Band: Mike Lennon, a country-tinged classic rock-y sideproject from the the bassist of Psychobilly Rodeo Band, the house band at Scottsdale's Rusty Spur saloon.
Record: The Dateline Phoenix 2009 album. The included press materials make it clear the record was actually written and recorded in 2007, making this "dateline" inaccurate.
Basics: At his best Lennon sounds a little like a lo-fi and electrified blues playing Jimmy Buffett, since his voice is nearly a dead ringer for the Head Pirate In Charge. Thankfully there is nothing remotely "psychobilly" about this effort which is pretty straight forward bar rock.
Band: The Plump Tones, a Prog-leaning Classic rock type band from Chandler. Record: Brown Chicken Brown Cow album Basics: The Plump Tones sound like what they look like: A gang o' weekend warriors playing some funky, often-instrumental jams. They're competent but not fully gelled and seem more interested in rocking out than rocking.
Band: A House Divided, a Phoenix-based four-piece alt-rock band that sounds like the recently re-united Creed. Record: A House Divided EP Basics: I suspect being compared to Creed will be seen as damning A House Divided with faint praise -- and I sorta mean it to -- but this band also does some of the same things right. They have big, powerful guitar riffs and a clear, polished sound. They also display a flair for the dramatic on songs like "Illusions," a trait I am not as fond of.
Band: Broken Poets Record: Everything In Nature Basics: An indie duo that recently re-tooled their sound to emphasize Tom McDonald's deep, brooding voice, the Poets have a the same vibe you'll find in the slowest Death Cab for Cutie songs. Though they at times sound a lot like the standard alt-rock fare you'll hear on, say, The Edge, this is a very high-minded band. They've got a manifesto here and a long statement on the back of their record that begins, "The songs on this record were inspired by the realization that my place in the world is directly related to my relationship with nature..."
Basics: There are a bazillion garage rock grrl bands to compare these ladies to, any of which would undoubtedly raise hackles from someone citing some small difference between The GLKs and the other band. Let's just say they're a darker and less go-go-y Love Me Nots, or a a more stripped down Girl in a Coma.
If you're the ex of someone in Tempe pop-rock band This Century, you won't want to listen to their latest EP, To Love and Back.
The six-song EP also touches on friendship betrayal ("Running"), but the dark lyrics are juxtaposed with an upbeat, catchy pop sound reminiscent of storytelling bands such as Jack's Mannequin.
Courtney Marie Andrews
Painter's Hands and a Seventh Son
(River Jones Music Label)
Grade: B+
Legend has it that Courtney Marie Andrews first tried her hand at songwriting when only 13 years old. Now 18, under the tutelage of River Jones and his music label Andrews has released two full-length albums including her newest, Painter's Hands and a Seventh Son.
Painter's is the work of a teenage girl with some noticeable vocal chops. Andrews has the wholesome and straining vibrato of a siren, adrift between the sweet, eerie pitches of Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor's gurgling cutesiness. Her instrumental inputs of banjo, piano and guitar don't hinder the record either.
Nayo Jones
My Name Is Nayo Soul
(PowerMove Records)
Grade: C+
Critics have been commenting on the death of R&B for a few years now, to the point it's almost universally accepted that the genre is artistically bankrupt, with few if any quality acts still practicing the time-honored craft of marrying rhythm to blues. As we've said in print before, guys like John Legend pretty much show the boring things have gotten in the scene.
The fact remains, there are two semi-successful brands of R&B . Males can still go hyper-sexual -- R. Kelly style -- and sell a few records. Women can still take their cue from the semi-politicized, vaguely Afrocentric style Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Lauren Hill have rode to popularity.
In some ways Phoenix's Nayo does a good job of the latter striking a pose as Phoenix's answer to the socially-conscious R&B ladies who rack up Grammys (among her top 19 MySpace friends: Badu, Scott, India.Aire, Common, Legend and Barack Obama) but, to the extent she tries to put her own stamp on the gimmick, she has mixed results on My Name is Nayo Soul.
98 KUPD is the premier (if not the only) radio station in the Valley for rock and metal. The station has a devoted following of music lovers in it for the soul-crushing bass and the scream-your-pain away vocals, not the cookie-cutter pop-hop brought to you by countless otherstationshere.
So it's no wonder local black metal band, Black Metal Box, released its self-titled debut album with a boost from KUPD. BMB won the station's 2008 "PlayDio for the Homeless" contest and opened up for Trapt at The Tempe Market Place.
It's a Cinderella story steeped in blood, sweat and heavy-metal tears to be sure, but how does the album sound?
