Past Stories
Cars, Hip-Hop, Hot Chicks
Get ready, Killa4nia dance crew—the Supacrew is coming to stomp all over you. Or drive over you.
Or maybe it’ll be the other way around. Whatever happens, these two B-boy crews have been studying each other&rs...
Mad Marge & the Stonecutters
Every time a female-fronted band starts making waves in an otherwise stagnant musical genre, there are bound to be chock-full-o-hormones rock nerds creeping out from their labyrinth of dusty, forgotten records to point ou...
AFI: WTF?
The last chords of pop-punk are whining out their death gasp, and not a second too soon. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on our part, but the last thing we need is another band bleating melodic, sound-alike songs bemo...
Bum Rush the Show
For some of us (OK, me), our first exposure to the theatrical world was when our girlfriend took us to a college production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. We tried to get into its musical antics and pervasive use o...
Deep in the Night
The post-war era rhythm & blues explosion, which roiled American society as it seduced a generation of white teenagers into the Devil’s Musical Den—and gloriously laid the foundation for rock & roll&md...
WORRIED MINDS
What makes the bands in some college towns so much better than others? Kinda depends on how you define exactly what a college town is. Riverside has its ubiquitous UCR, and San Bernardino has their CSUSB, but really, thes...
Call Me Crash
At first listen, San Dimas-based Call Me Crash might sound like your typical teen angst band. With their lyrics about suicide and various other melancholy subjects, and whiney, emo-inspired vocals, it’s an easy mist...
Howling, Naked, Guttural
Against Me—and yeah, we’ll refrain from using the exclamation point they normally employ in their name for this article—should’ve been the band that saved punk rock.
Their early releases captured a...
Kings of Bad-Ass
The saga of ZZ Top—the opulently whiskered, techno-trimmed and demonically heavy rocking trio that earned pop culture immortality with their mid-’80s status as Video Lords of MTV—is an extraordinary tal...
Coachella With Twang
When the Stagecoach festival finally kicks into gear this weekend, it’ll be the first such major country music festival held in Southern California in more than a decade. While some might consider this jumbo scale round-u...
Coachella Gone Country
COUNTRY, ALT-COUNTRY AND THE WHOLE DAMN MESS
The Empire Polo Field in Indio, still recovering from the great freak-fest that was Coachella, hosted Stagecoach entirely different beast last weekend, as some of the nation’s ...
Creative Cacaphony
Riverside is known for a lot of things—mostly its citrus-packed past and being really far away from anything hip. But with an army of local artists, musicians and volunteers, Riverside resident Alaska (a.k.a. Stephanie Wh...
THE IRON MONKEYS
Punk was, once upon a time, all about youthfully creative, fun rock. Sure, anarcho-politics have always played a role, especially with bands from across the pond, but in recent years it seems that the genre has been overtaken b...
Sonic Fruit
I first saw Melt Banana 10 years ago at Benway Records in Venice. It was more like a pilgrimage. In those pre-MapQuest days, it took five IE high schoolers about six hours to find the place with a Thomas Guide.…
Everywhere and Nowhere
It’s one thing to imagine disappointment and pain, quite another to actually live it. Gina Villalobos knows the difference, and more importantly, how to persevere through the tough times.
A talented roots-rocker from Los ...
Summer Music Haiku Preview!
Chris Isaak at Pechanga Resort & Casino, Saturday
Seductive crooner
But sexy pipes disguise some
Rather ho-hum tunes
L.A. Guns at Incahoots, June 29
Longhair metal dudes
Ancient, yet still better than
Axl’s l...
Did We Mention It’s Free?
To celebrate IE Weekly’s local music issue, we’ve put together an all-local-bands CD for—oh, wait, that issue came out last week? Okay, so we can be slow. Or lazy. Or way, waaay too into that Mindfreak maratho...
The Anti-Faith Hill
Capable of selling a honky-tonk weeper with unspeakable tenderness, throwing down volcanic rockabilly bombshells of devastating impact, as well as on-the-spot hard-rocking improvs you’ll hear nowhere else, Rosie Flores ef...
Hit Me With Your Best Shot!
The finest aspects of this year’s Warped stop, situated in the middle of the horse track at the Pomona Fairplex last Friday, could be distilled into three exacting items: fabulous female vocalists, vivacious veteran punks...
THE SUNDELLES
After a long workday recently, I slipped into Taylors in Redlands to unwind before going home, and found myself solemnly staring into a peach-flavored ale. Suddenly, I was distracted by some seriously stellar music oozing its w...
Ugly and Ignored?
When seminal Long Beach new wave punkers Le Shok officially went belly-up in 2001, we mourned the passing of possibly the most entertaining live band of the era. They once stormed off the stage of the Glass House to fight…
UP TO 11
THE WALKING TOXINS AT TREMORS, SATURDAY
If not the most talented act to play at this battle-of-the-punk-bands throwdown, then certainly the one with the best name. But then click up their MySpace, where you’ll find their ...
BANDS
The music industry is not evolving–it has evolved. To attest to the fact, music retailers–such as Tower Records–are closing their doors by the thousands. Record labels are reporting massive losses, yet the pop...
Great Ska!
Ska has been around for half a century. Upon entering its third incarnation since the humble, Jamaican-inspired R&B days of originators Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker, the ska template had morphed into a fusion of off-bea...
Free Your Mind & Your Ass Will Follow
Funk, baby, has got to be the sweetest four-letter word in the musical universe. A rhythm-heavy sound that is pungent, arresting and loaded with psycho-acoustic demands, funk grabs ahold of one’s mind and refuses to let g...
Rock The Bells
If you ask Chang Weisberg how he’d describe Rock The Bells, he’ll fling terms that only the musically initiated would likely grasp–"a conscious socio-political hardcore hip-hop fest." But for everyon...
Dr. Strange (Love)
Record label A&R scouts typically seek certain aspects of a band that would make them signable—you know, things like band members that don’t have kids or wives, who are still considered "under the hill,&quo...
Keeping Up With the Joneses
One of rock & roll’s most horrible ironies is the fact that it is so often dominated by phonies. Whether it’s Fabian Forte or Lenny Kravitz, the bogus invariably seem to land somewhere near the top of the charts...
