The lineup for the hip-hop/R&B-flavored “Up Close and Personal” extravaganza is everything the Arizona Diamondbacks weren’t this year — young, hungry, and well able to bash out the hits. Juelz Santana is the 23-year-old, Harlem-born rapper who first rose to prominence a few years ago as a member of Cam’Ron’s…
Riddle me this: Which award-winning, NYC-based turntablist has created best-selling dance mixes for MTV and Tommy Boy records, and remixed the likes of such superstars as Dido, Christina Aguilera, and Janet Jackson? The answer to the oh-so-easy brain teaser: DJ Riddler. Besides a gig at Gotham’s dance station WKTU (alongside…
As a bed of acoustic guitar is lazily strummed below Charles Westmoreland’s vocal gymnastics on “Driver,” the opening track off Portland-based band The Kingdom’s new LP, one may recall another NW purveyor of bliss-pop, The Shins. But it becomes clear early on that The Kingdom is more keen on injecting…
1. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds (Jive) 2. New Found Glory, Coming Home (Geffen Records) 3. Fergie, The Dutchess (Interscope Records) 4. Ben Kweller, Ben Kweller (Red Int/Red Ink) 5. Lupe Fiasco, Food & Liquor (Atlantic/Wea) 6. Mars Volta, Amputechture (Umvd Labels) 7. Fear Before the March of Flames, The Always Open…
Nick Luca, front man of his namesake band Luca, sounds a little confused, and like he might need a hug. The Tucson group’s latest album, Sick of Love, has an abundance of lovelorn laments and a strange mixture of rock genres. Luca and his bandmates, Chris Giambelluca (bass and vocals)…
The guys of Kingfish Fiasco are weird. They cite beer and porn among their musical influences, but that is probably because they frequent the Yucca Tap Room in Tempe. They also claim to have bought their drummer, John Earl Gilmore, for $20 on eBay. Actually, the story goes that they…
If the contrapuntal Al Green-meets-Skynyrd soul-groove of My Morning Jacket’s 2005 heavy-hitter Z didn’t convince you MMJ was breaking into the mainstream side of the music biz, the band’s inside-joke cameo appearance performing “Free Bird” in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown should have. Either way, MMJ disciples will no doubt fall on…
Motörhead’s 27th album (and its 19th studio offering), Kiss of Death, doesn’t deviate from the heavy guitars, breakneck beats, and hoarse vocals that made the British band one of the most influential groups in the heavy metal genre. With the departure of guitarist Würzel, Motörhead’s been pared down to a…
Toronto-based post-punkers The Creeping Nobodies might have started as a one-off collaboration at a tribute show for The Fall, but the band’s come a long way from imitating The Fall’s Mark E. Smith for kicks. The Creeping Nobodies celebrate their fifth anniversary on Thursday, and while lead Creep Derek Westerholm…
While you can credit (or blame) The Pixies for kicking off this whole reunion thing of the past couple of years, it’s nice to see the trend extending beyond just graying college-rock outfits (and a few ’70s arena-rock groups, too). Now back from the band graveyard is Nitzer Ebb, the…
One can’t help but chuckle at the Red Elvises’ appropriation of cheesy American culture — the colorful bow-tie tuxedos, the lopsided pompadours, singer Igor Yuzov’s lounge-lizard panache. The band’s flair for fusing Russian folk music with American surf, rockabilly, and even disco led to interesting concoctions like “I Wanna See…
Long before mall punk bands like Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory were all the panic at the disco, there was a time in the ’80s when punk fans were often called “fags” and targeted for ass-kickings by jocks and good ol’ boys. So it made sense in 1982…
Holy crap — Cyndi Lauper is 53 years old! This bit of trivia is shocking but true. The girl who just wanted to have fun is all grown up now. Somehow she managed to survive the ’80s, but the same cannot be said for some of her decade-of-decadence contemporaries (whatever…
If you want to see the best and brightest of the Valley’s turntablist scene (without having to hit up a dozen different nightclubs), beat feet down to this ginormous rave and music shindig at the Icehouse, 429 West Jackson Street, on Friday, September 22. In addition to appearances by Philly’s…
Bob Dylan sang “to live outside the law you must be honest.” Waylon Jennings covered Dylan on his first independent album, cut in Phoenix in 1964. His sound was born here, and it was here that he died, in February 2002, but the Texas-born Jennings was known as the Nashville…
It doesn’t sound like Murder Time. There’s no screaming. No tension. No sign of a struggle. The opening track, “It’s One Thing,” starts off sounding like the kind of thing old prog-rock bands were doing in the ’80s — big, dramatic keyboards offset by the muscular chunkity-chunk of metallic guitar…
Before we even marinated our eardrums to Hot Concrete — the Drunken Immortals’ third full-length album that’s out to steal your mind with positive hip-hop vibrations and community-building lyrics — there was already word on the street that it was hot shit. You see, this seven-piece, live hip-hop groove machine…
Albums without lyric sheets can frustrate fans who want to memorize the words they’re singing and pore over their poetic meanings. But with Lambchop, it’s best not to worry about such specifics; this melancholy country-operatic Nashville collective led by Kurt Wagner has always expressed itself more sublimely in its baroque…
If the creepy painting on the cover of Xiu Xiu’s The Air Force is supposed to depict singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart as Jesus, it’s ironic at best: Unlike the traditional singer-songwriter — who plays a guitar and makes sense of the chaos of our lives by making sense of his/her own…
Not many kids can say their high school band touched off a major-label bidding war. But it was after leaving Radish in the lurch at 17 that indie whiz-kid Ben Kweller made good on the hype with Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller, the first in a four-part series of increasingly…
Blowfly’s Punk Rock Party is so filthy Tipper Gore might spontaneously combust if anyone ever played it for her. The original nasty rapper’s new album is scandalous, obscene and hilarious. Blowfly, the 60-year-old pervert with a penchant for performing in shiny capes and masks, has been doing dirty for a…
Some musicians maintain legendary rivalries for decades on end — try getting Sting and Stewart Copeland to bury the hatchet and you’ll see what we mean. Very rarely, though, is a band’s epic enmity so huge it can carry a feature-length art-house documentary like 2004’s Dig!, which chronicles the Dandy…
