DJ AM has built his reputation on being the DJ for anything celeb-related, so we suppose it’s appropriate that he’s the featured act at this Thursday’s Axis Hollywood. Yeah, you read that right — Axis Hollywood is what the promoters are calling Thursdays at Axis in Scottsdale (7340 East Indian…
Nobody wants to be the fifth wheel, but as the fifth Beatle, Billy Preston was the musical lube that kept the high-strung Let It Be sessions from slipping off the rails. When the prodigiously Afroed keyboardist died of kidney failure on Tuesday, June 6, it came as no surprise to…
Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell have been down the reinvention road before. Back when they were the core of British shoegazers Slowdive, the pair concluded that the noisy, swirling sound they’d helped advance was a creative dead-end and they’d better try something different. The result? 1995’s much-maligned Pygmalion, an ambient,…
Thursday 15Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Red (hip-hop, dance) Axis/Radius: Axis Hollywood with DJ AM (hip-hop, rock) Barcelona: DJ Rob (dance) The Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Club Central: DJs Ernie G. (hip-hop, R&B) & Luis (salsa, merengue) The Crown Room: DJ Gable (rock, house, hip-hop) e4: Limelight with DJ Tranzl8r (rock…
Recently I was at a show at the Real Bar early in the evening, when the young’uns are out to rock. A two-person band had just finished its set when a crowd of tween and early teen kids with screamo hair (long bangs in their faces, cut short in the…
How did you spend your day of reckoning? Expectant mothers, fearful of a 06/06/06 due date, were asking doctors to induce labor a day or two early to spare their babies from the mark of the beast, which would not only adversely affect those terrible twos, but could keep the…
They ain’t weary and they ain’t boys, but they are the Weary Boys, a handful of Humboldt County, California, escapees who got up one day, stretched, and decided to pack up the ’87 Buick Century and drive to Austin, Texas, sight unseen. “It seemed like a nice place to want…
By all rights, Stiff Little Fingers should suck. What was once perhaps the best band of punk’s second wave is down to a sole original member (although a second, bassist Ali McMordie, returned to the fold earlier this year) and, since the early 1990s, has seemingly been cashing in on…
You’ve gotta love the contradictory impulses at work in the title, a clever enjoining of modesty and arrogance emblematic of Sonic Youth’s attitudes and recordings for the better part of the band’s quarter-century run. Rather Ripped is a perfect name choice in literal terms relating to its content — the…
Kill Rock Stars is owned by a man named Slim Moon who has better taste in music than you do. His ears are irrefutably sharp: The KRS roster is a dense handbook on indie-underground innovators and breakthrough wonders ranging from Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith to The Gossip and Xiu Xiu…
Regina Spektor’s tricky tongue and fading Russian accent separate her from the ever-expanding crowd of Tori Amos/Fiona Apple wanna-bes who sport “funky” hats and own well-worn piano stools. Begin to Hope might be less histrionic than 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, but it’s still great fun to bear witness to this NYC…
Fresh off a brain aneurysm, Neil Young gives the right wing an earful, clobbering our befuddled Decider-in-Chief with a righteous bitch slap that exceeds 40 minutes. Leave it to Johnny Rotten’s favorite hippie — a Canadian with health care, no less — to hold up the mirror, cluck his tongue…
Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. Cex, certainly knows how to keep listeners guessing. On his first few records, he adopted a white rapper persona and came across as a wittier and less violent Eminem; he then turned on a dime, picked up a laptop, and became an intelligent dance music composer who…
The side project is an established rock phenomenon. Distanced from the bread-and-butter band, one can engage in pursuits that might not fit the profile of the mother-ship group. The late Jerry Garcia played bluegrass banjo with Old & In the Way, and The Mekons’ Jon Langford played big rock riffs…
Indiana’s Murder By Death may draw from wild sources like Dante’s Inferno and Johnny Cash for inspiration, but we’re fairly certain that “Raw Deal,” off the newly released In Bocca al Lupo, has nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Quite the opposite — on this latest album, the band delves…
Instituto Mexicano del Sonido (IMS) is a one-man type of project, with lots of after-hour editions and additions at a home computer. During the day, Camilo Lara is the well-known industry man and savvy record label guy who works for major companies in Mexico City. By night, he finds magic…
“No shoegazers here!” swoons Vibration singer Anne Fitzgerald on “Muscle Memory,” the lead-off tune from this Brooklyn band’s debut. Well, there might be a few boot-staring palookas in their audience, as most of Amarilla is raw, sauntering guitar churn and rolling drums, calling to mind moody early ’90s mashers like…
Maybe the only thing shocking about Madonna’s 2004 “Reinvention” tour was how completely unshocking it was, at least by her standards. No cone bustier, no simulated masturbation on a bed, no topless backup dancers (female ones, anyway) to writhe against . . . just a safe two-or-so hours of classic…
The old-school Brooklyn-based dance-punks in Radio 4 vividly illustrated their dissatisfaction with The Man on 2004’s pissed-off Stealing of a Nation, but they forgot to have any fun in the process, which made joining their underground resistance a very hard sell. Though it doesn’t match the punk-funk intensity of 2002’s…
Now that summer’s upon us, we have a dearth of entertainment options and the promise of sweaty afternoons spent waiting for the sun to drop below the horizon so that the concrete heat islands stop sizzling. Once the natural light has faded, though, there are still a few places you…
Thursday 8Acme Roadhouse: College Night with DJ J. Alan (Top 40) Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Tsunami (hip-hop, dance) Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with DJ Jeremy (goth, industrial) Axis/Radius: Ladies’ Night with Scooter & Lavelle (hip-hop) AZ 88: Mr. P-Body (synth pop, electro) Hard Rock Cafe: Skandilis (hip-hop, R&B, Latin)…
1. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere (Downtown) 2. Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom (Ipecac Recordings) 3. Les Claypool, Of Whales & Woe (Prawn Song) 4. Tool, 10,000 Days (Volcano) 5. Blue October, Foiled (Universal/Motown Records) 6. Angels & Airwaves, We Don’t Need to Whisper (Universal/Geffen) 7. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium…
