Exactly 10 years ago, the mass media was abuzz with a new phenomenon in the music biz: the sudden rise of women in rock. The startling success of Tracy Chapman’s debut album–along with the rapidly growing profiles of Natalie Merchant, Suzanne Vega, Sinead O’ Connor, and Toni Childs–had the likes…
Tricky Angels With Dirty Faces (Island Records) Anyone can build a majestic structure if you give him unlimited materials and resources. The real test is what you can achieve with the sparest of tools. Tricky, the Bristol studio alchemist who brought trip-hop to the ears of dance mavens before the…
If there is a hill behind the sun, it ain’t Heaven Hill. It ain’t the brown-colored liquid that is sold at two bucks per half-pint in neighborhood liquor marts where food stamps are the legal tender of choice. No, it can’t be the same Heaven Hill that ruins lives faster…
There’s a scene in the 1981 Bill Murray Army comedy Stripes that’s always stood out for me. It comes after a depressed Murray admits to his girlfriend that he’s once again lost his job and had his car repossessed. In response, she blows up at him for his chronic slacker…
River Jones fancies himself as something of a young music-industry renaissance man. His big heroes are the Beastie Boys, who’ve managed to be ever-evolving artists while running the Grand Royal label, and Perry Farrell, who’s organized multimedia festival tours while maintaining his own musical career. But even the most ambitious…
The Pastry Heros Horn Rim Fury E.P. (Submersible Recordings) Pure, unabashed pop bands are a rare commodity locally; the few bands that place themselves in the pop category are generally either pretentious or too talentless to appreciate the measured aesthetics of truly beautiful pop music. When Alison’s Halo broke up,…
Poughkeepsie, New York, your time is gonna come. It almost came in 1988 when Poughkeepsie resident Rosy Carnemolla amassed 850 pounds of too solid flesh and snagged herself “the world’s heaviest woman” slot in the Guinness Book of Records. Matt Strangewayes, lead singer of Windigo, also happens to hail from…
The Valley may not be hyped as one of the great jazz meccas on the planet, but it has long had something that more ballyhooed areas don’t have: a genuine scene, a community where jazz players intermingle, exchange ideas, and sit in with each other’s bands. For years, the command…
Technology has advanced exponentially since my birth nearly a quarter-century ago. These days, computers ensure that the first letter of each sentence one types is capitalized, the Internet provides information and pornography to anyone capable of clicking a button, one space station is nearly used up and another one is…
The Prissteens Scandal, Controversy & Romance (Almo Sounds) If you ever wondered what the great girl groups of the early ’60s would do in this bolder, more sexually frank era, an answer comes in the form of the debut album by New York quartet The Prissteens. This three-quarters-female band (drummer…
Speedo. Petey X. Atom. Apollo 9. N.D. J.C. 2000. Who are these impressive, vaguely dangerous-sounding men? Gang members? Comic-book heroes? Members of one of the greatest rock bands of all time? Well, if you picked the last, then you should feel pretty clever. I’m talking about the mighty Rocket From…
If matchbox 20 is the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of McDonald’s, then Todd Snider is the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of El Fronterizo bar down at 14th Street on Van Buren in Phoenix. It’s where the smell of stale cigarettes, unfulfilled dreams and a thousand midnights of being drunk all…
Jeff Buckley Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (Columbia Records) When singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River last May, the media treated it like a pop-culture footnote, of little interest to anyone but his rabid cult. Years from now, when the dust finally clears, informed music fans may…
For most of the night, America West Arena was merely the picture of reverent adoration. But there were moments during Eric Clapton’s May 25 Memorial Day show when reverence turned to fanaticism, when Slowhand’s piercing Strat seemed to lift whole sections of people out of their seats. It happened during…
In an age when program directors are less inclined to stick their necks out than a turtle, the creators of Radio Free Phoenix–Dwight Tindle and Danny Zelisko–have launched a radical Sunday-evening show (7 p.m. to midnight) that they hope will shake up mainstream radio or, at the very least, air…
Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic Records) It’s easy enough to understand the cult of Tori Amos. In an era dominated by literal-minded rockers in baseball caps and baggy shorts, she dares to plunge into the mystic, to use songwriting as a vehicle for escape from mundane reality into…
Talk about your double-edged compliments. For six years now, the Piersons have patiently nodded while fans tell them how much their tough-but-tender songs and whiskey-soaked roadhouse punk call to mind the Replacements. There are worse things in the world than being compared to one of the greatest bands ever to…
You’re flying high in April–shot down in May! Ah well, at least Frank squeezed an extra nine months past the Sinatra Death Watch. For 10 months, the National Enquirer, The Globe and The Star held their ravenous vigil waiting for “The Voice” to give out. “Sinatra: The Last Sandwich! The…
Garbage Version 2.0 (Almo Sounds) If a mad scientist tried to build the ultimate alt-rock band for the late ’90s, it would probably sound a lot like Garbage. This unlikely musical marriage of three placid American studio graybeards and a fiery Scottish femme fatale vocalist couldn’t cover its bases better…
Typical Tempe guitar-rock isn’t so typical anymore. Not if a recent twin bill featuring Gloritone and Sleepwalker is any indication. The Saturday-night Nita’s Hideaway show on May 9 was an eye-opener in a variety of ways, a series of mini-epiphanies that featured some of the same, a lot of the…
There’s a lovely little girl a few trailers down from me who has that guard up. That barrier of self-denial that is inevitably raised in kids when unnatural things occur. A self-defense mechanism used before all the misfires accumulate and things like alcohol and meth grab them by the throat…
Everyone knows that progressive rock died in the late ’70s, right? The only question is when the patient actually expired. Was it the moment that Johnny Rotten first leaned into a microphone and howled, “I am an antichrist”? Or was it the day that Yes buckled to the winds of…
