Welcome to Up on the Sun, the new and improved New Times music blog. I am your new blog captain and man-on-the-scene, Matt Neff. As the new reporter on the, uhh, thriving Phoenix music scene, it’s my duty to inform you of what I plan to write about.
Two married pop-country superstars, one stage, one burning question: Who would win in a celebrity death match between these two happily married artists? Why Faith Hill Will Win: With hits like “Wild One,” “This Kiss,” “Breathe,” and “Mississippi Girl,” Hill has established herself as one of the greatest country music…
Curly, raven-haired Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) is a beautiful dork and potential prom queen of the science and math magnet school, seemingly groomed like the protagonist of Princess Diaries for the indie-pop throne. A quirky, imaginative musician, Clark’s played guitar for Polyphonic Spree, Sufjan Stevens and Glen Branca, which…
It took the hills of Tennessee to shake The Comas’ singer and guitarist, Andy Herod, of his bad habits. But the story goes back farther, to 2004’s breakout release, Conductor, penned in the wake of his breakup with Dawson’s Creek star Michelle Williams, a heartbreak immortalized in the woozy song…
Buy a ticket to the Projekt Revolution concert and your purchase could help eliminate an estimated 167 tons of carbon emissions this year. That should make you feel pretty good about yourself. In fact, give yourself a pat on the back for hitting up a tour that donates $1 of…
While it’s become standard practice for bands to slog through the same old set list night after night, Portugal. The Man has come up with a novel approach to providing audiences with a unique experience each and every time it takes the stage. Nowadays, coming up with a new song…
Perhaps more significant to today’s audiences than Sgt. Pepper’s 40th anniversary was the Beatles’ contribution that same summer to the program Our World. As part of the very first live global television link, the show was broadcast to 26 countries and watched by 350 million people via satellite on June…
Picture this: You’re walking down a street, circa 1983, and soaking in all sorts of music from the cool cats carrying boom boxes on their shoulders. Or imagine you’re making a cameo appearance in that killer scene in Amèlie, when the lo-fi sounds from the old dude’s portable record player…
Fergie, probably the most lusted-after hip-hop artist in the world, released her solo debut, The Dutchess, last year. It features 13 tracks of brainless dribble, including “London Bridge” and the barely literate “Fergalicious,” which, upon topping the charts, proved once and for all that hip-hop often specifically targets the dumbest…
Every week, a band breaks up, ending more often with a whimper than a bang. That’s a fate South Mountain Lights sought to avoid with The Last Word, the release of which they’ll celebrate with their final show. “We’ve both been in bands where the band falls apart and you…
Rock music history is paved with the asphalt of failure and obscurity — in their respective eras, the now-venerated watersheds the Stooges, Nick Drake, Velvet Underground, and Tim Buckley moved units in the teensy-weensiest figures. But as someone in the blues field observed, “Give me the flowers while I’m living.”…
OZZFEST IS FREE THIS SUMMER! As the words tolled out over the alkali flats, the rejoicing hordes of twitching, gibbering headbangers nearly swept away the bricks and mortar of our fair nation. Thousands of angry white men went into spasms on guitar showroom floors as police reported an unprecedented outbreak…
The next guy who calls 2007 “the year of the reunion” is gonna get his nose separated from his face. Sure, 40 years removed from the Summer of Love, it’d be nice to think there were larger Utopian forces at work beyond common greed and stalled solo careers bringing together…
No Use for a Name has been around for 20 years now, which is staggering when you consider that just about as many people know the punk band’s name today as in 1987, though that may have something to do with the fact that it has no use for one…
Vampire Weekend is a quartet of Columbia University graduates who are not vampires and do not sing about them. They do, however, sound a lot like what would happen if Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one or two members of the Walkmen decided to record an album…
The man they once called Tiger Tom was savvy enough to secure all the rights to his ITV variety show, which ran in England and America from 1969 to 1971, but securing rights from some of the performers proved harder. That’s why review copies of the DVD This Is Tom…
In a time when the opportunity for unsigned musicians to jump-start careers via MySpace seems already to have come and gone, the steadily building success of Tempe’s Eyes Set To Kill is both encouraging and confounding. Since posting a profile on the ubiquitous Web site in March 2005, the band’s…
Becky Stark, frontwoman for psych-pop/indie-folk foursome Lavender Diamond, is on a mission for peace. “All of our concerts we open by saying something like, ‘Congratulations, everyone, for peace coming to planet Earth . . . let’s hear it for peace on Earth,’ and everyone always wants to applaud,” she says…
The Sopranos blackout, Paul McCartney’s bare feet on the cover of Abbey Road, the vast number of sharpshooters hidden in the shadows of Dealey Plaza, and the inexplicable public fascination with Paris Hilton. America wrestles with these enigmas, seeking answers and finding none. Bigger than all of them is the…
By Brendan Joel Kelley It’s finally Friday, and since you’re probably reading this at work you’re likely desperate to clock out and get the weekend kickstarted. If you aren’t going to the hard rock/metal installment of New Times’ Summer of Sound series, your best bet is to hit up the…
Candee D*Vine wants to be your friend! She’s 19, cute, bisexual, and “up for anything.” If you approve her request, and you probably will, she’ll go into the pile with the rest of your “friends,” who are more than happy to invite you to check out their naughty Webcams, remind…
As far as showoffs go, Arizona is an unforgivably cocky offender. First, we get all high and mighty about that great, glorified geological ass-crack up north, then we start trottin’ out the “heavies” to campaign against Lyndon Johnson, and now it seems we’ve casually cracked our knuckles and announced a…
