J.J. Grey, front man for country-fried funk ‘n’ soul band Mofro, comes from the Florida swamplands and a rich storytelling tradition. Hints of both seep into the songs on Mofro’s latest, Country Ghetto, which contains a few tracks originally penned for neo-blues diva Cassandra Wilson. We recently caught up with…
“I may be an ice queen, but I like it fucking hot,” Siouxsie Sioux says from the stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall, site of the Dreamshow concert DVD (Rhino). The disc was shot over the course of three shows in June 2004 and, in between continually bitching about the…
If you want to get rich during a gold rush, you don’t go digging for gold. The guaranteed money is in picks, axes, wheelbarrows, and the land deeds that surround the boom. Only rubes sweat out the risk in the hills. Well, there’s a gold rush going on right now…
Fracture Point All the commotion on here lately regarding my distaste for Marshall “Fucking” Beck, formerly of the metal band Rebirth, seems to have left many metal heads (or at least Marshall’s Myspace friends) under the impression that I either don’t care about metal or don’t appreciate the genre. Granted,…
Army of Robots… dramatic! This is an early heads up so that if you can cruise up to Flagstaff on Friday, make plans now. Not only is it not in the 90s up there, Friday night at the Hotel Monte Vista (one of my favorite venues up there) Army of…
shaking in my Adidas…. Mr. Marshall “fucking” Beck, “the most controversial motherfucker in the Arizona music scene” thought it’d be funny to print my home phone number and address up in this piece; which he can certainly do on Myspace, but not here, where I moderate what goes up. While…
I wasn’t sure what to do tomorrow for Saint Patrick’s Day; I’m Irish as fuck, but my local Irish pub, Casey Moore’s, is a madhouse on 3/17, with souped up prices and a bunch of jackasses crowding the place. Another alternative had to found. Luckily, I saw Jared from the…
Marshall Beck and his sisters The Marshall Beck “Mr. Controversial” debate continues to rage on Ear Infection, thanks in great part to his admittedly posting Myspace bulletins to his 45,000 friends. (PEN15 wrote “I WISH THIS WOULD STOP SO I DONT HAVE TO SEE 26 MYSPACE POSTS A DAY BY…
Consider this a call to arms. In the wake of the arrests of DJ Drama, Don Cannon, and their crew, the Aphilliates, in Atlanta in January — for distributing mix tapes with copyrighted songs (that the major labels were paying them to pimp) — I’m asking all local DJs to…
It’s been hailed as Sebadoh’s defining moment and “a meeting place for indie universes.” But not to the bastard controlling the purse strings at Homestead Records. For his money, 1991’s III, a collision of sensitive indie-folk balladry, weird psychedelic experimentation, a goofy-ass cover of some God-forsaken Johnny Mathis ballad, and…
The “No Fear” tour is a tasty musical menagerie of acts at the forefront of their particular metal flavor. Metalcore representative Killswitch Engage combines a blitzkrieg bottom end that hunts with the springing fury of Pantera, labyrinthine Scandinavian metal melodicism, and agile yet sophisticated structures that showcase the band’s hooks…
A video on YouTube titled Great Moments in History begins, somberly enough, with the strains of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. All the usual throat-swelling suspects are paid a reverent visit — Kennedy’s inaugural address, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles at…
Wormwood Brothers new album, Spider Lake Due to space limitations in the print version of New Times, there are a lot of local records that we can’t fit into the music section. That’s why here, on Ear Infection, I try to turn you on or steer you away from certain…
Marshall “Fucking” Beck and his army of internet-tards still have their panties in a bunch about my recent posts involving him and Madhouse Records, found here and here. Beck wrote, “Although I do find humor in the fact that you call me a pussy from behind the computer screen and…
Today’s kickoff day for the music industry’s biggest orgy of shmoozing, boozing, and trying to see far too many bands in a brief period of time – the 2007 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. I won’t be there – my illustrious music editor Niki D’Andrea is on her…
My apologies for my brief absence from the interweb blogging thing recently; a trip to San Diego without the appropriate power source for a laptop left me unable to play with all the angry people that Marshall Beck, who I blogged about here a while back, recruited to cry and…
After last year’s Rock N The Seas cruise from Los Angeles to Ensenada, which featured a shitload of booze consumption and music from a grip of Arizona bands like the Gin Blossoms, Dead Hot Workshop, Sand Rubies, Rich Hopkins, and Ghetto Cowgirl, I was kicking myself for not going this…
The Black Parade had all the makings of a total drag. A concept album devoted to death? Yeah, those are always fun. But New Jersey rock darlings My Chemical Romance stared death in the face and decided to send out for Liza Minnelli, who sounds right at home on an…
Meg & Dia, a four-piece power-pop outfit out of Utah, is bulwarked by a strong confessional singer-songwriter sensibility and fronted by sisters Meg (21, guitars and lyrics) and Dia (19, vocals) Frampton. In shorthand: They’re everything Ashlee Simpson likes to imagine she is. More interesting, though, is the relationship between…
The Inimitable George Tabb What seems like a million years ago — but was really just half-a-lifetime, when I was 15 or 16, I was a faithful/fanatical reader of Maximum Rock N Roll. If you don’t know, it was the bible of punk rock, a newsprint compilation of all the…
SiOP The band SiOP’s press release begins, “SiOP was formed in the summer of 1998 and has been on the rise ever since.” Truth is, SiOP never left 1998 and its plethora of shit bands: Static-X, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, the Bizkit, etcetera. Here’s the goods on SiOP’s latest album,…
A little over three years ago, I wrote here in my column Revolver about the sad descent of Zia Records from a truly indie and customer oriented record store into an algorhythmically stocked clone of chains like Tower and Best Buy. I would venture to guess that a lot of…
