Pamela Lopez Grant/Otep Facebook

Get ready for Hydra

Imagine taking a demonic ride through a girl's mind, filled with fantastic illusions, haunting, heavy melodies, and vengeance against a world that has forgotten her.

To get there, you could spend an evening with Otep, one of the most prolific female-fronted bands of the past decade -- or have a listen to their newest album, Hydra, which was released in late January.

Based on a short story by frontwoman Otep Shamaya, the album evolved into a graphic novel based around a character named Hydra. Eventually, Otep realized that Hydra had become a creature all her own, and her story a vast musical excursion. But Hydra isn't just Otep Shamaya's latest work -- it's also her farewell to the music world.

Otep is playing with One-Eyed Doll at Joe's Grotto tonight.

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Caleb Kuhl

Matt & Kim

Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino do whatever they want. They play with whatever kind of bands they want, they get naked in videos, they do the "Harlem Shake," and they picked a band name, Matt & Kim, that immediately establishes their singular style of indie/pop.

See also:

-Matt Johnson of Matt & Kim Talks SB 1070, Fighting Kim, and Getting Naked in Times Square

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Bloc Party is back, and the post-punk outfit is Tempe bound.

Hailing from London, the band is closing out its 2012 comeback tour here in the Valley. The buzz kings benefited from the early 2000s "rock is back" craze, but it stuck around, outlasting the hype and incorporating soul, post-rock, and pop influences on increasingly diverse records before splitting in 2009. The band reunited this year for its fourth album, not-so-coincidentally titled Four in August.

Up on the Sun spoke with drummer Matt Tong about the mature split and reunion of the band, how remixes have become cynical, and how Wikipedia can lie to us all.

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Derek A. Welte

It's easy to write. Learning to edit, however, takes time.

It's a lesson IAMWE is intimately familiar with. When we last talked to the local indie rockers in depth, they fully anticipated pushing out a record in December of 2011. Today, nearly a year later, they release Run Wild, or the record formally known as She's a Soldier - edited, aged and genuinely heartfelt.

Initially named for Bella, a 100-year-old woman that touched the band that drummer Josh Carlson befriended while working at a local hospice, She's a Solider was about Bella; Run Wild is instead inspired by her spirit.

The recent death of Bella hit the band hard, but they're taking her warrior spirit with them when they embark on an upcoming East Coast tour with Anberlin.

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Reptar makes it look easy. Y'know, the whole "band" thing. The whole build a fanbase, tour, release albums... all that. But the way that the fast-rising dance-pop band's career has evolved seems so by the book that it seems a little off. After all, didn't the digital revolution mean that everything bands knew about, well, everything had been upended? Altered? Fundamentally shattered? Maybe so, but Reptar is one of the rare acts that's followed a traditional path in its brief two-year lifespan, and one of the rare acts for whom that's worked.

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Silverback Management/Slightly Stoopid

The members of Slightly Stoopid have been making music together for more than a decade.

Slightly Stoopid's sound is varied. Its six members wield an array of instruments including congas, harp, trumpet, keyboard and saxophone. They've toured with such legends as the Dave Matthews Band, Sublime (Bradley Nowell helped bring them to the public eye), Snoop Dogg, G. Love & the Special, Sauce and Pepper.

And although they aren't touring to promote a new album (their last was 2008's Slightly Not Stoned Enough to Eat Breakfast Yet Stoopid) fans can expect to hear a handful of new songs when the band comes through Mesa Amphitheatre this Friday.

Drummer Ryan 'RyMo' Moran sat down the Up On The Sun to dig into their record label and upcoming album, his top surfing locations, and the band's favorite post-show activity.

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Hanson has been a household name since 1997 when they made it big with their unforgettable song "MMMBop." You know, the one you could never get out of your head every time you heard it. But the three-brother band has moved on to bigger and better things now, like their chart topping latest album Shout It Out and making a point to give fans a ton of inside access via social media.
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When Cactus Chainsaw's singer said the band's list of influences was possibly a higher number than his criminal record charges, I took it with a grain of salt (courtesy of a cheap tequila shot).

But within the first 20 seconds of listening to their music, I could hear the band's specific influences, from Ministry to Muddy Waters. It's a bit too simplistic to categorize them as bluesy metal -- just ask their fans, who label them everything from Southwestern rock to swamp metal to --wait for it -- desert hillbilly metal. Yes.

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