Crescent Ballroom wasted no time becoming a downtown Phoenix staple putting on shows almost every day of the year, and serving delicious food and drinks in the lounge. The venue expanded its horizons last year with Los Dias de la Crescent, where local bands performed both inside and outside for two days of fun. Crescent set up an outdoor stage twice more for Cold War Kids, Hanni El Khatib and more at Carnaval Electrico, and once again for Modest Mouse a few weeks ago.

The venue returns to its two stage format next week for Du Hot Club de Bizarre, a two-day festival featuring a bevy of local and touring bands that could be qualified as strange and bizarre. Find out more about the lineup after the jump.

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Courtesy Brandon Capps/Beautiful Noise Archives

Kimber Lanning of Half String

It was 1993 when Brandon Capps and a few like-minded friends started coordinating the first Beautiful Noise "shoegaze" festivals around Arizona. But 20 years ago, shoegaze wasn't a compliment. It was an insult, a pejorative tossed at the kind of guitarist who stared down at his pedals, waiting for the right moment to trigger the phaser or fuzzbox.

Twenty years later, shoegaze doesn't carry the same sting it used to. In fact, it's pretty hip these days. Last year, Brooklyn label Captured Tracks re-issued the complete recordings of Capps' old Phoenix-based band Half String to indie-blog acclaim and a series of reunion shows.

And now Capps has reignited the festival to celebrate its anniversary at Hollywood Alley in Mesa.

See also:
-Vintage Phoenix Shoegaze Band Half String Reissued by Brooklyn Label Captured Tracks
-Half String: Vintage Phoenix Shoegazers Reunite for California Tour

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It's hard to believe that it's been 17 months since the release of rapper Mouse Powell's outstanding debut, Where It's Cloudy. The Tempe-based artist has kept busy during that time, notching several tours on his belt and becoming the house hype-man at the Valley's renowned weekly hip-hop night, Blunt Club Thursdays at the Yucca Tap Room.

His new record, These Are the Good Times, is scheduled to drop this summer and to mark the occasion, Mouse has finally released the music video for "Ruby Slippers" off his 2011 release. "We've been holding on to the video for a while now, but I felt like now was the perfect time to release it because I have so many things in the works," Powell says.

Read More:

• Mouse Powell's "Holding Home" Music Video Features Local Landmarks and a Slew of Wet Girls
• Rapper Mouse Powell on an AZ Hip-Hop Education

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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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Phunk Junkeez and Jimmy Eat World do not have a lot in common. The Phunk Junkeez' major-label video was about "Me N Yer Girl" booty-shaking; Jimmy Eat World's was about two kids who fall in love and put their clothes back on.

Jimmy Eat World hit on the mixture of fast-paced pop and before-it-was-a-bad-word emo that dominated crossover rock for a large part of the aughts; Phunk Junkeez combined funky riffs with vocals that split the difference between nu-metal and everybody's Beastie Boys comparison-by-default.

But Phoenix is a big place. And for music fans of a certain age both bands are local-boys-made-good, which is why tonight's We Got The Beat! benefit show at the Crescent Ballroom -- featuring the Phunk Junkeez and JEW's Jim Adkins, with all proceeds going to young heart-transplant patient Kylee Geretti -- is an excellent time-traveling opportunity, if you're in the market for one. With that in mind, here are both bands in their own words -- from the '90s.

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Amy Martell

Run Boy Run in a rare moment of repose

Garrison Keillor knows about all the cool stuff way before the rest of us do -- we were in Tucson a couple of weeks ago, innocently catching a show at Plush that featured old friends of whom we're huge fans, and it turned out to be the release show for Run Boy Run's So Sang the Whippoorwill. Already entirely gobsmacked by the show, we marveled further the more we learned about the band.

This quintessentially Arizonan group of two sets of extremely musical siblings, plus the mustachioed and outgoing Jesse Allen on standup bass, appeared on A Prairie Home Companion's Gammage show in January and again live in Minneapolis in February. Keillor has said he "[hopes] they go on forever."

Run Boy Run is scheduled to open the main stage at Country Thunder in Florence at 1 p.m. today, and perform at the Rhythm Room with Elephant Revival on Sunday, April 14, with doors opening at 7:30 p.m.

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George White and Charles Barth form Saddles.

If the flu virus is a filament-filled spiky sphere, I wonder what the electronic synth bug looks like.

By the sounds of things, Charles Barth of two-man group Saddles is the latest in a long line of musicians to be infected by the bug. His recently released single, "The Original" features some smartly programmed beats and brightly-tuned key tabs to go along with his folk-rock sensibilities.

With long time collaborator George White officially joining Saddles' lineup, the duo is ready to unleash a new record next month which will feature influences ranging from Toto to David Bazan.

See also:

-Sit Down with Saddles
-Saddles Frontman Charles Barth Talks About Discovering His Acoustic Side

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Local bands and musicians of a Celtic bent have plenty of reasons for their Irish eyes to be smiling right now, as this weekend is pretty much the biggest of the entire calendar year. St. Pat's lands on a Sunday this year, which means three straight days of partying and performing for rowdy, drunken crowds at countless local pubs and watering holes, which is certain to nab them plenty of green.

Celtic croonings aren't the only sort of musical stylings afoot, as everyone from rappers to rockers have gigs scheduled from Friday, March 15, until the big day on Sunday, March 17. Here's spitball list of eight of the must-see concerts and gigs worthy of your time and money. Hell, a few are even free, which should leave plenty of scrilla for Smithwick's.

See also:
-Flogging Molly's Bob Schmidt Says Tempe Is the Best Place in the Country for St. Patrick's

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Bryan Sheffield

Flogging Molly

After nearly a decade, Celtic folk punkers Flogging Molly have become a St. Paddy's Day staple in Tempe. The band's anthems -- "What's Left of the Flag," "Devil's Dance Floor," and "Salty Dog" -- pull double duty each year at Tempe Beach Park, serving both the energetic moshers and the waves of bros looking to pound rounds of Guinness and shout at each other.

"It's the best place to be doing that day in the country," says multi-instrumentalist Bob Schmidt on why Flogging Molly keeps coming back to Tempe (this year marks the band's ninth stop). "Just about everywhere else you go, it's freezing cold and nobody's going to congregate outside for more than five minutes."

See also:

-Anti-Flag Peforms Anti-War Punk in the Obama/Drone/Wikileaks Era
-Flogging Molly at Tempe Beach Park 3/17/12

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Dfactor is always writing new songs and like all pop-infected minds, he's a sucker for self-deprecation and introspective topics. He's also highly sensitive to the world around him. So if his new single, "Yes & No Girl," is any indicator, it looks like Dave is in a pretty good place right now.

"Yeah, I think I'm happy there," Dfactor -- real name Dave Murrow -- says. "I'm more positive."

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