It's hard to believe, but tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of Woodstock 1999. Though organizers have done everything they can to protect the Woodstock brand since, distancing themselves from the fiery debacle in Rome, New York, if you ask me the event was a smashing success, as it really did accomplish the ambitious goal of defining a generation. Like it's two predecessors -- the hippie fest of '69 and the grunge showcase of '94 -- the '99 installment captured the zeitgeist of American pop music, as ugly as that zeitgeist was.
For better or worse, there's about five years of popular music that can best be summed up by Limp Bizkit's performance at Woodstock 99 (the event ran July 23-25, 1999) when the righteous white suburban rage of "Break Stuff" led to, ahem, the breaking of stuff, the setting of fires and, reportedly, sexual assaults. If you ask me, observers at the time were right to wring their hands and condemn a generation of kids who gathered to see shitty bands like Godsmack, Buckcherry, and Korn.
Here's the truly tragic epilogue: 10 years later, in Phoenix, Arizona, there are bands who seem to be striving to re-create the sound bands like Oleander perfected a decade ago. Beyond The Now is such a band. They're pretty good at it, too.
Brad Perry and the Acoustic Fingerprints Brad Perry and the Acoustic Fingerprints (Self-released)
Grade: C-
I'm sure our weekly locals-only music review column, You Asked For It, has unwittingly kicked people when they were down before but, honestly, that's never the intent. That's why it's so hard to write about this week's selection, offered up by Brad Perry who was recently laid off from Channel 3.
Perry is, by all accounts, a super-nice guy, but his debut EP sounds a lot like what you'd expect a deep-voiced TV newsman's collection of covers and confessions to sound like. Or, to put it another way, it sounds exactly like what it's advertised as on his MySpace: "a little bit Kenny Chesney with Ben Harper soul."
Numbers on Napkins Forget This, I'm Going To Tokyo (Bad Stain Music)
Grade: C+
As past installments of You Asked For It have demonstrated, I've rarely been impressed by Phoenix punk bands. Numbers on Napkins, this week's pick, fall somewhere in the middle of the pack. They aren't nearly as awful as, say, VW Trainwreck and The Video Nasties, nor are they anywhere near as good as 80*D.
Starting off with a title track that features some of the better bass playing you'll hear from a Valley band, NoN shows they can at least write decent melodies, unlike many of their peers. Sure, the recording quality leaves a lot to be desired -- some of the percussion ends up sounding like the weird blips your computer makes when you try to do something your operating system won't allow -- but at least there's some substance underneath.
Demonstrating even a small affinity for a band as roundly despised as Limp Bizkit takes some balls. Sure, Fred and the boys sold a gazillion records, but even the unhippest guy in the Valley -- I picture him as baggy-jeaned dude inking Chinese letter tattoos at a plaza-bound shop in Avondale -- knows history has, thus far, been cruel to the band and the nu-metal movement they championed. So, yes, showing the Jacksonville rap-rock group has had any influence on you is pretty much suicidal. But straight up ripping them off, as Serious Side Effects does? Well, shit, I don't even know what to say about that.
When financial considerations mean songs needs to be replaced for a DVD release of a film or a TV show, producers usually turn to generic sounding music to take the place of the more popular, but prohibitively expensive, tune. Tinsel-town just might come knocking on Hollywood Heartthrob's door, if their debut release The Takeover, is any indicator. They'd make a great stand-in for that Rolling Stones track some movie exec can't negotiate rights to.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not like we have never heard this stuff before. The Takeover isn't terrible, and it's clear that a lot of money was put into this self-produced release. But, then again, you can put a lot of money into almost anything, and if the substance just isn't there, no one is to blame but the creative minds behind it.
We've been doing You Asked For It for just over a year now and it's about time we had our first repeat customer. Dude Offline got his first record, Nerd Love, reviewed by Niki D'Andrea last year, and now he's waited long enough for his seven song mini-album Monkey Baby to get a turn.
Unlike it's more eclectic predecessor, Monkey Baby is pretty much straight up nerdtronica with vocoder vocals, pounding beats and rough-edged synthesizers I'd feel comfortable comparing to The Faint. Surprisingly, it all works pretty well. Despite the cover - hopelessly uncool even if we imagine it was conceived from the most ironic of aesthetics - and the sometimes forced references, Dude (aka Shawn Armenta) makes some pretty good dance music.
I generally try to make our weekly You Asked For It review more about music than career counseling, but there's no way to avoid it with this week's pick, Phoenix rapper Chad Krystals.
Krystal$ has some things going for him. His white boy flow isn't bad, he's got a few clever rhymes on Superconscious, and the album's retro-vibe G-Funk-style beats and soul hooks got me a few times, especially when the record finds its groove toward the middle, with on "Start The Show" and "Musical Precision."
But, fact is, career prospects are limited for white rappers, as the record-buying public is, by and large, indifferent to them unless they've got a gimmick. Basically, to find success, they can clown around (Eminem), be totally cerebral (Aesop Rock), go horror-core (Insane Clown Posse), or do the stoner thing (Kottonmouth Kings).
