Music

The Phoenix indie crowd has a new pit stop on their Friday-night boozing agenda. Glam (formerly Ky’s Place), at 32nd Street and Indian School Road, is a perfectly petite dance club stuck in a strip mall. The place goes nuts after midnight, when the pre-drinking is over and an ass-shaking…

Face it, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen your friends make asses of themselves at karaoke. On a Saturday night in mid-November, I’m about to launch an alcohol-fueled audio assault on the croaky-oke crowd, along with my friends Bones, Chazz, Toxic JuJu, and JuJu’s dad Papa JuJu, who’s visiting P-town…

Kurt Cobain loved The Melvins. Without that band’s influence, there would be no grunge. The outfit un-cheesed Sabbath and created truly evil-sounding metal that directed future generations toward methodical bass lines and sick distortion. Cobain (the band’s most tragically beloved roadie) tinker-punked The Melvins’ sounds and made them palatable to…

Somewhere, “power-pop” sticklers are brooding that these Oklahomans can’t possibly apply that mantle to what it is that they do. According to most universally accepted theorems, most power-pop bands are in their late 30s and early 40s, unless they had some estimable RIAA success in the ’70s — then they’re…

Piano rock, schmiano rock. What Copeland produces is something much more than the recycled Ben Folds schmaltz typical of most ivories-oriented groups. Both Beneath Medicine Tree, the quartet’s 2003 debut, and In Motion, its 2005 breakthrough, were awash in lush, dreamy indie pop that eschewed irony for introspection. The guitar…

Best known for incredibly catchy punk songs about murder and monsters, Misfits-Samhain mastermind Glenn Danzig is the only alumnus from hardcore’s original old-school scene to land an album at No. 1 on Billboard’s classical album chart, with 1993’s Black Aria. More sophisticated and eclectic, Black Aria II is instrumental, but…

Lady Sovereign may not seem as revolutionary as the last great British hip-hop export, M.I.A. In fact, at times, her record feels a bit like M.I.A. and Dizzee Rascal sitting down to tea. But it’s the pintsize rapper’s cheeky personality that ultimately matters here (although the quirky synth hooks certainly…

We’ll take the esteemed word of Vogue — along with reports of Karl Lagerfeld’s collection of 60,000 CDs — as evidence that this two-disc comp of the iconic fashion designer’s “favorite songs” isn’t the product of a focus group. But there’s something tragic about a man born in 1933 (according…

The Clash may have scavenged the past for inspiration — calypso, Beat poets, film idols, rockabilly, the Spanish civil war — but never for the sake of nostalgia. And while boxed sets sometimes embalm history, this one suggests the spirit of discovery Joe Strummer might have felt poring through record…

Is there anything that Paul Oakenfold hasn’t done? The London-born wax worker has been dubbed the world’s most successful DJ (per Guinness World Records), toured with Madonna, sold zillions of CDs, reportedly has collected as much as £25,000 or more for certain gigs, and collaborated with actress Brittany Murphy on…

The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year, alternately known as “Black Friday” and “Blitz Day,” when people get up at 4 a.m. to barrel over each other in shopping carts and take advantage of the ridiculous rollbacks. If you’re not in such a hurry to…

This is not an album that will translate into catchy ring tones or make you bounce in your car seat, bang your head, shake your booty with friends, or write angry/gushy diary entries about your recent ex. It’s thinking (wo)man’s music, a sweeping soundscape that re-creates a horrible moment in…