Zox - The Southland - Shawn Johnson & The Foundation - Joey Arroyo March 20, 2006

March 20, 2006 Zox / The Southland / Shawn Johnson & The Foundation

Venue: Martini Ranch Address: 7295 E Stetson Dr Show Starts: 7:30pm

Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 day of show.
All ages welcome!
Buy tickets now at www.eveningstarproductions.com

Where: Scottsdale, AZ Rhode Island based, ZOX along with LA based, THE SOUTHLAND, and local favorites, Shawn Johnson & The Foundation will perform one show at Martini Ranch. Since the release of their debut album, Take Me Home in 2003, ZOX has emerged as one of the most promising and original new bands on the New England scene. Characterized by blistering violin melodies, a pulsing backbeat, sophisticated arrangements, and the poignant and personal songwriting of a hapless romantic, the band's unique sound has won followers across the tyrannical boundaries of genre. Described by some as a cross between The Cure, Fugazi, The Police, and Beethoven, ZOX's distinctive style is at once remarkably innovative and surprisingly familiar.

Influence of Geography, The Southlands first album, is full of songs that seem at once novel and strangely familiar. Like "305," about the mother of all lovers' spats, titled after the number of the apartment where it all went down; "Debris," which picks through the shards of a shattered relationship until words are no longer enough and the band throttles the remaining pangs of regret during the course of a scintillating, thematically apt instrumental passage as if they were the five-man Steely Dan circa Countdown to Ecstasy; and "Shining Sun," whose incandescent melody and lilting, Graceland-like tempo are juxtaposed with verbiage that doesn't belong yet seems just right. And so on. The Boston Herald, for example, noted The Southland's "melodic, sweet pop wrought with heavy slabs of fuzzy guitar," singling out the band's rendition of the Flamingoes' "I Only Have Eyes For You," which "had heads turning," as the performance progressed from "a smooth jazz beginning [to] a sludgy rock monolith, with golden-voiced singer Jed Whedon switching from a sweet coo to a frustrated, angry screech."

Event submitted by Eventful on behalf of LuvLive.