Army of Robots Last week I dropped a couple of new demo tracks from Army of Robots for your listening pleasure; after a debauched drinking marathon this weekend, frontman Daggrr hit me off with one more new track for you. “Fabulous” is about picking up a girl (who ends up…
Still Alive Speaking of trite, I really couldn’t come up with a better title for this blog post; you’d think I’d have learned more Espanol in my eleven years in Arizona… but I digress. I just got my hands on the latest release by Still Alive, a reggaeton group from…
Sonny Long Once in a while we music critics get lucky and an especially stinky CD ends up in our hands… an easy target, something genuinely bad. I scored that recently, when I got my hands on some tracks by PHX rapper/R&B-er Sonny Long, whose debut album The Resume is…
Dave Wade Is a freebie… the Dave Wade Trio playing at Trax (the former Sail Inn) this evening. Along with guitarist extraordinaire Charles Bond and drummer J.B., Wade takes every style he can think of and jumbles them all together, be it jazz, reggae, blues, Middle Eastern music, or straight…
Cute Lil’ DJs (My Friend Andy in foreground) Over the last month or so I’ve spent some time watching and listening as DJ My Friend Andy, formerly half of the Cute Lil’ DJs (along with DJ Stefascope), worked on a remix album of Modest Mouse songs – mostly kind of…
There’s a shitload going down tonight at joints around the Valley, including the AZPunk compilation release party at the Sets. If you’re not making it down to that, here’s a couple of other options to sate your thirst for the live music thing. Heather Rae and Shannon of the Moonshine…
Army of Robots Way back in February of 2005, I wrote a column saying that Army of Robots had succeeded Tucson’s The Bled as the best band in Arizona (in my opinion, of course), and that they’d “fucked up the whole paradigm and established a new gold standard for Arizona.”…
Saki Photography Violet Wild A while back I wrote a column about Violet Wild, the band put together from remnants of the Black Moods (guitarist Josh Kennedy) and Mink Rebellion (singer Bobby Scott). Along with bassist Paul Fenix and drummer Joey Schwegler, the boys were working on an album that’s…
“Know any banjo jokes?” my roommate asks me when I tell him I’m going to see local bluegrass purveyors The Breadwinners on a recent Tuesday night. I don’t, but my roomie does. “What’s the difference between a banjo and a vacuum cleaner? A vacuum cleaner has to be plugged in…
It’s the Fourth of July at Cricket Pavilion, and kids wearing tee shirts that pledge their allegiance to every band from Anti-Flag to Less Than Jake are pressed against a makeshift stage at this year’s local Warped Tour stop to see a star their parents may, in fact, have pressed…
As you read this, the National Security Agency has probably been monitoring your phone calls, while the Department of Homeland Security peruses your e-mail, and agents from the Central Intelligence Agency torture detainees in the War on Terror. A decade ago, long before 9/11, terrifyingly Orwellian-style occurrences such as these…
Glenn Weyant’s The Anta Project — a single, 54-minute track created by playing the steel walls and barbed-wire fences along the U.S.-Mexico border using a cello bow and modified chopsticks — puts a musical face on illegal immigration under the guise of creative improvisation. Where mere mention of the hot-button…
The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited (Shout Factory) is an all-star, boxed-set tribute to artist and folk music anthologist Harry Smith, whose 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music helped set off the folk music revival of the next two decades. This four-disc set captures more than…
The Breadwinners In tomorrow’s new ish of the paper, I hang out with the Breadwinners, a four-piece traditional bluegrass group that plays at the Loft in Tempe every Tuesday night. There ain’t much bluegrass in these parts, but these four bring it with an authenticity you can’t find anywhere else…
While my esteemed blogging colleague (blog-eague?) Stephen Lemons has been busy picking fights with the fiesty commentators at AZPunk.com, I’ve had my ears glued to the formidable portal’s latest compilation of local punk bands, AZPunk.comp V5, which will have its release celebrated Friday night at The Sets in Tempe. This…
Pacific Coast News Happier Times Lefties get the House, maybe the Senate, Rumsfeld resigns, but even better than that – Britney filed for divorce!! Ordinarily I stick to BS-ing about local music steez up in this piece, but I had to pass on the fantastic news that Britney Spears is…
ProjectGuerilla.com Back in late August I wrote a feature on revolutionary rapper GRIME (the acronym stands for “Got Revolution In My Eyes”) and his musical perpetuation of the Revolutionary But Gangsta movement. Apparently GRIME’s getting up in the election day today in his own unique way, releasing his new single…
DJ Aaron Roberts Local producer Aaron Roberts released a tricky little EP of booty shaking house beats called Hip-Hop Stop on Nashville label Photo Records this week. The “hip-hop” reference is deceiving – this is bass-heavy house with chopped-up vocals and dancefloor cuts. Not really the sort of thing I…
Wormwood Brothers This local self-described “dustcore” outfit called Wormwood Brothers sent me a beautiful little track called “Trigger Happy” that reminds me of shoegazers with a taste for y’all-ternative bands like Wilco, Son Volt, and their ilk. It’s pretty fucking melancholy, as are the other tracks up on the band’s…
After I posted a couple of songs from the enigmatic Janis Joplin Crap N Vomit last week, the band sent me a couple of emails to explain what the deal is. And it just got weirder. Here’s the illumination from “Pete aka Solvent the Solution”: “Two piece, bass and drums…
Woodpile in New Times There was a little e-mail scuffle between an L.A. Times writer named Chris Lee and myself recently, when I wrote a column refuting his assertion that local white rapper trio Woodpile are white supremacists (he wrote that in a front page story for the beleaguered newspaper)…
Z-Trip’s Bling Phoenician ex-patriate and now Los Angelian DJ Z-Trip, who I’ve toured through the Pacific Northwest with before and is currently hitting up European dance floors, has been pretty damn busy lately, getting married in this summer and posting some new and old cuts on his website and continuing…
