Photo by ERIC ASHLEIGH I’ve always been intrigued by making it out for home town performances, though they tend to be overhyped or more often, the band shows up exhausted – playing one-off hits for some family and friends after a long tour – mustering whatever they’ve got left to give and not much more. At last night’s gathering, War on Drugs was doing the inverse, celebrating not only the release of their new record, Lost in the Dream, but also launching the tour itself at a sold out home town venue. The crowd was all winter beards and high […]
BEING THERE: Arcade Fire @ Wells Fargo Center
Photo by ERIC ASHLEIGH BY JONATHAN VALANIA The jagged through-line of agreed-upon rock n’ roll history is marked by epic strategic blunders and stylistic reboot fails that will live on in infamy. The Grateful Dead going disco, Jefferson Airplane becoming Jefferson Starship, REM attempting rap (nothing personal KRS-One, it wasn’t you it was them), the Rolling Stones hiring the Hell’s Angels to keep the peace at Altamont, to name but a few. Add to the list the Arcade Fire getting ‘funk to funky.’ Or trying to, anyway. There seems to be two schools of thought on Reflektor. A) It’s their […]
EARLY WORD: In Bob We Trust
MAGNET MAGAZINE TURNS 21! Feat. GUIDED BY VOICES SURFER BLOOD * TITUS ANDRONICUS MAY 22 Trocadero Theatre 1003 Arch St * Philadelphia Tickets on sale Friday 3/21 at Noon! Although they’ve been underage drinking for years, MAGNET is finally turning 21! To celebrate, the long-running indie mag is putting on a kick-ass rock show, featuring the classic lineup of Guided By Voices (who we hear might know something about drinking), Surfer Blood and Titus Andronicus. It’s May 22 at the legendary Trocadero Theatre. Be there, or bee thousand. For tickets and more information for Magnet Magazine Turns 21 featuring Guided […]
24 Philly Keystone Pipeline Protesters Arrested
Photo by DUSTIN SLAUGHTER BY DUSTIN SLAUGHTER & KENNETH LIPP More than 100 activists blockaded three entrances of the Federal building at 6th and Market streets today as part of a nationwide campaign to pressure President Obama to block construction of the last leg of Keystone Pipeline construction. The demonstration was mounted by of a coalition of environmental groups including Earth Quaker Action Team, Rising Tide Philadelphia, 350 Philadelphia, and Be the Change. Today’s action resulted in 24 arrests, although 23 were cited on misdemeanor obstruction charges and released. One man faces felony charges for allegedly assaulting a federal officer. […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See A Special VIP Advance Screening Of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel
To mark the highly anticipated release of The Grand Budapest Hotel in select theaters on March 14th, this is officially WES ANDERSON WEEK on Phawker. We’ll have soundtrack and film score Sound Clouds to share, an in-depth interview about all things Wes Anderson from award-winning New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz, author of The Wes Anderson Collection AND we’re giving away 40 tickets to a special VIP advance screening tomorrow night, Tuesday March 11th, 7:30 pm at the Ritz 5! Because what’s the point of seeing a Wes Anderson movie if you can’t see it before everyone else […]
BEING THERE: Broken Bells @ The Trocadero
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Broken Bells — the collaborative side-project of Shins main man James Mercer and producer/DJ Brian Burton, AKA Danger Mouse — thrilled an overflowing standing room only crowd at the Trocadero last night with an 18-song set of their indie-psych-electronica hybrid. Mercer and Burton arrived on stage dressed in dark business suits and took up positions behind two white Star Trek-like pulpits, embedded with all manner of vintage synths and assorted retro-futuristic keyboard gadgetry, situated on opposite sides of the stage. Behind them were two risers with a drummer on one and a guitarist on the other. […]
CRIME & PUNISHMENT: Talking Drones, Snowden, O.J. And How To Solve The Israeli-Palestinian Riddle With Super-Lawyer Alan Dershowitz
