Music

Nobody ever said you’ll get Tempe fans handed to you on a silver platter. That’s what Emily Haines, the keyboard-playing front woman for the indie pop band Metric, found out when her group headlined the annual New Times Music Showcase on Sunday, April 18. Metric’s catchy CD came out last…

The long-vacant, two-story building at 750 Grand Avenue is a former car showroom, and there are rumors it was once owned by Bing Crosby. Now it’s open for business again, but not for auto sales. Instead, the site is home to the new Paper Heart, a multipurpose art and music…

Deerhoof seems to have found relative cohesion on Milk Man, something like the difference between a murky, half-remembered dream and a lucid one. The album makes good on the promise audible but not realized on last year’s Apple O’. Where Apple O’ was experimentally indulgent, Milk Man hangs together as…

I saw an anomaly at a Phoenix hip-hop show recently — a 58-year-old guy onstage playing classic funk 45s — no scratching, no mixing, just one song after another. Two twentysomething DJs, ChaseOne and Smite, stood by John Dixon, better known as Johnny D, nodding to the beat and looking…

Madlib’s Madvillain project is the second of his dream match-ups, following his slightly disappointing pairing last year with Detroit iconoclast Jay Dee (Jaylib’s Champion Sound). While Jay Dee favors original compositions, track-busting Madlib finds more in common with MF Doom, since the latter’s early-’90s work with KMD as Zevlove X…

BR549’s energetic synthesis of Buck Owens and Ernest Tubb started packing ’em in during pass-the-hat gigs at Robert’s Western Wear — a Nashville haberdashery on the wrong side of the tracks — in early 1996. When the band’s self-produced EP Live at Robert’s juiced up the buzz to a deafening…

For a while there, it seemed like Britain’s Squarepusher, a.k.a. Tom Jenkinson, would never show his face around these parts. One full-scale U.S. tour was aborted shortly after its launch, and another was scrapped entirely, all for unspecified reasons. It only added to Jenkinson’s long-standing reputation as a mad IDM/drill…

Ten songs into what was supposed to be a nine-song set, on a lawn between two of Arizona State University’s freshman dorms, Greeley Estates singer Ryan Zimmerman is obviously spent. He keeps spitting behind the PA, trying to clear his throat to finish screaming the lyrics to “Not Alone,” the…

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When I was 17, I worked at a skateboard shop in Anchorage, Alaska, called G&B, the first skate shop in the state. Growing up in Alaska doesn’t afford one much exposure to underground music — you have to dig for it. Luckily, beneath the glass front counter at G&B, there…

Singer/guitarist Karie Jacobson and drummer Drew Kowalski of the Dagons were a duo way before this current trend of rock minimalism became all the rage. And forget about the candy-coated innocence of faux siblings Jack and Meg. Comparing the White Stripes to the Dagons is like comparing the Osmonds to…

“God bless this mess,” Khadijah Anwar proclaims at the top of Slicker’s We All Have a Plan, the third album by Chicagoan John Hughes III, a dude possibly better known for his ownership of Hefty Records (home of Telefon Tel Aviv and Prefuse 73 offshoot Savath & Savalas) than for…

Lauded producer Kanye West has a king-size chip on his shoulder about being passed over so many times as an MC. But with the breakout success of The College Dropout’s first two singles (“Through the Wire” and “Slow Jamz”), it’s a safe bet the chip has been whittled down to…

The two albums sturdily bearded Floridian film professor Sam Beam has released as Iron & Wine — 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle and the new Our Endless Numbered Days — are the kind perfect for putting on when you’ve just performed some sacred ancient ritual in the woods and…

First, the bad news: This package tour from New York hip-hop superindie Definitive Jux could use a couple higher-profile names than it currently boasts. At a hometown launch last month, label star Aesop Rock put in a breathtaking appearance at the end of a marathon show; though his rapping was…

Ben Funke’s the overachieving, gifted kid you’ve always hated and wished you were. At 18, he’s the driving force behind the electro synth-pop trio XOXOXO, touring the West Coast in style, and getting paid to play gigs he’s booking himself. His band tours in a shiny new 2004 Honda Element,…

Slim Golba cuts a unique figure even walking along freaky Mill Avenue, where his bouncing, loping gait and long graying hair, braided in classic cigar-store-Indian style and falling in front of his button-down shirt, create the image of a mellowed ancient soul much older than his 43 years. On this…

Someone tagged the plywood where the mirror used to hang in the men’s room at Long Wong’s: “Where do we go now? Tempe dies April 3, 2004.” Last Saturday was, in fact, the Tempe desert-rock institution’s last day open. But the tagger had it all wrong. Tempe died a long…

At this year’s South by Southwest music conference, I unexpectedly witnessed the invention of a brand new musical genre — honkycrunk. I didn’t discover the honkycrunk at any officially sanctioned event, or even onstage, but rather at an impromptu “showcase” I threw in my room at the Austin Hilton 48…

Arguably one of the most vital and prolific live music venues in Arizona is closing for good. On Saturday, April 3, Long Wong’s on Mill Avenue showcases twelve of the notable local bands that have gotten it attention over the years, including signature Tempe acts such as Dead Hot Workshop,…

Once, the roar of punk rock noise rallied a cry of anomie and alienation like a shot across the slowly steaming and sprawling suburban bow, spawning the vibrant, diverse Eighties underground. Now it seems the gentle swoon of traditional folk, country and blues — housed under the guise of Americana…