Archive for the ‘Music/Music Feature’ Category
December 24th, 2009
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Author: Our music critics share their thoughts on the best of 2009
by The Usual Gang of Idiots
It’s that time of year when music critics feel the need to make lists—and our critics are no exception. If you are one of those folks who hate Top 10 lists such as these, take solace in one thing: At least we’re not engaging best-of-the-decade lists like so many other publications. Anyway … here’s part one of our critics’ lists. Look for the exciting conclusion next week. GENE ARMSTRONG (in alphabetical order) Baroness, Blue Record (Relapse) [image-1] Epic-rock dynamics and…
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Say goodbye to the Aughts and hello to 2010 with musical accompaniment
by Stephen Seigel
For the second consecutive year, the Downtown Tucson Partnership is sponsoring First Night, “a New Year’s Eve celebration of arts, culture and community” that encompasses many different events at a dozen downtown locations—all of which are family-friendly and alcohol-free. Some events are free, while some require admission buttons for entry. Admission buttons, which allow entry to all venues and events, are $12 for adults, $6 for children 6 to 12, and free for children 5 and younger. They’re available at…
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Vicki Brown balances her career in psychology with her growing musical life
by Gene Armstrong
One of the hardest-working musicians in Tucson’s rock-oriented music community is a classically trained, lifelong violinist who hasn’t yet quit her day job. Vicki Brown didn’t even start playing in bands or doing studio sessions until 2003, the same year she earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Arizona. Brown has played with several local live acts, done dozens of recording sessions for other artists, and created music that has appeared in theatrical, dance and film productions. She…
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Candye Kane celebrates more than 20 years in music at the Fourth Avenue Street Fair
by Gene Armstrong
For more than 20 years, the terrific singer Candye Kane has performed blues, country, roots rock and jazz in a powerful, bodacious manner. Kane’s brash, over-the-top persona was never a calculated stage act; it was her method of empowering herself to triumph over what she describes as a “hard-knock life.” “I often say that songwriting and performing is kind of a therapeutic thing for me,” Kane says. Which explains songs such as “Big Mama Candye’s Blues,” “Gifted in the Ways…
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Hawthorne Heights moves on from the death of Casey Calvert with a new record label
by Linda Ray
When guitarist Casey Calvert died suddenly at the start of a 2007 tour, Hawthorne Heights naturally came unglued. They had lost a close friend, and their music had lost an important reconciling element: Calvert’s visceral, tormented screams had held the glee-club lilt of the band’s vocal harmonies together with the contrasting despair of their lyrics and fight of their guitar attack. Calvert’s scream was the scream that all of us stifle as we slog harmoniously through our drudgery and the…
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Fanfarlo’s special blend leads to deeply textured and layered songs
by Annie Holub
Although British band Fanfarlo is named after an autobiographical novella by French writer Charles Baudelaire, all that Fanfarlo’s music really has in common with the 19th-century French symbolist are a love of language and a heightened sense of form. Fanfarlo’s lyrics may be poetic, obtuse and fanciful, but the focus is less on thematic lyrical content than on a certain musical approach, explained lead singer Simon Balthazar. “I definitely had a vision of what I wanted to do,” explained Balthazar,…
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The Generationals—a fine rock band from New Orleans—like to play up the old
by Eric Swedlund
Catchy 1960s-style rock music built on the foundations of Phil Spector and the Beatles doesn’t have much to do with the classic New Orleans sound. But for the Generationals, reaching back in time to weave threads of different musical traditions together into their own new and exciting entity is exactly how the Crescent City has always functioned. With a set of demos that had slowly been building since the 2007 breakup of their previous band, the Eames Era, singer-songwriters Grant…
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Former Green on Red guitarist Chuck Prophet returns to Tucson with a new album
by Gene Armstrong
Ever since he joined Green on Red 25 years ago, I’ve wanted to ask singer-songwriter and guitarist Chuck Prophet if he was born with that last name. He set the record straight in an interview last week. “Would I make that up?” he said, in mock offense. A longtime favorite in the Old Pueblo, Prophet will return to Tucson to play Nov. 11 at Club Congress. Prophet expounded on the thin line that separates myth and reality, talking about the…
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Tom Russell eschews modern indie rock’s emasculated songwriting
by Jarret Keene
Old-school country-folk beatnik-cowboy singer/songwriter Tom Russell holds a certain measure of respect for the Southwest indie-rock scene, especially younger artists who recently have emerged from Tucson’s Wavelab Studio with killer tunes and classic albums—artists like Calexico, Neko Case, DeVotchKa and Los Lonely Boys. Why else would Russell hole up in producer Craig Schumacher’s sonic lair to record what critics are calling the El Paso legend’s best album to date? Throughout Blood and Candle Smoke, Schumacher applies his distinctive touch, largely…
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Why? wades through the strange ‘Eskimo Snow’
by Michael Petitti
The weird world of Why?—more specifically, the world evoked in the peculiar lyrics of frontman Yoni Wolf—continues to get stranger. On the Oakland-by-way-of-Cincinnati band’s unusual, engrossing Eskimo Snow (Anticon), scary figures, comical failures and sad premonitions inhabit a world both self-enclosed and all-encompassing with religion (Jesus, Maccabees, Book of Numbers, God), geography (Ohio, Cleveland, Jersey City, Berkeley), food (sea salt, watermelon, meat), animals (a dead fox, one mongoose, one cobra), characters (high school soccer girls, ex-girlfriends, the poseur in the…
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