Music

She’s 81 years old, dressed in a curve-hugging black velvet dress with a slit all the way from waist to foot, exposing the dress’ red satin interior and the entire length of her shapely leg, which she extends luxuriously toward the people seated below her. Then she crouches down, opens…

Zachary James Dodds sounds too world-weary to be just 22 years old. On his debut five-song EP, Dodds, who also plays guitar for local folkies the Via Maris, spins vivid tales — both real and imagined — that would seem to belie his age. Behind sparse but eloquent arrangements, Dodds…

In 1997, when Portishead’s self-titled second album arrived, the group’s sound was routinely described as trip-hop. Eleven years later, that term is as dead as Fatty Arbuckle, but Portishead is alive again and more captivatingly obtuse than ever. “I never had the chance/To explain exactly what I meant,” lead singer…

The dark electro-musings of Tucson artist Shawn Foree (a.k.a. Digital Leather) have never sounded more spastic, insidious, and danceable than on Sorcerer. This 12-track album blends quirky art-pop influences like Devo, Plastic Bertrand, and Tubeway Army with layers of synthesized desolation, lyrical angst, and gothic intensity to create a morose,…

Poor RZA. When the studio overlord produces a Wu-Tang Clan masterwork, it lands on RCA or Universal. Yet this chessboard fiend, martial-arts aficionado, and Quentin Tarantino pal can’t seem to garner any respect or sales clout as a rapper; Digi Snacks, his latest sonic escapade, is coming out on Koch…

Any band that puts out an 11-minute recording and presents it as a full-length album obviously has a sense of humor. Like Slayer’s shorty classic Reign in Blood (which is twice as long!) and Napalm Death’s Scum before it, Daughters’ Canada Songs is an attempt to capture a metal sub-genre…

The only way to experience a group this vast, colorful, and earthbound is to simply just listen. An excessive use of adjectives seems unjust. Faun Fables and its creator, Dawn McCarthy, seamlessly draw from a spiritual and mythological realm to convey world sounds that are entrancing. The expression “song telling”…

The gravel-voiced, avant-garde king of indescribable booze-jazz/art rock/blues-folk/dissident cabaret is making his first appearance in the Valley in 30 years. Waits’ song characters — whether it’s a hooker in Minneapolis sending a postcard or a lonely kid sitting after hours in Napoleone’s Pizza House — have endured with as much…

British beat-juggler Lee Burridge is sort of a freak. Sure, turntablists are known to be an eccentric lot, but it’s a safe bet your average record spinner has never claimed to have done the nasty in a DJ booth, fallen in love with a Voodoo woman, and bombed around Burning…

After seeing Eartha Kitt perform with the Phoenix Symphony, I had to find an album that contained most of what I’d heard during her performance, and then some. The Very Best of Eartha Kitt is a two-disc, 35-song collection of her best-known works, from “I Want to Be Evil” and…