Vayden, Warner Drive and Ronin Meyer at 910 Live Tonight

Get ready for a night of hard and heavy alternative rock music that’s definitely worth checking out.Vayden, Warner Drive, and Ronin Meyer will be performing a big all-ages rock show on the outdoor stage at 910 Live tonight. Tickets are $10.All three bands have put a more artistic spin on…

Social Distortion at Marquee Theatre Last Night

Social Distortion Marquee Theatre January 13th, 2011It’s a testament to Social Distortion’s prominent influence on younger punk rock n’ roll bands that two songs in to opening band Dead Relatives’ set, I thought they were Social Distortion.  It’s either a testament to that or how crappy a music critic I…

Meat Puppets Announce New Record, Lollipop, for April 12

Local legends The Meat Puppets will put out a new record, Lollipop, on April 12. The followup to 2009’s Sewn Together will come out on Megaforce Records. It was also recorded in Spoon’s HiFi Studios in Austin. Curt Kirwood produced the record himself — Curt lives in Austin and also…

Top Ten January Albums Since 2000

While the month has always been bountiful for new releases, some January albums often get left off of many year-end, best album lists. Those that do make it onto such lists have to be albums that are enjoyable enough to merit listens well into the later months of the year. …

Numbers On Napkins: Borrachos, Chingasos Y Rucas

  Title: Borrachos, Chingasos Y Rucas   Basics: How about some good ol’ fashioned AZ punk, compliments of local quartet Numbers On Napkins. Lead by the prolific Chase Stain, Borrachos was produced by Joe Queer of, oddly enough, The Queers while being engineered by Landmine Marathon’s Ryan Butler.   That’s a…

Now Open: Bar 350 in Scottsdale

Beer and booze are once again flowing at the Scottsdale space formerly known as biker place the Billet Bar. The spot, which is located at 3752 North Scottsdale Road, has taken on a rebooted identity as the newly opened Bar 350. Owner Johnny West is hoping his joint will become…

Flier of the Week: Snail Quail

Nothing says “good times at the Trunk Space” quite like Pee Wee Herman and Snail Quail.Snail Quail’s singer and guitarist Jonathan Cisneros designed this week’s featured flier. He was shooting for something that would make people smile.”The concept behind the flier was to make it undeniably ‘Snail Quail-esque’ and simple,”…

The Flaming Lips Play Smartphone Jam in a Bath Tub

The Flaming Lips have done an interesting musical experiment with smartphones, according to Prefix.Wayne Coyne and Steve Drozd of the Flaming Lips recently recorded a jam sesh that took place in a bath tub.The guys played different parts of a song they wrote by playing the tracks of each instrument…

We Came As Romans @ The Clubhouse

Metal has probably produced more legitimate subgenres than any other branch of rock. Yet, for the most part, these offshoots have remained fairly true to the genre’s roots, especially visually: Grizzled, long-haired dudes in black leather playing brutal music. But then we have metalcore and bands such as We Came…

Social Distortion @ Marquee Theatre

It’s hard to know what to make of Social Distortion’s over-30-year-cling to their signature sound. Take their new single, “Machine Gun Blues,” from their forthcoming album, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes: The three-minute ’30s gangster parable sounds exactly how you would expect the first single from a new Social Distortion…

The Whisperlights @ The Lost Leaf

The music scene in Phoenix, as much as we don’t like to admit it, isn’t perfect. It’s not that we don’t have enough bands making decent music — but one thing that has, in my opinion, always hampered some bands in Phoenix is that their records seem to lack a…

Concrete Blonde @ The Compound Grill

Someone in Concrete Blonde’s licensing camp really dropped the ball. 2010 saw the release of the 20th-anniversary edition of their seminal 1990 album, Bloodletting, described by the kind folks at Amazon as “a gothic tapestry of danger, vampires, alcoholism, and passion,” but I didn’t hear a single one of their…

The Rage Music Festival and the Coming Evolution of Christian Rock

Every year at Castles-n-Coasters, 50 bands play on four stages in front of crowds that could be considered big by any reasonable Phoenix standard. Odds are, however, that unless you happen to follow Christian music, you will not have heard of the bands on the two-day Rage Festival bill. Thousand…

Air Supply and the Other Greatest Dude Duets of All Time

Though they flamed out faster than John Bobbitt’s adult-film career, Air Supply can always lay claim to early-’80s light-rock godhood. In a post-Carpenters world, they kept us going, man. The group’s founding duo — guitarist Graham Russell and singer-songwriter Russell Hitchcock — have another, less obvious claim to fame: They…

Madball Is Now Moving at a More Civilized Pace

Hardcore punk is one of those easily dismissed, oft-overlooked genres. Too frequently, people regard it as solely for teens — or irrelevant after the late ’80s. The reality is that good hardcore music does have a place in the music world, and bands like Madball are at the forefront of…

Rainbow Brite @ Stratus

Stuart Langelaan (a.k.a. Lange) commands some serious respect in the DJ world, and rightly so. Some of the 36-year-old British trance trickster’s accomplishments include ranking highly on the UK sales charts several times over the past decade (and earning an appearance on BBC’s Top of the Pops as a result),…

Seven Nights of DJs and Dancing

THURSDAY 13 27th Avenue Bar: R&B Thursdays (old-school R&B) Airia Nightclub: Ladies Night with DJ Circle, & D-JR (hip-hop, Top 40, remixes, house, electro) AZ88: Josh One (rare groove, urban funk) Bar Smith: Short Notice with DJ Smite, Monsoon Sound, Johnny D., One Peso, J-Cut, Djentrification, DJ Melo, DJ Mantis…

Roundup of Music-Related Gabrielle Giffords Stories

If you’re a loyal reader of all the New Times blogs you may have spotted a few familiar bylines over on our news blog, Valley Fever.All our coverage related to the tragic shooting in Tucson is there for convenience sake, but in case you missed some of the music-related (and…

From Print: Blogs Teased in Our 1/13 Issue

This week, New Times ran a list in our print publication highlighting some of the most interesting posts published at Up On The Sun over the past week. Here are links to those posts.What sort of music did Jared Lee Loughner listen to?Why does Alice Cooper have a naked lady…