Music
Can I be real with you for a moment? The Who's halftime show performance was one of the most upsetting things I've witnessed in quite a while. This is a band that defined itself by its outstanding live shows. The band's early days were paved in trashed guitars and vocal
Music
How do you decide a good revivalist? What rating system should be applied? Should it be the slight twists, innovations and modernizations that someone like M. Ward brings to the table? Should it be based on the deference for and flawlessness of the replication, like the garage-rock revival strives for?
Music
Off and on, I've experimented with recording at home. With my old, plastic chunk of computer, my results with GarageBand have been shaky at best. Sure, it's charming to create a dinky little song with a dinky little internal microphone. Inane, but charming. If you're serious about creating and recording music
SouthSoundland
On one Valentine's Day a couple years back, when I was considerably less cynical, I sent four old men to my girlfriend's work. They were my present: four octogenarian men in white tuxedos, brandishing roses and barber shop serenades. It cost $40, and it was absolutely perfect - as nearly
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Loaded for Bear are brimming with theatricality, presenting themselves like a shadowy back-alley band at a slurred, drunken carnival of ill intent. Their songs are moody pieces of work, propelled by haunted piano lines and stuttering drum beats. The vocals call forth from the hazy din, gruff and tired, occasionally
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"Western doom" is how Pioneers West describe their sound, and it's easy to see why. It's a kind of music that's born out of Modest Mouse's experiments with paranoia in the Pacific Northwest - that kind of feeling of everything closing in around you, being acutely aware of your tiny
Music
Ah, upstart college bands. You provide much-needed collegiate water-cooler talk about campus. (I presume, having never been to college, there are a lot of water-coolers in college.) You dream so big; you love so deep. You fill those (roughly) four college years with boundless quantities of mirth and youthful oat-sowing. I
Archives
The Twilight Zone exists as a kind of anomaly in the history of television. It was a high-concept (well, most of the time) anthology of short plays, tales of the bizarre - designed to provoke thought and ideas - contributed to by the best sci-fi writers of the time. Viewers
Music
Wheelies write pop songs, to be sure, but they're just a little mixed up - a little upside-down or inside-out, sounding as if they were recorded on the wrong end of an intercom. Or maybe sounding worn and yellowed like a long-lost mix-tape. The hooks are jagged and nervy even
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Wheelies write pop songs, to be sure, but they're just a little mixed up - a little upside-down or inside-out, sounding as if they were recorded on the wrong end of an intercom. Or maybe sounding worn and yellowed like a long-lost mix-tape. The hooks are jagged and nervy
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The FunkyJahPunkys are an absolute mystery to me. They utilize a dizzying combination of reggae, punk, hip-hop and funk. The outfit is a quartet of Red Hot Chili Pepper acolytes, taking the funk-metal notion to its logical next one or two steps. Their songs vacillate between pummeling riffs and
Arts
My childhood is a hazy mystery to me. Lately, I've started to suspect I might have brain damage, but that's beside the point. One unifying thread that runs through my whole life, however, is the presence of a fake radio program that's planted itself in my brain and reminds me
Music
Sometimes I'll say that music - as it exists and moves forward in society - is cyclical in nature. I try to catch myself when that happens, because, of course, music is not cyclical. In my mind, it looks more like a loop-the-loop. It moves in a straight line but,
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Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your panties or boxers. Guess who's coming to town. Guess. Wrong! It's the West Seattle Pleasure Club, and besides having maybe the best band name in history, they are masterful purveyors of underwear-destroying soul and funk. I dare (dare!) you to attend one
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The Variety Hour can feel simultaneously fresh and nostalgic. Their eponymous debut EP sounds firmly rooted in Generation X, and, if I never saw the band, I would picture the members with ripped denims and flannel. No offense. After last decade's resurgence of the '80s in music, the '90s are
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Phil Austin, David Ossman, Phil Proctor, and Peter Bergman met in the late '60s through Bergman's groundbreaking alternative radio program, Radio Free Oz. Finding a comedic rapport, the four went on to record their first album together, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. From that first record,
Music
Once your band has been together for a while, after you've worked up a bit of material, the next logical step is to put it all on record. But it's a big and kind of scary step. Even at relatively cheap studios, you're going to be throwing down a
Music
No matter how jaded I sometimes feel about music, there's always something that comes along and takes me completely by surprise. I think the last thing to have that effect on me was St. Vincent - known for jarringly jumping back and forth from pop to folk to crunchy space-funk.
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Almost two years ago I attended a free concert in People's Park. There, along with a modest crowd of polite audience members, I listened while several delightful folk bands sang loudly and without microphone. The show culminated in Kimya Dawson performing while sitting on the steps with the audience, my
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Roman Holiday is a band that begs to be seen live. It dares you, song after song, to sing along and raise a lighter. There's not a single moment in any of Roman Holiday's songs that suggests a band that's resting on its laurels. Every build-up is tight and suspenseful,