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Seattle quintet Great Grandpa exudes an effortless cool. The grungy pop recalls bands like the Breeders and Garbage, with their sly melodies and crunchy guitars. Lead singer Alex Menne brings a detached swagger that is offset by unobtrusive harmonies from her bandmates. A band like Great Grandpa, with lyrics about
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More so than many of the other bands striving to capture the feeling of music in the '90s, pop weirdos Dead Larry feel like they emerged straight from the time capsule. It's remarkable how uncanny their resemblance is to the pop eccentrics like They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds Five,
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Setting aside any of the other qualities that I'll be billboarding about Nasalrod, the one thing that you need to know is that they're a lot of goddamn fun. The punk rock Portland foursome create impossibly energetic music that doesn't so much pummel as it grabs you by the shoulders
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San Francisco duet the Classical make concise descriptions quite a task. The easiest way to sum them up is to call them baroque art-rock, though that doesn't quite cut it. "Shovel & Bevel" combines clinically mesmerizing drums with odd phrases repeated over and over with darkly expressive strings to create
Music
My first time listening to the Dirty Projectors was a bewildering and dizzyingly delightful experience. David Longstreth was clearly a madman, constantly stretching his vocals beyond the boundaries of good taste and engaging in musicianship that seemed less like a good time and more like self-flagellation. The Dirty Projectors were
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I've long been in love with the fizzy, cartoonishly bright power pop of the Hoot Hoots. With their driving indie rock, dressed with colorful costumes and embellished with lyrics about robots and dinosaurs, the Hoot Hoots have embodied the height of blissful optimism for me in the Pacific Northwest. Seeing
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Seattle quartet Specters are romanticizers of the '90s, as they say. Specifically, they bring the sort of slacker vibe to their music that bands like Pavement mastered. Unlike the weirdo energy that recent slacker rockers like Mac Demarco carry, there is a gentle power pop grandeur to the Specters that
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Hungry Skinny perfect a kind of dirtbag glam befitting their Northern California roots. What initially sounds like the same sort of garage pop that comes from Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin eventually reveals itself to be impeccably assembled rock that draws from the sloppy blues-rock of '60s mods like the
Arts
Sometimes, when you're thinking up a story idea, you can engage in a game of chicken with yourself. An unusually potent example of this was when I brought up the idea of seeing the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey for a story. My friend suggested that I up
Music
Music has long been used to get through traumatic times like deaths, break-ups and wars. There's something comforting about being guided through the hard moments by artists who seem to know exactly what you're going through, but who have the tools to help others. Music is a salve, a sturdy
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I was surprised and delighted to hear the latest from Skrill Meadow, the one-man band of Mark Morrison. Private Memories is an album of straight-up slow jams, albeit jams coming directly from one shitty tape machine to your ear. Despite his limitations, Morrison embodies the consummate frontman, reeking of sex
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Underwhelmed comes to us from Dick Rossetti (formerly of 107.7 The End and currently the frontman of the Jilly Rizzo) and Isaac Olsen. Olsen should be known to fans of local music and film as the director behind Quiet Shoes, Ich Hunger, and the Girl Trouble documentary, Strictly Sacred. The
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After a brief respite from holidays that are improved by the consumption of mass quantities of alcohol, we have arrived at another doozy: Fat Tuesday, and the kickoff of Mardi Gras. It is always my suggestion to avoid the crowds during amateur nights like St. Patrick's Day and New Year's
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Holy North American Motor Highway (also known as Holy Motors, if you're into the whole brevity thing) make experimental chamber rock that comes steeped in an intangible feeling of dread. Their only release, Live at Paper Street, contains two epic-length songs recorded in a kitchen in Olympia. In the liner
Music
The phenomenon of the "morning zoo" radio show is a persistent and inexplicable one in American culture. People like Bubba the Love Sponge and other assorted fake monikers dominate drive time radio with an unending assault of sound effects and self-consciously edgy material, seemingly just because it's hard to keep
Music
Before I had even heard Prince, I heard the lo-fi, gonzo appropriation of Prince's sound in Ween. Here were a duo of weirdos that loved progressive rock and early '80s funk, but who filtered that love through tape machines and more than a little bit of huffed Scotchgard. Even after
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Ravenna Woods have grown in ways that enter them into a different realm from those that consider folk revivalism the be-all and end-all of new indie expression. What began as a three-piece that created percussive folk has nor involved more electronic elements that expand their sound. Now, with their newest
Music
When I first saw Ravenna Woods, it was in Austin, Texas, 2011, at a showcase that included the Pacific Northwest likes of the Nightgowns and the Tea Cozies. Unlike those bands, Ravenna Woods were built in the mold of Washington's growing obsession with folk music. However, unlike the infestation of
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The struggle of a one-man-band is that your defining characteristics are utterly your own. There's no flavor to be found from the inclusion of a wild drummer or a stoic bassist - everything comes directly from whatever you decide to include in your lonely presence on stage and record. Mig
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This festival of improvised music at Obsidian features a very special guest by the name of Mazen Kerbaj. Hailing from Beirut, Lebanon, Kerbaj specializes in the trumpet, taking that instrument many miles from any expectations you may have when I utter the words "improvisational trumpet." His style takes the trumpet