music than we could ever hope to cover. Every week or so, Mike Bogumill will use this space to cover a little more of it. In this week’s edition: Music videos from Jock Club and Playboy Manbaby and…
Christian Filardo is a local fixture in some ways. The 21-year-old is known as a noise musician, currently under the moniker Baseball Cap, and as an intermedia artist. He also is the founder of Holy Page Records, a record label that mostly releases cassettes of any music he finds interesting,…
[The Valley is a big place, and it puts out more interesting music than we could ever hope to cover. Every week or so, Mike Bogumill will use this space to cover a little more of it. – Ed.] The goal of this column is to document, explore, and create…
The Marsh is a house venue whose main room’s dimensions I estimate to be around 16 x 20. In this room, there is an alcove where some lights that change color are installed. There is a fog machine somewhere that, in conjunction with the lights, is intermittently successful in creating…
Playboy Manbaby CD release partyCartel Coffee Lab, TempeApril 27, 2013 I get weirded out when large crowds share unbridled enthusiasm. I chalk it up to either “rugged individualism” or “special snowflake syndrome,” depending on how positively or negatively I want to look at myself. This makes me a wallflower in…
Paperhaus with Playboy Manbaby and St. RangerThe Trunk SpaceApril 26, 2013 Post-punk is a minefield for modern musicians. There’s always going to be a group of people who dig through a cool older relative’s record collection or read Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again and discover bands like…
A famous series of ads for Rosetta Stone tells a fictional narrative about some Midwestern farmboy intensively learning Italian to get with an beautiful Italian woman. The pitch seems to be that learning a new language opens up new opportunities, and since it is advertising, the sexual opportunities are top…
“I guess it’s about me having things to say and then saying things with friends,” Kristina Moore, vocalist and songwriter of Where Are All the Buffalo? says in regard to her band. While this sounds like the mission statement of most bands, the collective and collaborative nature of Moore’s project…
It is a recurring event in my life that whenever I hear a new song by former Tempe, currently Los Angeles-based songwriter Tom Filardo, it becomes my favorite song for a week. The last time this happened was when I saw the music video for “I Don’t Getcha Kid” at…
Whirr @ Trunk Space | 3/6/13I don’t want to be a shallow critic, but there’s no denying the Whirr’s firm place in the shoegaze section of the record store. They are knee-deep in the genre tropes: the excessive delay and reverb, the lead guitar doing some twinkly thing while the…
Brujeria @ 910 Live|3/1/13In 2010, Jan Brewer asserted that “our law enforcement agencies” had found decapitated bodies in the desert along the Arizona-Mexican border. Although undocumented immigration from Mexico does lead to deaths in that region, it turned out that the stories about mutilated bodies were unsubstantiated, another one of…
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a myth originally told by the ancient Greeks but best-preserved in Western culture through the Roman poet Ovid, generally is interpreted as a cautionary tale about the perils of living in the past. Orpheus, a famous Greek bard, loses his wife to a snake…
It’s hard to break down what OM is not because it is so complex, but because it is so simple. Music journalists are absorbed by terminology and context. We see a band like OM featuring the bass player (and, in a sense, the heartbeat) of Sleep, Al Cisneros, and immediately…
Phoenix brought it hard in 2012. The year saw a flurry of excellent records and downloads come from the Valley’s hardcore, metal, and punk underbelly. Leading the charge was Sorrower, whose split 7-inch with Portland’s Violence of Humanity ended up on New Times’ music blog Up on the Sun’s year-end…
I don’t think there’s anyone who disagrees that posers suck, but being a part of the landscape of contemporary underground music can make one feel as though he half-heartedly has to jump on trends to maintain relevance. It’s easy to be a poser. It happens every time someone says something…
Seas Will Rise, Gay Kiss, Said Gun, Dead Canyon @ Yucca Tap Room|1/26/12Last night’s charity event at the Yucca for CASA, a crisis center focused on the prevention of sexual abuse, went surprisingly well, all things considered. Along with the originally intended charity, the Boys & Girls Club of America…
“This whole interview is just going to be us trying to figure out how an assembly line works.” I am at the house of Mark Glick, the founder of Anxiety Machine records, along with all the members of the hardcore band Gay Kiss. Together, we are packing copies of their…
Castle @ Yucca Tap Room|1/9/13Every journalistic piece has an angle. The last time Castle played here, touring with Portland doom-metallers Witch Mountain, I was so overwhelmed by the riff-saturated environment that the angle for the piece I wrote on that show shifted to the eating habits of the various touring…
Even though it’s only about two hours away, Tucson and the musical happenings within it can seem distant and obscure to a Phoenix resident like myself. For instance, I only found out about Tucson metal act Godhunter today — despite the fact that it appears that they have been consistently…
Is it possible to have a New Years Resolution for a whole city? Not sure, but I have one. One for Phoenicians one and all, myself included. So here goes: Let’s take some musical risks, Phoenix. Let’s look for opportunities to try new things. No sticking to known quantities. We…
“I think Tristan’s [Jemsek, guitars/vocals] Craigslist addiction is the biggest influence on the band,” says Dogbreth bassist Erin Caldwell. Dogbreth — the long running downtown pop punk combo — has been around for a while, but 2012 has been a year of growth for the band, seeing it make a…
“This whole interview is just going to be us trying to figure out how an assembly line works” I am at the house of Mark Glick, the founder of Anxiety Machine records, along with all the members of the hardcore band Gay Kiss. Together we are packing copies of their…
