Meg & Dia, a four-piece power-pop outfit out of Utah, is bulwarked by a strong confessional singer-songwriter sensibility and fronted by sisters Meg (21, guitars and lyrics) and Dia (19, vocals) Frampton. In shorthand: They’re everything Ashlee Simpson likes to imagine she is. More interesting, though, is the relationship between…
This Detroit band found some success in the swing revival of the late ’90s, even though they were really an eight-piece jump blues band. They had the horn blasts and boogie beats to steal Cherry Poppin’ Daddies fans, and the good sense to make their second (and last) album, Torch…
The Search may be the perfect title for the latest album from Uncle Tupelo offshoot Son Volt, conveying the yearning, seeking quality that underlies the album’s indie rock-flavored mix and lyrical bent. In fact, it is long past time to bury the “alt-country” banner that Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and…
Where its higher-profile tour mates and pop-punk counterparts Simple Plan and Good Charlotte have coupled their massive record sales with face time in the spotlight, Ohio’s Relient K has taken a subtler route to the top, remaining virtually faceless to the rock (and punk, for that matter) mainstream while still…
At its best, Ace of Hearts, the U.S. debut from Danish quintet Green Pitch, lilts, floats, and haunts like the best work of Mazzy Star; at its worst, Ace is ponderous, awkward, and inscrutable. Dream pop is undoubtedly the band’s genre of choice, but folk influences abound. The opener, “In…
Good news for metalheads who are still living in 1983 — Age of Evil (whose members are half your age) is making new music that sounds like outtakes from Iron Maiden’s Killers album and Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather. The Scottsdale quartet (composed of two sets of teenage brothers)…
Call him a poor man’s Dylan, or a wise man’s Clapton. Richard Thompson is perhaps the most underrated performer of his generation. For 40 years, first with Fairport Convention, then with ex-wife Linda Peters, and finally solo, Thompson has continued to produce terrific, thoughtful albums while others have fallen off…
Eric Clapton may have aged a bit too gracefully for many fans of his incendiary work with Cream, abandoning that youthful urgency in favor of a gentlemanly school of easy listening. And Back Home, his latest effort, clearly plays to Clapton’s older, wiser, less exciting side. As the title suggests,…
Priestbird — not to be confused with Priestess, Judas Priest, or “Freebird” — can be confused with Tarantula A.D. That’s the name under which the New York trio crafted its unique, enticing blend of classical music, freak-folk, punk, psychedelia, prog-rock, and metal before changing their moniker in recent months. Why…
Catherine Vericolli and Ryan Champagne might’ve dubbed themselves The Lucky Bitches, but the truth is that they’re quite the pleasant pair. Consider them to be goofballs to the third degree, as they named their DJ duo after a French & Saunders skit and incorporate silliness whenever possible into their weekly…
Most critics gave up on these horndogs back in ’68, when they had the temerity to boot out founder Al Kooper to get someone who could really shhhaaaang! The counterculture gave up on ’em completely when they went on a 1970 State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe and had to…
Thursday 8 AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Bikini Lounge: Scratchy Rekkid Night with DJ Shane Kennedy (various) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Coyote Hill: DJ G-zus (Top 40, hip-hop) The Door: Pink Thursdays with DJ Astonish (hip-hop, Motown, Top 40) Hollywood Alley: Blunt Club with Emerg McVay, Hyder, Pickster,…
A Club Candids without drinking? What could possibly make us want to go out besides the sweet promise of bars filled with bountiful booze? The biggest downtown arts event of the year, that’s what. This week, we decided to keep our livers clean and take in a little culture on…
The Inimitable George Tabb What seems like a million years ago — but was really just half-a-lifetime, when I was 15 or 16, I was a faithful/fanatical reader of Maximum Rock N Roll. If you don’t know, it was the bible of punk rock, a newsprint compilation of all the…
SiOP The band SiOP’s press release begins, “SiOP was formed in the summer of 1998 and has been on the rise ever since.” Truth is, SiOP never left 1998 and its plethora of shit bands: Static-X, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, the Bizkit, etcetera. Here’s the goods on SiOP’s latest album,…
A little over three years ago, I wrote here in my column Revolver about the sad descent of Zia Records from a truly indie and customer oriented record store into an algorhythmically stocked clone of chains like Tower and Best Buy. I would venture to guess that a lot of…
After hitting up a couple empty clubs this past Saturday night, we finally gave in and headed to The Rogue in Scottsdale for Shake!’s two-year anniversary. Leave it to William Fucking Reed to steal the crowds, because on Saturday, February 24, the place was packed with a mixed mob looking…
Other than a few years of classical piano as a preteen, I never learned to play music. My parents wouldn’t buy me a guitar or a drum kit, I never got to sing in front of an audience (thankfully, since I can’t sing), and I never had a rock band…
In the 30 years since its inception, hip-hop has grown from a means of expression for oppressed black youth to a major force in American popular culture. As such, hip-hop has been appropriated by all segments of our society — most controversially, by young white suburbanites. Fortune Small Business editor…
For nearly 20 years, the Queers have made a crude pop art of thrashing through their most infectious songs with the reckless abandon of a hardcore band — a really funny hardcore band that worships the Ramones and The Beach Boys. They actually cover the Beach Boys in one of…
“I thought it was garbage,” says guitarist Kenny Florence, recalling the first time singer/songwriter Adam Baker let him hear the new songs he’d been writing as Annuals. “The first few songs, I really didn’t like. And he’ll admit to you that they’re just not that great,” Florence says. “But then,…
As much as Kittie benefited from the late-’90s nü-metal explosion, they were always one smart step removed from it: From the scrappy, Hole-via-Cannibal Corpse death-grunge of 1999’s Spit, to the Pantera-style bludgeoning of 2001’s Oracle, to the finessed, goth-tinged chug of 2004’s Until the End, the all-female Canadian quartet never…
