It’s shaping up to be a stellar year to see touring indie acts in metro Phoenix, and it couldn’t have happened soon enough for our atrophied live music scene. Just in the next month we have NYC’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Canadian twee popsters Stars shortly afterward. Hold on, wait…
Air makes great soft-core-porn music. At least seven of the 10 songs on the new Air album Talkie Walkie could back the drawn-out slow-motion sex scenes to those old dubbed-in-English Emmanuelle skin flicks and, in some of those instances, actually improve the aesthetic. The tunes really are that evocative of…
Rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp isn’t just for baby boomers who were never in bands in the first place. It can also be for ex-punks with closets full of metal albums, whose current mainstream-alternative bands aren’t providing the pure chewing satisfaction they’re after. Thus, Dave Grohl, weary of platinum sales…
It’s only fitting that the Zombies enjoyed their biggest-ever hit posthumously. The group’s excellent 1964 debut chart entry “She’s Not There” set the tone for pop over the next three years — moody minor-key masterpieces where breathy singer Colin Blunstone sighed about not getting the girl while Rod Argent trilled…
Intra-band love — past or present, real or imagined — is the simplest way to ensure that chumps (like this one) endlessly obsess over your personal life and ignore the damn tunes. Ask the White Stripes: Everyone else has. But if Fleetwood Mac represents the benchmark for post-relationship acrimony, Mates…
When Survivalist became the first Arizona hip-hop group to crack Billboard’s Top 10 Hot Rap Singles chart in 2001 with the aptly named “Bounce,” its members felt they were strapped in for a rocket ride to Ballersville. Instead, when all the big-label contracts the suits flaunted like origami for their…
Mabybe Jesus Christ invented hard-core. Christians, after all, believe the man from Nazareth died for our sins with nails through his hands. It just doesn’t get much hard-core than that. Perhaps that explains why the Christians who release their music through the independent punk label Tooth & Nail Records have…
Ryan Breen is best known locally as the guitarist for Chronic Future, the young, progressive rap-rock band whose first Interscope album is scheduled to drop in April. But in his latest musical endeavor, Back Ted N-Ted, Breen doesn’t touch a guitar. If you hit up a Back Ted N-Ted show,…
Black 47 has been invisible for several years now. These stout-rock stalwarts of the New York Irish rock scene — veterans of places like Connolly’s and Paddy Riley’s — have kept busy with gigs and side projects. But now they’ve released their first new CD in several years, New York…
Shuffling between pseudonyms like Delarosa and Asora (currently retired), Prefuse 73 (his most popular), and Savath & Savalas (now the intelligentsia favorite), Scott Herren has created a steady string of productions ranging from digitally flecked folk to frayed hip-hop. Yet he has also suffered from an identity crisis in the…
Lots of acts attract fans who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Reuben Khan wears his devotion to Cut Throat Logic on the back of his shaved head. “Cut Throat Logic is a way of life. That’s the only one I need,” says an emphatic, enormous Khan, a childhood friend…
Ansel Averitt is a closet rapper. The Phoenix twentysomething has a loyal audience of three friends, and his finest piece of music equipment is the tape recorder he keeps in his back pocket. But soon, Averitt and any other talented underground rapper could be as big as an American Idol…
If you weren’t at last Saturday’s D-Styles show at the Old Brickhouse, you missed several of the country’s best scratch DJs: D-Styles, Ricci Rucker, Mike Boo, and the Valley’s own DJ Radar. A lineup this solid hasn’t hit town in ages. It’s about time some top-tier turntablists started coming through…
The Thin White Investment’s got a new album, his best since — Scary Monsters? There are two possible reactions to this news. The more common one — rolling your eyes — is what you are probably doing right now. The other is to discard a Bow Wow Wow disc to…
Nada Surf once ruled the airwaves, but their reign was briefer than that of the homecoming queen, destining them for the cultural curio shop along with Monica’s beret. Cast off by Epic when their second album, The Proximity Effect, failed to prove as, um, “popular” as their debut, the band…
If you’ve ever wanted to just feel stoned, turn out all the lights and watch the image generator on your computer’s MP3 player. Without some green, the closest parallel to being blissfully baked lies in the glow of those gurgling, psychedelic screen savers. The best of these, ones my friends…
With Map of What Is Effortless, Telefon Tel Aviv marks a radical departure from the opaque ambiance of its 2001 debut, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, toward a rich brew of soul and IDM electronics. Much of it, in fact, features the Loyola University Chamber Orchestra, which lends the proceedings a regal,…
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. How long has it been since your last confession? Uh, what’s today? Let me see . . . I guess that makes it . . . two . . . divide by three . . . carry the four . . . uh,…
“When I was in England once, my aunt said to me, You know, that’s a dangerous business you’ve got there.'” David Lowery pauses. The highest-profile member of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker — touring together now — wants us to know his mother and her sisters are “working-class intellectuals” from…
Maybe it was a sign from God. In June 2002, the owners of Nita’s Hideaway were fighting for the club’s life. About to be booted from their longtime location near Rio Salado, owners Mark and Abby Covert fought hard to move to a much larger vacant building at Price and…
With Americano!, Roger Clyne and his caballeros have returned with the most potent album in their Southwest-loving canon. Before we pin gold stars on each of their ponchos, though, let’s examine this song cycle from its effective starting point, “God Gave Me a Gun.” Released in advance of the album…
Relying on a cheap pun isn’t normally the best way to start a review. But given Sigmatropic’s origins, as well as its strange mix of sounds, the oft-quoted expression “it’s all Greek to me” somehow seems appropriate. Taken literally, Sigmatropic refers to Greek producer/multi-instrumentalist Akis Boyatzis, who recruited several musicians…