The stoner thing is actually a pretty good bet for Krystal$ or -- using the moniker I'd like to see him adopt -- Chaddy B. Blunt.
Cardiac Party singer Ryan McDowell had it all planned out: By including a package of Skittles with the copy of his band's new EP, Teen Challenge, he says, he was assured of getting at least one positive remark in my review. "The songs sucked, but the Skittles were delicious!" Actually, Teen Challenge is one of the better local records I've heard since I started this job -- even without the Skittles.
This Tempe-based indie/noise/electronica outfit is making the sort of super trendy keyboard-and-noisy-guitar music hipster-haters spend most of their waking hours actively despising, but it's hard to find anything worth not liking about this brilliant followup to their 2007 effort Cardiac Party R Cacti Yard, PA. I'm only passingly familiar with what the band sounded like back then -- mostly standard lo-fi indie rock garnished with small slices of lo-cal Peachcake -- but I'm comfortable calling this record a giant step forward. Actually, if I were them, I'd pull the first album off shelves immediately.
It's hard to believe, but we've been slogging through You Asked For It submissions for a year, as of today, May 21. My predecessor, Niki D'Andrea, started YAFI as a way of catering to local bands that bitched about her coverage and it still fills that function today though, as I learned, and as Niki has confirmed, we've been impressed by a handful of submissions we've gotten from bands brave enough to toss their CDs in the mail to us, knowing we'll write whatever we think about it without holding back.
In the meantime, with Niki's help, I've compiled a list of the best and worst records that've come to us this way. Without further ado, that list. A big "Thank You!" to the great bands who've participated and a big "Ugh, why did you waste my fucking time" to the bands that sent us complete crap. Oh, and keep 'em coming. The address is at the bottom of this post.
J.D. Stooks says it best himself on his MySpace: "I play slow sad bastard music."
For all intents and purposes he does, though there's an occasional buoyancy to Stooks new record, Women & Gold that'll appeal to most fans of acoustic folk-rock, even the ones who prefer the more upbeat offering of Pete Yorn types.
The well-connected Stooks (local production mastermind Bob Hoag recorded the CD, and plays on it, as do former Loveblisters Lou Kummerer and Ryan Casey and long-time singer/scenester Yolanda Bejarano) has a great feel for Phoenix, from "Mary Moeur" (an ode to the ghost at Casey's Moore's that was actually recorded at the venerable Tempe watering hole) to the novelty of outerwear, as documented on "10 lb. Coat."
A Few Random Drunks World Famous County Wide (Self released)
If you ask me, there's too many alt-country acts doing the Old 97s thing, and not nearly enough doing the Drive-By Truckers thing. Now, granted, I prefer the former to the latter, but unless you've got Rhett Miller's worn-denim vocals -- and few in the genre do, as Miller's new self-titled record reminded me -- you're better off with a scratchier, sassier approach.
Tempe's A Few Random Drunks get that (sorta) and it's one of the reasons I enjoyed the faster half of their six-song EP, World Famous County Wide, which is full of fun little harmonica solos and loose guitars accompanying Josh Preston's unvarnished vocals.
Phoenix metal act 69 Sins' debut EP G.F.Y. doesn't disturb me so much for what it is, as what it hints at. Though it's a pretty standard metal CD in many ways, there are a few glimmers of what I can only describe as Bro Metal. Now, metal barely -- barely -- survived the nu-metal era, and
that was, at least in part, created by bands like Korn who
counterbalanced their machismo with oddly-structured songs
about being molested. 69 Sins comes a lot harder than a band like Limp
Bizkit, and with all the bro rock posturing, I worry they could
eventually grow in to force of pure evil.
Prehab One is Too Many (A Thousand Is Never Enough) Self-Released
If Prehab's One is Too Many (A Thousand Is Never Enough) sounds a little too polished to be a debut, there's good reason. The guys spent five years as The Bedspins in the mid-90s, racking up 500 shows and serving as songwriters for the producer behind Tempe's Gin Blossoms. They broke up, as bands are wont to do, and stayed that way until a mutual childhood friend died of a brain hemorrhage. After seeing each other at his funeral, they thought it might be cool to get the band back together. After a few other twists and turns -- events that forged their new identity as a drug concept band -- they guys eventually reunited and, musically, pretty much picked up where they left off.
All those detractors of the country-tinged pop-rock of Mill Ave scene are going to:
a) hate b) loathe c) despise
this band, but I really dig them, even if they're doing a style of music pioneered by The Eagles and (arguably) perfected in Tempe in the mid-90s. One is Too Many is a polished, mature effort with more than a few memorable moments.
