The heinous death rattle of the June sunset had arrested the city as I descended into Mitchell Park in downtown Tempe with vocalist Alec LoCruzio and guitarist Alex Rempel of the nascent hardcore quartet Humiliation. We are not-so-comfortably seated at a still sun-warmed picnic table that’s partially pocked with pigeon…
When The Sail Inn closes on Sunday evening after the final night of its three-day Farewell Festival, it will mark the end of an era — not just for the bar itself, but also for the Tempe music scene. A big chapter in the city’s lore will draw to a…
When you learn that Youceff Yunque Kabal, better known as YUS, is studying accounting and economics, it makes sense how precise and organized his chillwave tunes are. Now he’s released Talisman, his second full-length, not counting three remix albums. It’s the kind of conscientious craftsmanship found in Daphni or Burial…
Someone who compiles these things (Metacritic, apparently) averaged all the reviews for all the records released last year, and Deafheaven’s Sunbather came in at number one. In fact, the album with the starkly pink cover is the seventh-highest-scoring record in Metacritic’s entire database, dating back to 1999. That means it…
Things are going well for Phoenix rapper Futuristic. The video for the unsigned rapper’s single, “I Guess I’ll Smoke,” from his released released album Traveling Local, has now surpassed one million views on YouTube. If you listen to him, it’s clear he’s bound for great things. And he’s not the…
Phoenix band Destruction Unit’s 2013 album Deep Trip was among the finest of the year, a scary mess of nightmarish psych-punk that played out as body music, because each of the band’s members share two roles: making noise and conjuring rhythms. The band was formed 14 years ago by Ryan…
By Dennis Romero What’s it like partying with 134,000 of your closest friends? After a fourth year covering Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, the size and scope of America’s largest electronic dance music festival (and, really, one of the country’s largest music events, period) still just leaves us breathless…
Last year when heavy metal musician and horror icon Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare debuted in LA, I was pretty close to heading out there over Halloween to check out what The New York Times called “the best example yet of the upsizing of haunted houses in the last decade.”…
By Dennis Romero The Clark County (Nevada) Coroner is investigating the death of a 24-year-old who collapsed Saturday morning outside Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. An autopsy was being conducted this weekend, but results aren’t yet available to the media, an official at the coroner’s office told us. If…
By Sarah Purkrabek Electric Daisy Carnival goes down this weekend in Las Vegas. We’ll be providing coverage as the weekend progresses, never fear. But will you be there yourself? If you are, expect to hear, well, lots of songs you’ve heard before. In fact, whether it’s Hard, Coachella, or countless…
Bruce Cockburn has to be the most hot-cold songwriter operating today. On one hand, there are songs about sunrises, horses running across golden plains, the mysteries of life, and spiritual awakening. And on the other, Cockburn fires off songs about narco-politics, human rights, religious flaws, and environmental degradation, offering such…
The owner of >Lawn Gnome Publishing, Aaron Hopkins-Johnson, is one of the best slam poets in the country, and so it stands to reason that his store is a hub for those interested in the spoken word. Lawn Gnome once held one of Phoenix’s most popular open mic nights, it…
Lee Bains III is a white, Christian Southerner and, yes, knows exactly how that reads. Over the course of the 10 tracks on Dereconstructed, his sophomore album with his band the Glory Fires, he chews on and wrestles with the idea of Southern identity, reflecting on a place where segregation…
What do you say about a performer like Sage Francis? He plays with words? He slays them? He engages his audience using a medium that rarely witnesses such a truly spectacular mastery of the vernacular? His repertoire of rhetoric is frenetic, authentic, and polemic while being transcendent, resplendent, and a…
Beginning with MySpace, then on other digital platforms, Ingrid Michaelson has been recording and releasing her own brand of indie-pop music, with a mysterious artsy flair, for more than a decade. In April, she released her latest studio album, Lights Out, which has climbed to number one on the indie…
Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale were veteran songwriters — 14 solo albums between them, to be exact — before they began collaborating on what would become the duo’s first album, Prologue. But when they started writing songs, they stripped the sound from their previous projects and wrote melancholy, earnest tunes…
Despite all its nihilistic, anarchistic, and pugilistic leanings, Fight Club actually is a tale of hope and redemption. No, really. Strip away all the brutality, bedlam, and bathing products, and the overall message of both Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel and David Fincher’s flick is that one can attain salvation, albeit…
Those looking to get out of the Phoenix heat can find no better reason than the Flagstaff Blues and Brews festival on Saturday, June 21. The event goes from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Continental Driving Range. Eden “Little Boogalo” Brent is a good place to start. Her…
The heavy metal music community is one that’s pretty close. Last weekend, a well-respected veteran of the scene was killed. According to Phoenix police, on June 7 around 1:30 a.m., Chris Kutcher was driving east on Cactus Road when an intoxicated woman accelerated behind him, striking his SUV and sending…
Not sure if Spanish is indeed the loving tongue, but it wasn’t two minutes into “Peregrina,” the opening track of The Lovelost’s debut album, Foreign, before I decided I loved the Lovelost. It didn’t matter if Ixchel del Castillo was singing about a Mexican telenovela star or a mineral water;…
Things normally seem dead around these parts at this time of year, thanks in no small part to the heat kicking into high gear. So we were mighty surprised when the cats behind hip-hop lifestyle brand Coolin Out announced they were bringing back their club night Supreme Sundays this weekend,…
Once upon the ’90s, there was an underrated melodic grunge band named Failure. When it was seven years old and touring its third album, Fantastic Planet, the group fell off its proverbial horse. Its members subsequently wandered the music industry’s topography during a 15-year hiatus that ended February. And there’s…
