For me, Brian McKnight will forever live in a clip from the original 90210, performing for ill-fated couple Donna and Noah in a restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles. Even though I may not need to hear anything from McKnight ever again, after his early 2000s urban adult contemporary heyday slowed…
Michelle Shocked’s sophomore album, Short Sharp Shocked (1988), was a best-selling rebuke of the walkin’-on-sunshine Valium binge that ruled pop music in the late 1980s. Filled with pissed-off-sounding folk-rock paeans to the American condition, the album also sported a magnificently jarring cover image: A black-and-white photo of Shocked (born Michelle…
With a name like Dirty Pretty, you’d expect lots of gorgeous gals, and if you’re lucky, ladies that want to get down and dirty. I’m not sure about the dirty half of the equation, but the pretty were out in full force. Check out this week’s Club Candids to see…
Such is the case for today. Pala — the sophomore album from British dance rockers Friendly Fires — is now streaming in full thanks to the fine folks at the Hype Machine. Details about the album — plus the stream itself — are after the jump…
Today, The Cars release their first record since 1987’s Door to Door. The new album, Move Like This, also marks the band’s first album without bassist and co-lead vocalist Benjamin Orr, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, twelve years after The Cars broke up.Orr’s harmonies and bass lines are…
By my estimations, I’ve been doing You Asked For It for over a year now — just about 15 months. In that time, I have come across some really fresh, interesting new music from local, unsigned bands. Those albums have shown me that there is a very solid core of…
There’s no “secret formula” for success in any music genre, but finding an audience as a prog rock band seems especially tricky. Prog rock’s biggest success stories range from the legendary (Pink Floyd) to the legendarily annoying (Rush). For a genre in which virtuosity is so highly regarded, the gaps…
Portugal. The Man is arguably one of the hardest-working bands making music. They’ve released a record every year since 2006, and five EPs between 2005 and 2007. They tour tirelessly, constantly churning out their psychedelic funk grooves for the enjoyment of their dedicated fans. The Portland via Alaska band got…
There isn’t much demand these days for films about train-hopping hobos set in the ’30s, but if there were, no one other than Man Man could supply the soundtrack. The Philadelphia quintet combines the practice of using a wide variety of instruments, including piano, guitar, pots, pans, and fireworks, and…
History shows that modern musicians can become successful when they work in threes. For instance, ZZ Top, Green Day, The Bee Gees, Destiny’s Child, The Police, and The Beastie Boys have all found fame and fortune. However, not one of them sounds anything like Brooklyn instrumental soul funk trio Soulive…
Juan Carlos Lenz and the other hipster DJs behind the new monthly dance affair Mean Streets aren’t lacking in confidence, by any means. Check out the event’s Facebook page as evidence of such, as Lenz and company declare that the night will be “a party extraordinaire featuring some of the…
Dirty dubstep beats, dope dames, and wild times are what you’ll find every Thump Day down at School of Rock in Tempe. The Mill Avenue nightspot is filled with plenty of bass-heavy beats courtesy of such DJs as HavocNdeeD, which shake School of Rock to its very foundation. Club Candids…
Phoenix resident Stevie Nicks’ new album, In Your Dreams, was released today. Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield has already given the album rave reviews, calling it Nicks’ best album in a decade. It’s hard to argue with that, especially considering that Nicks hasn’t released an album in a decade (her…
Fleet Foxes kicked May off in the proper fashion, releasing what I consider to be the year’s best album thus far. In only a week’s time, however, New York experimental rockers Gang Gang Dance will unleash their beast of an album, Eye Contact.Lucky for us, the fine blokes at NME…
In case the giant beard and heavy jacket didn’t tip you off, William Fitzsimmons is a singer- songwriter in the vein of Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam before he embraced ’70s soft rock (or Justin Vernon when he was still in the cabin, before he met Kanye). In the past,…
Dirty Beaches songwriter Alex Zhang Hungtai started with a desire to make films and, sure enough, his album Badlands feels like a movie, owing as much to filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, and Wong Kar-Wai as it does to his musical influences, Suicide, Nebraska, and lonesome Roy Orbison pathos…
Considering the sheer volume of music we’re exposed to on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget that songs can be more than a distraction or a catchy beat. For Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, music was less a pastime and more an anchor, a tool used to stay hopeful…
With both South by Southwest and Coachella fresh in our minds, it’s easy to look at those festivals and feel a little envious. After all, we host our fair share of festivals in the Valley, but rarely do we ever pull in the amount of star power as some other,…
You have to figure with the pedigree Knoxville, Tennessee’s Royal Bangs has going for them — their first albums were on Black Key Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle Records; their new one, Flux Outside, is on Glassnote, home of the inexplicably popular railroad-fan band, Mumford & Sons — that they must…
It’s been a helluva year for Sticky Fingers. The weekly hipster wingding created by William Fucking Reed has hosted plenty of taste-making indie rock, electronica, and DJ acts (Database, Flosstradamus, Pictureplane), changed venues, and helped reinforce the hepcat reputation of Bar Smith, 130 East Washington Street. The night’s one-year anniversary…
Can you call The Smithereens’ new album, 2011, “a return to form” if the band never really went away? Sure, it’s the group’s first disc of original material in 12 years, but they’ve never stopped touring nor releasing records. It’s just that the records they’ve been releasing have been, uh,…
The Voice, which is hosted by former TRL dreamboat Carson Daly, involves four judges: Adam Levine, Cee-Lo Green, Christina Aguilera, and Blake Shelton. The judges, who serve as coaches, faced away from the auditioning singers during last night’s blind auditions so as to remain unbiased in regard to each singer’s image. Each…
