In eyelinered Chicago goth-pop wanna-bes Kill Hannah’s sort-of hit “Kennedy,” singer Mat Devine brags that he wants to be a Kennedy and, after living fast and breaking hearts and kissing the girls of centerfolds on the tongue, die young. We don’t really believe Devine, because two songs later on that…
You don’t have to be a dork to like Primus, but these days it sure helps. Dismissed by critics and hipsters alike as “cartoonish weirdo wankery” and almost universally named as the scapegoat for the nü-metal holocaust of the late ’90s, Les Claypool and company may have a hard time…
Voted most likely to bring an accordion and dance-punk beats to the emo-kid table at lunch, the exquisitely dressed young men of Panic! At the Disco took their first step down the road to superstardom not by being from the same Las Vegas stomping grounds as Brandon Flowers or even…
When it made its first crude, unintelligible blast onto the metal landscape, no one could have foreseen that Napalm Death would do anything other than flare out into obscurity as a quickly worn novelty. But the band, now grinding away into its 25th year, would not only go on to…
Fuck amps that go to 11 — Tim Carroll lives life with the volume ratcheted up to 20. The 48-year-old gay vocalist for Minneapolis punk foursome Faggot is hardly shy about his sexual orientation, jamming it down the throats of anyone attending their riotous gigs, during which Carroll and his…
The SYR series of recordings were the right idea at the right time. Issued via Sonic Youth’s imprint — beginning in 1997 and continuing, albeit sporadically, to the present day — the releases allowed the group to shrug out of verse-chorus-verse strictures self-imposed as (relatively) new Geffen signees. Lyrics were…
The first-ever mix CD to come from Napoli’s Marco Carola shows no signs of amateurism. After all, Carola is quite familiar with techno, having been DJing at least since 1990, before rolling out his own productions, subsequently establishing a label called Design Music, and recording with Adam Beyer. His selections…
Downtown Phoenix seems to be a ginormous cluster-fuck of urban progress these days. Between the massive mess of light-rail construction and a few new skyscrapers going up, it’s quite the challenge getting to the handful of off-the-chain events going on downtown. However, you’ll wanna brave this urban death maze on…
Thursday 7 AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Cat Eye: DJ Diesel (rock, punk) The Crown Room: DJ Gable (rock, house, hip-hop) Dos Gringos: DJs Benjamin Cutswell & Kid Vicious (rock, ’80s, old school hip-hop) E-Lounge: DJ Domenica (hip-hop, house) Grilled Expedition: DJ Jeff (hip-hop)…
My neighborhood in Tempe is a pretty noisy place. The guys next door have a band practicing inside their house with the windows open every few days, and my neighbors across the back alley apparently have a band that practices there as well (I can hear them now as I’m…
If the answer is yes, then you have a fruitful few days ahead of you. Tonight, at the Stray Cat in Tempe you’ve got none other than the Danzig-killer Danny Marianino of North Side Kings DJing (yeah, this is almost as weird as Vince Ramirez from Flathead learning to scratch)…
Hella props to Lawrence for fashioning the Pandemic logo, which is making its debut in this post. If you didn’t hear already, I’ve asked a plethora of local artists, promoters, and playaz to submit their various Top 5 lists. This is the debut of the returns. If you think you…
Vince Ramirez, center, is playing for both teams Hang out with too many musicians too much of the time, and you’re bound to get some surreal-life moments where you threaten the space-time continuum by placing opposing elements in too close a proximity. Last night I had such an experience, and…
Throwdown on the Interweb; Ear Infection’s in Your Corner Seems a little pissing match has erupted on the interweb in the masturbatory little world of music criticism, between my own company and sister paper Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll and Gawker media’s too-cool-for-school Idolator music blog. The…
Despite authoring this blog, I’m not much of a software geek; I’ve got to rely on some smarter heads at HQ to fix little interweb/html quandaries for me, and I don’t install new programs often. Nonetheless, I got sucked in when I read a press release this morning about Dizzler,…
Ernie, flashin’ the bling Well, I guess “emo rap” is a bit insulting, but my friends in Who Cares (who are Sacto-based but spend a lot of time in the ‘Nix) pretty much wear their hearts on their sleeves, especially Ernie, the group’s MC. I hadn’t heard from them since…
Not sure if it’s the holidaze or or just the cooler weather that’s causing so much dope action on the music tip lately, but I really don’t care. Fact is, practically every night of the week there’s some bomb shit going on. Tonight’s no exception. If you’re not hitting up…
Today’s Thursday, aka Baby Friday, and Thursday nights there’s really only one gig in town worth spending your evening at: the infamous Blunt Club. Whether you’re a hip-hopper, backpacker, punk rocker, indie hipster, what-the-fuck-ever, the Blunt Club’s the bangin’est club night to hit up, five years strong now. This installation…
There’s nothing like a good ol’ drag show to scum up a wholesome holiday with the family. That was the idea at Amsterdam’s 4th Annual Thanksgiving Night Show last Thursday, November 23, when everyone sucked in their turkey-filled guts and squeezed into their clubbing clothes. The fabulously flamboyant show starred…
“We’re planning to do a children’s show in a couple of days, and I was asked which song I would like to play for this kids’ show. I started going through the songs on the record, and with every song it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, here’s the love-story phobia song, this…
Desiree and Mindy Duponte are teenaged sisters, attractive blond girls who each stand around five feet tall and have unusually tiny hands. When they tell people they’re musicians, they usually get a reaction along the lines of, “Oh, you guys play in a band? That’s so cute. ” When I…
Five of the 11 tracks on Robert Plant’s first DVD, Robert Plant and the Strange Sensation (Rounder/Zoe), are new performances of old Led Zeppelin songs. But this set isn’t nearly as safe or nostalgic as the track list would suggest. Captured live in 2005 for PBS’s Soundstage, Plant and a…
