The Lonely Island is a lot like one of those cans that’s filled with spring-loaded snakes — most of their humor comes from how long it takes for the joke to reveal itself, and how surprising it still is when it finally does. Their current string of #WACKWEDNESDAY releases –…
Four punk legends walked into a bar. That’s not the setup to some lame knee-slapper, but rather a precise description of what transpired Tuesday night in downtown Phoenix. The bar in question is renowned English pub the George and Dragon, and the aforementioned punk icons are exponentially more famous, having…
Let’s face it: We’re always going to be the red-headed step-artform at comic book conventions. Superheroes have dominated movies for years, and videogames hit the comic-culture demographic pretty naturally, but music — Jonathan Coulton and J-Pop and all the filkers on Livejournal aside — has been (naturally) resistant to adopt…
Carla Morrison’s return to the Valley is a bit of a homecoming: She attended high school at Marcos de Niza and took music classes at Mesa Community College before dropping out to perform with friends in Tempe’s Babaluca. They built a local following for three years before Carla moved out…
[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 Berlin-based DJ Thomas Gold will be visiting Maya, one of Scottsdale’s newest hosts for EDM artists and events, this Friday. Up on the Sun spoke with Gold about his upbringing in music, how his touring and festival schedules have been going, and what we can possibly expect to see…
When people and brands re-create the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket promotion, they don’t always seem aware that Willy Wonka is kind of a sociopath. Regardless: Taylor Swift is re-creating the Golden Ticket promotion, and it’s coming to Phoenix. If you can connect a series of clues on Diet Coke’s Twitter…
Every once in a while I run into a record I’ve never heard of, even though it’s been out for a while. “We Run the Night,” by Australian DJ-turned-recording-artist Havana Brown, is one of those records, and I’m surprised it didn’t become a pop smash in the United States. It…
Country guys are hot. The crowd at the Miranda Lambert show provided plenty of people-watching opportunities, complete with lots of overdressed people and gigantic trucks that dwarved my poor little Toyota. I’m about as far from the “country girl” image as one can get, but that doesn’t change the fact…
“It’s Friday somewhere” isn’t strictly true — I don’t think the International Date Line works that way — but if Jimmy Buffett were to write a song to that effect, and it made you feel better about going to see The Presets and Dragonette tonight at the Marquee, I think…
Am I the only one who is sick to death of the ever-growing list of metal subgenres? It seems to evolve and pulsate and throw out even more obscure genres on a daily basis. Honestly, if there’s one thing metalheads should be able to have faith in when it comes…
Los Dias de la Crescent 2013 was defined by what’s local — the music, the beer, the food, the fans. This year’s schedule looked like a tightened-up version of last year’s format — and it somehow found a way to bring “Stairway to Heaven” into a celebration of Arizona music…
Listen up, local party monsters and EDM fans. There are a few things you’ll definitely need before going wild out at the massive outdoor dance fiesta and electronica rager known as Dirty Disco tomorrow evening. First, make sure to sport a colorful and eye-catching ensemble that you don’t mind getting…
America wants to be close to Jay-Z and Beyonce. Desperately close. Hashtag close. Because they are officially the last celebrities who have not turned their life together into a weekly show on Bravo, they’ve hoovered up the country’s remaining supply of Camelot-style mythos and gravitas. And because it’s 2013, the…
Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley (see the full slideshow.)Desert Sky PavilionMay 16, 2013 For me, the night the Desert Sky Pavilion (or whatever else it’s called from year to year) opens its gates for the first show of the season marks the beginning of summer. And the 2013 summer concert…
One brand-new way to validate your musical tastes in front of your friends: Tell them that you were a fan of Huey Lewis and the News before he put on a raincoat and murdered Weird Al Yankovic with an ax. Murdering Weird Al is a classic sell-out move, but you…
Justin Timberlake is coming to Phoenix in December, and because he’s Justin Timberlake that means tickets are on sale today at 10 a.m. Also because he’s Justin Timberlake: The tickets, at least during limited presages, ranged in price from $62.50 to $1,950. That $62.50 ticket will get you high enough…
Finally, I get to write about music. I’ve been hanging out on the cultural side of the New Times site, Jackalope Ranch, writing a little column called Parent Hood. Not a “how to parent” column, more like a look at pop culture through the eyes of a parent (five kids…
Season 2 of the American version of The Office is my favorite TV show ever, and because I am a glutton for punishment, I’ve been using tonight’s series finale mostly as an excuse to understand how old I and my tastes (and the DVDs I watched all those Jim and…
By Caleb Haley For nearly two decades, Cody Canada has been a driving force in the musical sound blowing out of Oklahoma, like the dust bowls before it, known as Red Dirt music — a raw combination of southern jazzy blues, folk, country, and rock ‘n’ roll. For the first…
There’s a new Spotify competitor in town, and its name is — take a breath here, if you’re reading out loud — Google Play Music All Access. What separates it from Spotify, besides the increased time it will take to type (or speak into your Google Glass)? It always costs…
