THURSDAY 6 Axis/Radius: Ladies Night (Top 40, rock, dance) Blooze Bar: DJ El Dedo (rockabilly) Bobby C’s: Willy B. (old-school R&B) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Casey Jones: Da Gutter Thursdays with DJ Soulman (hip-hop, Top 40) Cherry Lounge: DJ M2 (rock, ’80s, old school, hip-hop) Club Red: The Blunt Club with Pickster Uno, DJ Element, Emerg McVay,…
Los Angeles is, at best, a transient city filled with transitory dreamers. They come in all varieties these days: actors from Sioux Falls, rockers from Detroit, photographers from Reno, and immigrants from places most of us will never bother to find on a map. Consequently, the people in the City…
I’ve just arrived at the Nello’s pizza joint in Old Town Scottsdale, where I’m meeting friends to check out the Rachel Eckroth Trio. I’m cold, wet, and freaking late, because people in this town turn into their Buick Century-driving grandma whenever it rains. I spot my pals at a table,…
Pepsi fires, plastic surgery disasters, and child molestation accusations aside, Michael Jackson is a genius. Some people may laugh at that statement, but those folks probably aren’t included among the more than 104 million people who bought copies of Jacko’s 1983 record, Thriller, which remains the best-selling album of all…
Operatic crossover Sarah Brightman, speaking on The Early Show about her new album, Symphony, said: “It’s got a little bit of dark and light in it. It’s quite gothy and rocky. On the other hand, it’s quite operatic as well.” The soprano left out the album’s most important detail: It’s…
The East Valley beckoned once again for a Saturday-night gallivant. This time, we poked around in Old Town and slid into Pattie’s 1st Avenue Lounge to drink a few rounds with the locals.(Click here for more photos.) Things started to fire up around 10, evidence that the place is a…
In the past five or 10 years, indie rock’s subgenres have been multiplying like bacteria. Dream pop, shoegaze, sadcore, slowcore . . . one has to be a scholar to keep them straight. Ida deserves a tag all its own — “minimalist folk” or “quietcore folk-rock.” We can’t comment on…
Lenny Kravitz hates it when critics call him retro, contending that love, revolution, and smooching should belong to every generation. But the problem with Kravitz’s new album, It Is Time for a Love Revolution, is not just its bland message; it’s that it rips off artists like David Bowie, Led…
Talented songwriter k.d. lang clearly has learned a few things from spending so much time around Tony Bennett. The two have been recording together since they released 2002’s A Wonderful World, and on her latest disc, you can hear the influence of Bennett in her approach to singing. Throughout Watershed,…
The Mars Volta switches gears on its fourth album, giving beat-propelled dance pop a spin. We kid! The Bedlam in Goliath is stuffed with nine-minute alt-prog epics — the type the band has refined to blood-drawing sharpness over the past seven years. We’re not quite sure what singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala…
When political times get tough, artists get dreamy. Stuck in the Vietnam War and immersed in the civil rights movement, musicians in the ’60s engaged in psychedelic escapism. Fumbling through the Iraq War and trapped in the murky quicksand of the economy, the current political tenor resembles the chaotic ’60s…
Old Time Relijun subscribes to three basic tenets of life: Eat, drink, fuck. Bred in Olympia, Washington, the band’s sound is primal and urgent — as if barnyard animals were rioting through an uppity art college. The three-piece, fronted by enigmatic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Arrington de Dionyso, makes music like…
At some point, Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando must have realized that no one really knew who he was. It most likely happened sometime earlier in this decade, when he was trying to make it as an alt-country troubadour — just like Gram Parsons, one of his musical heroes. Dando didn’t…
Before Winger was the butt of many jokes, the Denver-bred Bon Jovi doppelganger and his bandmates undoubtedly had busloads of Betties on standby in every ZIP code and printed their own money, thanks to two consecutive albums that went platinum (a feat nearly unheard of in the Digital Age). Little…
Despite his salacious pseudonym, we’ve got absolutely zero idea of how gifted Kevin the Makeout Bandit is at the art of heavy petting. What we do know, however (other than the fact it takes some serious cojones to advertise your abilities at getting down) is that the dude is pretty…
This techno trio will make you want to dance, even when singer Chris Donathen isn’t shouting stuff like “Get down girl, shake it, shake it!” over bumping beats and synthesized programming on songs like “Fscene8,” which sounds like the sonic stepchild of Cher’s “Believe.” The crux of every Medic Droid…
This garage quartet from Chandler cooks up raw rock recipes with the best ingredients — solid, fuzzy guitar hooks; danceable beats, and sexy vocals with all the lusty thrust of Cramps singer Lux Interior and the sassy swagger of Jack White. Some Mean Wells songs, like “The Storm,” are built…
Ryan Breen (a.k.a. Back Ted N-Ted) creates spacey, upbeat electro-pop songs with introspective, poetic lyrics. If Moby had ever been truly “techno,” he’d have probably made a record like Back Ted N-Ted’s A Jet Made of Limos (Modern Art), which boasts everything from New Wave excursions with basic beats (“999…
A lot of people think things like catchy band names and cool album covers are irrelevant in the Digital Age, when most people download their music and nobody can afford to pay $18.99 for an unheard CD based solely on how cool it looks. (That’s not a good idea, anyway – the last time I did that, it was a Blowtorch Betty CD, and I regretted letting my eyes make decisions for my ears).
But I don’t whole-heartedly agree with the idea that a band’s name isn’t as important as a band’s sound, especially at a massive festival like SxSW, where thousands of unknown artists are clamoring for a break and playing all over the place. I have gone to see bands I’ve never heard of play at SxSW, based on solely on their band names. Last year, I went out of my way to catch this band from India that was cleverly christened Menwhopause, and I didn’t regret it. The music was a great mashup of acoustic rock, heartfelt harmonies, and complex compositions – sorta like Dave Matthews Band, but with a better moniker and fewer sweaty gesticulations from the singer. And I was eternally amused at the crass name one band from Houston took – The JonBenet. I never got a chance to catch one of their shows last year, but they’re slated to perform again this year.
But now they’ve got more competition. Going through the 2008 SxSW performer schedule, I found a whole slew of mostly-obscure bands with outrageous (and sometimes, outright stupid) band names. If you’re going to be in Austin for the festival this year and find yourself with some down time, consider checking out some of these intriguingly-named acts:
Tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane – son of music (and not just jazz) giants John and Alice Coltrane – performed two 50-minute sets with a foursome that showcased drummer E.J. Strickland, pianist Luis Perdomo, and bassist Drew Gress.
With more than 1500 acts at this year’s SxSW music festival, it’s pretty obvious that festival-goers won’t get to see everything, even if they could make hella clones or disperse themselves into cognitive atoms. For me, SxSW is all about running around the blocks to catch such-and-such band at such-and-such place, before shuttling off through the melee to catch the next thing. And while there’s plenty of cool, undiscovered stuff to serendipitously stumble upon, I always like to make a rough guide of the shows I want to catch at SxSW. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of the acts that will inspire me to run even faster through the streets to see their sets. My “absolutely-cannot-miss” gigs are in bold:
Six years after “The Fragile” we were given “With Teeth” followed by “Year Zero” in less than two years and one year later we’ve received another album from the pretty hate machine: “Ghosts I-IV.”
