BY DIANCA POTTS mewithoutYou’s super sold out CD release show started off with Greensboro hip-hoppers Urban Sophisticates. Currently signed to Right Hook Records, the classy stylistics of MC Benton James rocked the Troc to the back beat of the act’s rock-funk jam band sound. A surprising opener for Tooth and Nail’s mwY, Urban Sophisticates’ squeaky clean but catchy “Head Nod Head Rock” got hands in the air and ample applause by the song and set’s end. Quickly thanking the crowd and the evening’s headliner, the southern sextet turned the stage over to New Jersey’s Danielson. Dressed alike in uniforms like […]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419), was a missionary and logician. Annie Clark (1982- ), the American singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist who goes by the name St. Vincent, brings a missionary zeal to her current status as indie’s ambassador of goodwill from The Other Side. Likewise, despite all its head-spinning detours and U-turns, her music follows the pristine logic of a flowchart. Such was the case Thursday night when St. Vincent stunned a near-capacity crowd in the sweaty basement of the First Unitarian Church with a flawless recreation of selections from Actor, her just-released and deservedly hyped sophomore collection […]

BY KYLEE MESSNER As if following the prime directive of the great philosopher known as Old Blue Eyes (“Let’s take it nice an easy”), Mike Kennedy lives his life “in simple intervals,” which is why he chose it as the title of his band Audible’s latest record. “Basically, it was a line in one of the songs on the record,” explains Kennedy. “In the last song on the record we all sing in harmony.” With Kristine Muller, Kennedy’s wife-and-bandmate, expecting twins due in September, the record’s title was, it seems, quite in tune with the the band’s offstage life, as […]

ST. VINCENT Actor (4AD) Texas native Annie Clark, AKA St. Vincent, has come a long way since her departure from The Polyphonic Spree, having won over critics’ hearts and minds at this year’s SXSW festival, and releasing Actor, her highly anticipated and justifiably hyped sophomore effort. Critics have described Actor as the captivating soundtrack to some long lost Disney film that never existed, and after a few listens I am inclined to agree. More accurately, I would argue that Actor‘s seamless wedding of tormented lyrics to sweeping symphonic arrangements is closer to the enchanted melancholia vibe of a Tim Burton […]

NEW YORKER: [Will] Oldham has been releasing records for fifteen years, though almost never under his own name. His first recordings were credited to Palace Brothers, a name inspired by John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”—in which the characters’ makeshift home is known as the Palace Flophouse—and by close-harmony duos such as the Louvin Brothers, who helped expand the scope of early country music, and the Everly Brothers, whose hits from half a century ago underscored the link between country music and early rock and roll. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an […]

At First Unitarian Thursday with Pattern Is Movement.