What sort of indie band is The Package? The kind of "indie" band that sends us a flier titled "AZ's Biggest Indie Band Releases Debut Album" despite their only scheduled show being at a small club in Prescott next month. The kind of "indie" band who has girls wearing their official underwear pictured in their MySpace Top 8. The kind of "indie" band that (unironically, it seems) calls their record Best New Artist.
Somewhere, Frank Black is crying.
Now, all that probably makes you think The Package's debuet is a lot more awful than it is. In truth, they're a pretty average local "indie" band, considering they've been together a short time. They should have waited until they jelled to record an album, though, as Best New Artist shows.
Putting a cover song as the second track on your CD is ballsy. Either you've got 'em right there, or you've lost 'em forever. For a metal act to put a cover of an Ozzy/Black Sabbath song second on their record? Well, that's pretty much suicidal. Sure, Sabbath can be covered. The Cardigans' cutesy version of "Iron Man" was the cherry on top of First Band on the Moon. But if you're a metal band, you better be able to bring something extra, extra special to "Crazy Train," or you're just going to leave listeners needing a real Ozzy fix.
Sorry to say the gambit does not pay off for St. Madness, a Scottsdale metal band who's album Saintanic struck me as shockingly amateurish given that it was produced by the Valley's closest approximation of Mutt Lange, Larry Elyea, and that the band is 16 years and seven albums deep in to their career. Saintanic is an ambitious effort, but falls short in ways so many younger Phoenix metal bands succeed.
Generally, I write positive reviews about bands that are good at what they do. I like a little bit of everything, so it's not that hard for me to appreciate either a delicate ballad or ear-shredding thrash. Shit, I genuinely love the first Britney Spears record, and think Toby Keith is a tragically under appreciated genius. With that said, it's very hard for me to appreciate Goodbye to Pretty, despite them being very good at what they do.
The Scottsdale band plays that brand of bland Maroon 5 pop-rock that filters through the speakers at Old Navy-type establishments. Most of the songs on their radio-ready self-titled disc sound like B-sides to the Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah." For me, three listens through the album was tough, though I can easily picture a lot of girls with bright smiles and tasteful sundresses singing along with these guys at a concert.
Maybe it's because I don't listen to a lot of it in my off hours - that time when I want only the sweet, sweet voice of Karen Carpenter to sooth me over AM radio - but I'm constantly surprised by the depth and quality of the Phoenix metal scene. In the seven months I've been doing You Asked For It I've yet to have a bad local metal record come across my desk (sadly, the same cannot be said for the pathetic local punk scene) and this week won't change that.
Phoenix thrash metal band Hemoptysis isn't the second coming of Slayer yet, but for a band that's only been together since 2007 their EP, Who Needs A Shepherd?, is solid. The band's tempo is a throwback to the mid-80's Golden Era of thrash, though with Masaki Murashita's guttural death growl instead of singing.
One of the things I love best about Bright Eyes (and yes, I unapologetically love Bright Eyes) is the way the band mingles so many rootsy sounds in songs that end up being totally contemporary. It's for that reason, and not just Matthew Reveles' vulnerable, emotive vocals, that I compare the Tempe singer-songwriter to the Omaha outfit fronted by Conor Oberst.
Reveles' impressive album We'll Meet Halfway is full of old-timey instrumentation: guitar, upright bass, jazz bass, drums, harmonica, fake organ, clarinet, lap steel, Dobro, kazoo, whistle, tambourine and shakers. Actually, those are just the instruments Reveles himself is credited with playing; he's also got buddies on banjo, piano, drums, and hootin'/hollerin'.
There was a time when hearing a boyish and manicured voice like Conner Cecil's alongside a willowy pedal steel wasn't uncommon in country music. That time is long gone, though, and hearing Conner -- a Globe native whose voice matches his cherubic face -- on his debut EP, Conner, is a little strange. In a genre where banjo accompaniment is now usually the dominion of guys with pock-marked faces and gravelly voices or quirky songstresses, Conner is an odd duck.
"Punk rock, comedy, and politics" can be a great combination -- look at NOFX. But when a local band declares they're playing with these elements in their self-penned biography, I get a little nervous. VW Trainwreck's new album, Dramaturgy, is exactly why.
With a band theme song, a track about sleeping with 16-year-olds and a song called "Beer, Sports & Porn," Dramaturgy is a standard three-chord punk album with as many cringe-inducing moments as the first five installments of the Saw franchise combined.
Rarely does a death metal act succeed in spooking a seasoned critic like me, but I have to say there was truly something unsettling about Iwatchedherdie.'s The Ill Effects of Hope. Midway through the seven-song disc I just felt vaguely disturbed by the imagery, the haunting keyboards, the crushing guitars, and singer Joey Milosevich's vicious wretch.
Post a Comment
