Two First Fridays ago, xrayok played in the parking lot outside Fate restaurant, glowing in a blue spotlight and framed by inky black tree branches shaking in the wind. A storm was about an hour away, threatening the party vibe, but the band plugged in anyway, and the irresistible opening…
The Valley seems to have finally come into its own within the sphere of hip-hop, with nary a night lacking a jam-packed beats and rhymes expo somewhere in town, and national touring acts hitting metro Phoenix all the time. “We’re putting Arizona on the map,” local promoter Adam “Dumperfoo” Dumper…
The pop ledger is littered with entries for bands that failed to make it despite huge inventories of creativity and talent, but instead found their legacy in the parts other bands might salvage off them. The Wonder Stuff scored 17 Top 20 singles in the U.K., and even a U.S…
A couple of Sunday afternoons ago, about an hour before the New Times Music Showcase began, I was drinking a beer at the Tavern on Mill with Natalie Espinosa, guitarist and singer for local girl trio and Best Indie Rock nominee Bella, talking about her band’s impending last-ever show, trying…
Some things only get better with age. Looking back at the 10th annual New Times Music Showcase, which shook up Tempe’s Mill Avenue last Sunday, April 17, it’s clear that local music fans have not only made the event a tradition, but stepped up their support more than ever. With…
Ahhh, free pornography. I’m happily back on the grid and into the glaring free light of the digital world now that broadband Internet service has returned to my home office. Free to download 20-second sample video clips off a billion girlie sites, or pull them from others’ computers with peer-to-peer…
U2 has gone from the band that mattered most to arguably the most irrelevant. There, I said it. But just because I threw myself on the proverbial cross and fessed up, I don’t expect you to go out and hawk your tickets to either of U2’s sold-out shows at Glendale…
In a town full of Mormons and mega-churches and one of the largest Christian hip-hop movements in the country, Cole Massey couldn’t find religion. “I went to a bunch of churches around town, asking them what they offered for a 29-year-old single guy looking for some hard-core theology,” Massey, co-founder…
You need look no further than a John Hughes movie (or your own adolescence) to realize that jocks and freaks don’t really mix. But occasionally, the seemingly disparate paths of pro athletes and musicians do cross, from jocks trying to be rockers (Jack McDowell, Scott Radinsky) to rockers honoring jocks…
Most of the songs The Reflection plays end in the same raucous fashion: with the howl of two overamped guitars, loudly reverberating on the same chord, holding the tone like a musical staring contest between the players until one of them blinks and the pitch veers off in unpredictable and…
It’s the second Friday night in a row I’ve been hanging out in Heather Rae Johnson’s living room, listening to Johnson and her husband, Shannon Marino, roll through the repertoire of honky-tonk and hillbilly country tracks they play as Heather Rae and Her Moonshine Boys, peppered liberally with covers of…
T.S. Eliot dubbed April “the cruelest month,” but even The Waste Land neglected to point out that National Humor and National Anxiety Month share the same calendar page. As do National Welding Month, International Guitar Month, and Uh-Huh Month, which might quicken the failing hearts of John Cougar Mellencamp devotees…
Right now, Atlantic Records is giving the star treatment to San Diego’s Louis XIV, whose first full-length for the company, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, hit stores on March 22. But what happens if the disc doesn’t sell 200,000 copies in its first week? Will Atlantic stick by the…
Bare-shouldered girls with asymmetrical haircuts and slouchy boots roam in pairs, while shaggy rocker boys in tee shirts and tight jeans wander the sidewalks in packs. Waiting in line outside of clubs among the messenger-bag-and-cell-phone-toting industry types, there’s a higher than normal presence of Japanese girls and lanky, bearded dudes…
Over at my pad on a recent Sunday afternoon, DJ ChaseOne has his battery-operated portable turntable on the floor next to his metal box of seven-inches, playing cuts and talking shop about crate-digging for rare grooves — limited pressings of old funk and soul records — and the gems he’s…
It’s hard to imagine a concert that can handle 50,000 fans a day completely selling out, but that’s what happened at last year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for the first time in the event’s brief history. And this year, with another jaw-dropping, nearly 80-band lineup that boasts headliners…
Tommy Lee’s first tattoo was of Mighty Mouse, a small, gaudy rendering of the pocket-size superhero bursting through a bass drum with sticks in his hands. Back in his early 20s, Lee identified with the cartoon underdog because he was one himself: With scrawny ostrich legs set against a pile…
Tegan Quin is happy to set the record straight about some things that have been written about her and her sister Sara. Their band, Tegan and Sara, is really a five-piece, not just a duo. Being identical twins does not make them one entity. Their sexuality is a non-issue because…
Al Singer, one of the Valley’s most prominent jazz promoters, died on March 3. He was 77 years old. Singer’s passion for jazz started in the 1930s, when movie Westerns exposed him to the sounds of swing. For Singer, it was an early stimulus for jazz, and by the 1940s,…
Ben Harris used to stare out the window of his Indiana high school, watching cattle graze outside and daydreaming about performing music onstage. When he moved to Phoenix at age 16, he started rapping after school with friends who would bust out the karaoke machine and rhyme for hours. His…
When the local bedroom producer who calls himself the Angel of Death dropped me off his demo, he made sure to point out the birth-control instructions he’d festooned the homemade CD with, which made me laugh, but not as much as the songs: choppy beats with sampled music and vocal…
The Wu-Tang Clan shouldn’t still exist. In an industry where today’s rap superstar becomes tomorrow’s MC Hammer, nine Staten Island MCs pulled off the impossible. They outlasted the three great pitfalls of modern hip-hop: ego battles, gang violence and, most important, irrelevance. Rappers worldwide would be wise to learn from…
