In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to break-dance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…
While the music business goes about choosing its acts like a high school popularity contest, music’s ranks of losers, loners and sensitive souls continue to prove true art is borne of greater hardship than bad hair days and poor fashion sense. Looking more like members of the truckers’ local than…
Okay, no surprise here: The rush-released American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs, one of the worst albums in recent memory, debuted earlier this month at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. There’s plenty to scoff at here, from the laughably heart-stricken rendition of Journey’s “Open…
The Thorns have the sort of name that these days can attract a considerable ground swell of interest among young record-buyers: a definite article in front of a one-syllable plural noun that features a prominent long vowel. Last year the formula worked for the Hives, the Vines and the Strokes,…
The United States’ latest ventures abroad prove that our country is far better at combating cultures than at mixing with them. So perhaps it makes sense that three dudes from our favorite scapegoat nation should remind us about the art of the enlightened blend. Having already sold a half-million copies…
Darryl Worley’s song “Have You Forgotten?” attempts to split the patriotic difference between Toby Keith and Alan Jackson, waving the flag while showing some class, to erratic effect. The country star deserves points for rhyming “forgotten” and “bin Laden” (it’s certainly better than, say, “income-tax deduction” and “weapons of mass…
Come on — stop that Noize! Firmly in the “what th . . .” category, Quiet Riot has decided to tour, gracing us at, you guessed it, the Mason Jar with its wacky homogenized heavy metal. Quiet Riot is basically famous for two reasons: losing founding guitarist Randy Rhoads to…
Mike “Sir Pie” Gomez, the normally effusive rapper and singer for Cousins of the Wize, looks devastated, wearing a blank look of disbelief, like he’s lost his security blanket. In fact, he has. Days earlier, his Cousins rhyming partner and longtime friend Chris “CPT” Pangrazi, 29, had been killed in…
As an international post-indie rock star, Damon Albarn’s waded through it all with a grin. Along with archrival Oasis, vocalist Albarn and his band Blur ushered in the early-’90s Britpop era that saved smart guitar rock in the U.K., before the Gallaghers knocked them out of arena contention. They’ve taken…
Sorry to say it, but Silver Lake sounds like Vic Chesnutt light. The veteran singer-songwriter’s southern gothic has gone quasi-gospel, his delicate imperfection and haunted airiness glossed over. A full band of musicians leaves its stamp all over the recording, which, if memory serves, includes the only wicked guitar solo…
If you lined up all the arenas REO Speedwagon, Journey, and Styx have simultaneously rocked and wimped out end to end, it would stretch across the universe and back six times and probably resemble one of their ludicrous space-invader album covers. And if you were to flip over their Power…
Revolving casts of players complement David Bazan’s music, but there would be no Pedro the Lion without him. He is known for brooding internal meditations on existence, man’s struggles with a higher power and the dark aspects of humanity. A Christian artist, Bazan draws more indie kids than church groups,…
Pop culture historians like to pontificate that punk killed the guitar hero. Though anyone who’s seen Doug Martsch’s Stratocaster lead Built to Spill to a kind of Hendrixian Valhalla knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Punk simply reeled in the absurdity of that hero’s myth, sterilizing the…
In the recent past, Mill Avenue in Tempe has been reserved for the aging jangle-pop bands of ’90s yore, but things have started to turn. The relatively young noise-rock outfit Hotfoughtcold has joined the storied avenue’s ranks — and they’re hauling their friends with them. The year before HFC started…
I walked into Stinkweeds Record Exchange in Tempe last week and was stunned by what I heard. Hail to the Thief, the new album by British art-rock giants Radiohead,was blasting from the store’s speakers. I recognized the drum machine distortion that closes “Sit Down. Stand Up” immediately; it was something…
Like other musicians whose primary instruments are laptop computers, Canadian-bred U.K. resident Dan “Manitoba” Snaith is simultaneously saddled by specific sonic expectations and set free in a truly endless field of sound. Most of his contemporaries are often done in by this push and pull. Trip-hop fiddlers and dance-floor superstars…
From H.L. Mencken to the Coen Brothers, patronizing Yankees have always been quick to giggle at the rubes down south. Three decades ago — after watching Harvard-educated Dick Cavett grill high school dropout and then-Georgia governor Lester Maddox on national TV — Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Randy Newman decided he had seen…
Occasionally, a celebrity phone interview can reveal a slice of life not intended for print. It’s usually something mundane, maybe a rock star reiterating he needs his groceries to his nanny or personal assistant. But since rock journalists are like priests and not only in a monastic sense, revealing even…
The rich man can have his green grass back next week. This is our field tonight. I stand surrounded by tens of thousands of party people on this terra-formed oasis. They look happy, smiling, throwing Frisbees, disco napping in pockets of shade, dancing in celebration, rushing from one attraction to…
Virtually all of the hatorade that’s been spilled over Madonna’s sharp American Life has actually succeeded in pointing out what’s great about the album. A sonic palette limited to sliced-and-diced guitar and producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï’s signature synth squelch; over-the-top pontifications from the singer about America’s consumer culture and her search…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a female-fronted three-piece from (where else?) Brooklyn, are being hyped as the latest saviors of raw fucking rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Tony Blair’s kingdom, where mania over the garage-rock phenom runs high. They come to us as yet another American garage-rock tsunami in the wake of…
Every great band has a so-called “quiet” one — they’re the ones you gotta watch. For indie-rock statesfolk Yo La Tengo, that’s James McNew, the “new” member, third wheel to guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley’s marriage for a mere decade. As with most quiet ones, the mask’s a…
