Time is short so let’s just cut to the chase. You know you want ’em, we know we got ’em. Let’s do this thing. First three readers to email us at FEED@PHAWKER with FOGHORN LANGHORNE in the subject line win a pair of tickets to see Langhorne Slim tonight at Union Transfer. Good luck and godspeed! RELATED: Langhorne Slim is an American singer-songwriter, (born Sean Scolnick on August 20, 1980 in Langhorne, Pennsylvania). Scolnick attended high school at Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, part of the SUNY system. MORE […]
CONCERT REVIEW: tUnE-yArDs @ uNiOn tRaNsFer
[Photo by JUSTIN BANK via YOUTELLCONCERTS.COM] BY MIKE WALSH MUSIC CRITIC The first time I heard a tUnE-yArDs song, I wondered how Merrill Garbus, the singer and songwriter who essentially is the band, could perform such a unique style in a live setting. With the many layers of her voice and sounds on her CD whokill, I assumed she’d need a large band with backing singers to pull it off. But I was wrong about that, as I discovered on Sunday night at Union Transfer. Garbus uses live looping techniques so expertly, she made her and her bass player sound […]
#OCCUPYPHILLY: Home Of The Brave
[Photo by MEREDITH KLEIBER] BY ALEXANDER POTTER “This is what democracy looks like!” was the collective cry Saturday afternoon as hundreds of people marched from Dilworth Plaza at City Hall to Independence Hall and back. Mayor Michael Nutter had met with many Occupiers the day before to express support, remind everyone to remain peaceful and, let’s face it, score political points. Although they were extremely loud and disruptive, drawing shop clerks out of their stores and onto Market Street, picking up stragglers and passersby on the sidewalks as they went along, they obeyed Nutter’s only wish and made their point […]
KILLADELPHIA: Is The Police Department Cooking The Books On The City’s Annual Murder Rate?
[Photo via multi.lectical.net] GOP mayoral candidate Karen Brown made a startling accusation today on Radio Times, claiming the murder rate is in fact much higher than the figures cited by Mayor Nutter. Seizing on Nutter’s remarks during his inauguration that if he did not reduce the murder rate by at least 30% he should not be re-elected (in fact, he did call for a reduction of the murder rate by 30% to 50% in the next three to five years, but never said he shouldn’t be re-elected if he doesn’t) Brown claims that the Philadelphia Police Department has been using […]
SIDEWALKING: Semper Fi, Brother
Marine manning the picket line at #OccupyWallStreet by TIM SCHREIER SALON: The establishment press’s primary “problem” with the Occupy Wall Street protest is that those silly kids don’t have a concrete demand. Or they have too many demands. Or their demands aren’t realistic. This is silly. The movement’s “demand” is economic justice. Its goal is plainly to remind everyone that the bloated, obscenely profitable financial industry is sitting on vast piles of money while everyone else struggles, and to focus outrage about that situation where it belongs.[…] The solution, if I may take a page from the official Washington Grown-Ups’ […]
Win Tix To See Matthew Sweet Perform Girlfriend
Matthew Sweet’s guitar-pop masterpiece Girlfriend turns 20 this year. Good grief, where does the time go? Those who’ve lived through its glorious flowering in the early 90s can attest to the album’s deathless classic status, as for those who haven’t, if you like rock music, trust us, you already love this album, you just don’t know it yet. Sweet’s honeyed, golden-boy vocals and study-at-the-feet-of-the-masters songwriting is kicked into overdrive by the astonishing six-string fire power of Television’s Richard Lloyd and the dearly departed Robert Quine. Hail, hail rock n’ roll! They sure don’t make ’em like this anymore. To mark […]
SIDEWALKING: And So It Begins
#OccupyPhilly, Dilworth Plaza, 12:27 PM by JEFF DEENEY RELATED: “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” said Eleanor Walker, a 70-year-old retiree who worked in human resources for corporate America. “It seems like the American people have been sleeping. When this happened, I said, our time has come.” MORE RELATED: Mike Fox, 27, of Haddon Heights, who recently finished a seven-year hitch in the Army, explained the Guy Fawkes mask on the back of his head, saying it represented “Anonymous” – a name used by activists behind the recent uprising in Egypt. MORE PHAWKER: Dear Peter Mucha […]
DEENEY: Why K2
THE FIX: Over the past few years waves of drug-hysteria stories about new synthetic substances have flooded the media; headlines shouted that emerging drugs like the stimulant mephedrone were being sold legally, marketed as “bath salts” body products and wreaking havoc on the minds of drug abusers. Even as legislators scrambled to ban this demonized new test-tube high, habitual substance abusers in drug-soaked inner cities like Philly shrugged. Who needs bath salts when you can get whatever you want, whenever you want, at high potency and low cost on one of the city’s hundreds of drug corners? But one new […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
Stephen Malkmus, TLA 9:21 PM, last night by JONATHAN VALANIA BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Generation X has always seemed the embodiment of Groucho Marx’s dictum about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have you. That goes double for Stephen Malkmus, Gen X’s aging slacker princeling. As leader of Pavement, Malkmus spent the better part of the ’90s zigging whenever his fan base zagged, and the better part of the last decade cranking out the kind of wanky, Aspergerian solo records that scare off women and try men’s souls. While the pretty, wryly observed […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Ray LaMontagne’s Beard
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] Soulful, scruffy, silver-tongued singer-songwriter par excellence Brother Ray LaMontagne — think Nick Drake meets Joe Cocker — plays the Mann Music Center on Friday, thus bringing to a close another lovely summer concert season under the stars in Fairmount Park. And gone with it goes Alex Fine’s cool-as-shit line of commemorative baseball cards. Sigh. But fret not, dear reader, we have a pair of tickets to give away to the first person to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the correct answer to the following question: What is the title of the Ray LaMontagne tune nominated for […]
DEENEY: Crack Is In The House
THE FIX: On this particular Monday morning the voice on the other end of the phone identified herself as a high-ranking official at the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Why was she calling me, I asked? I’m just a rank-and-file, trench-level social worker. She had a last-minute addition to my caseload: a four-year-old child belonging to a mentally ill, addicted mother, living in a public housing unit that had been converted to a crackhouse. It was my job to go find him. Now, 911, high risk, no time to waste. I’ve certainly heard crazier war stories from longtime vets in the profession; […]
LOOPY FIASCO: Or Why This Popped! Music Festival Review Is So F*cking Late & My Boss Wants To Kill Me
BY PELLE GUNTHER Firstly I’d like to apologize for being a total fuck up. My tales of this past weekend’s misadventures should have made their way to the Phawker days ago, but you see me and my incompetent self found ourselves stranded in Philly for a few days after the festival in a mess of drunk college pricks, without wheels, cash or even a cell phone to contact the world, let alone a computer to record my thoughts on Popped, or even a moment of silence to collect them. The self-defeating decision-making really started about two years ago when I […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To The Felice Brothers Tonight
Impersonating The Band hasn’t been a decently-paying gig since Scorsese filmed The Last Waltz in 1976, but judging by the full-up crowd at the Trocadero Thursday night The Felice Brothers seem to be on their way. Actually, ‘impersonating’ sounds a little too dismissive and I like these guys, so let’s go with ‘evoking’ or ‘carrying on the old, weird Americana tradition’ of the Band instead. Besides, they have the pedigree (hail from upstate New York, sons of a carpenter) they’ve paid their dues (busked in the subways of New York; went acoustic at the Newport Folk Festival; woodshedd-ed at Levon […]