Illustration by ALEX FINE,/font> BY JONATHAN VALANIA Famed criminal defense lawyer, retired Harvard Law School professor and cable news gadfly Alan Dershowitz will be at the National Constitution Center tomorrow to debate the legality and ethics of drone strikes on American citizens. In advance of tomorrow’s debate, we got Mr. Dershowitz on the horn. DISCUSSED: When it’s OK for the President of the United States to order the assassination of an American citizen; his theory of a “Continuum Of Civilianality; why he is advocating for the court-supervised use of torture in so-called ticking time bomb situations; Zionism and how to […]
BEING THERE: ZZ Ward @ The TLA
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Zsuzsanna Eva Ward was born in Abington, PA, in the late eighties and spent her youth absorbing her dad’s blues records as well as her brother’s hip-hop albums. Fast forward to 2014 and that little girl has become ZZ Ward, a rising music star with a sound that combines the lyrical and sonic tropes of blues and soul as well as the rhythms of hip hop. Friday night Ward and her tight three-piece band packed the Theatre of Living Arts and thrilled a winter-weary hometown crowd on the opening night of her Last Love Tour. Ward […]
BEING THERE: St. Vincent @ Union Transfer
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Before St. Vincent could take the stage at Union Transfer last night, an announcement was made over the loudspeaker by Microsoft Sam, the voice of Windows text-to-voice app, asking the jam-packed crowd to refrain from the use of any digital recording devices, audibly disappointing the smart phone-wielding hordes, most of whom, we can safely presume, had already figured out what vintage filter they were gonna put on their Annie Clark snaps. The irony of a phone telling humans to put away their funs may or may not have been lost on the crowd. Despite my […]
WIG OUT AT JAGBAGS: Win Tix To See Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks @ TLA Tomorrow Night
Generation X has always seemed the embodiment of Groucho Marx’s dictum about not wanting to join of any club that would have him as a member. That goes double for Stephen Malkmus, Gen X’s aging slacker princeling, son of a Coca Cola middle man, the man Courtney Love called the Grace Kelly of Indie Rock. As leader of Pavement, Malkmus spent the better part of the 90s zigging whenever his fanbase zagged, and the better part of the past decade cranking out the kind of wanky, Asbergerian solo records that scare off women and try men’s souls. The pretty, […]
BEING THERE: Courtney Barnett @ Union Transfer
Photo by NOAH SILVESTRY Courtney Barnett is not yet famous, but she’s a legend in the making. Her lyrics are not yet iconic, but evoke Bob Dylan’s poetry. Her band has not yet attained rock and roll glory, but they rock like Nirvana. Point: Believe the hype. Courtney Barnett is for real, and she hasn’t even released a proper album yet. Her Thursday night show was originally booked at Boot N’ Saddle but had to be moved to Union Transfer to meet demand. Taking the UT stage backed by her power trio, she opened up a short set with “David,” […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Butthole Surfers But You Weren’t Sure It Was Legal To Even Ask
Photo by ANDREW CAITLIN via the Melody Maker This is very exciting news. We’ve been granted permission to excerpt a 3,000 word passage on the Butthole Surfers — easily the greatest live performers (not just in rock, but in any artform) in the 1980s — from the forthcoming book NO SLAMDANCING, NO STAGEDIVING, NO SPIKES, an exhaustive oral history of City Gardens, the legendary 80s shithole/tri-state alt-rock mecca situated somewhere on the dark side of Trenton, in a a post-apocalyptic/post-industrial deadzone that could easily have served as location shots for David Lynch’s Eraserhead. And did we mention that Jon Stewart […]
BEING THERE: Dr. Dog @ The Electric Factory
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Last night Philly natives Dr. Dog threw down an epic, no-holds-barred, all-stops-pulled tour de force sold-out show that served as a fitting finale to the band’s two-night homecoming stand at the Electric Factory. Decked out in their trademark Skittles-colored beanies and cheap sunglasses, the Dog played a seemingly endless 18-song set, followed by a six-song encore, that took long pulls from their newish album B-Room, with smaller sips from their older vintages stretching all the way back to their 2002 debut, Toothbrush. The beard-y six-piece seemed to be having the proverbial time of their lives […]