Psst! Hey, Bub. The Dead Milkmen are playing a ‘secret’ show at Johnny Brenda’s on October 25th, the day before their official reunion show for R5 Productions, under the name ‘Les Enfants Du Prague.’ Don’t tell nobody! THE DEAD MILKMEN: Punk Rock Girl If you don’t got Mojo Nixon, then your store could use some fixin’!
FILE UNDER X: UFOs Over Springsteen Rally
Filmed by somebody in the crowd at last Saturday’s Bruce Springsteen Rally For Change concert in the Ben Franklin Parkway. Our in-house paranormal analysts have reviewed this footage and concluded it can only be one of two things: NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings that might be a threat to NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings. Either that or it’s McCain, Snoopy and the Red Baron.
LET IT BLURT: Lester Bangs Speaks
ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: Back in the day, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches formed a terrible triumvirate of rowdy, hard-living rock scribblers — angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of rock — feared and loathed by the music industry’s power elite. They didn’t just write about rock ‘n’ roll; he lived it, drank it, smoked it, felt it up, snorted it down and puked it up all over the page the morning after. BOING BOING: So what an incredible thrill it was to come across a 90-minute interview with Lester […]
All Of This Happened While You Were Sleeping
READY FOR PRIME TIME: TV On The Radio, Electric Factory, Last Night [Photos by JONATHAN VALANIA] SET LIST Young Liars Wrong Way Dancing Choose Golden Age Wolf Halfway Home Province Dreams Blues SMO Satellite Love Dog Crying Method Starring VERDICT: With expectations high in the wake of the just-released and most-excellent Dear Science, TVOTR packed out the Factory Friday night with old-school admirers and newbie acolytes. Ninety minutes later, what was the takeway? Sad to say: Meh. Not sure if it was the muffled, monochromatic mix or the prospect that some bands simply should be heard (preferably in headphones) not […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Anthony Braxton
BY DAVE ALLEN Last night’s concert at Settlement Music School confirmed it: Anthony Braxton is from another planet. I’d known that he had written music intended to be performed at non-Earth locations and that one of his compositional heroes, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, claimed to have emanated from the star Sirius. But during a compressed set with his Falling River Quartet, it was clear thatBraxton is operating on another plane of existence. Good for us, the curious listeners; not so good for his fellow players, whom he frequently left in the dust. On three types of saxophones and the mammoth, […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
[Photo by LAURA BUCKMAN] BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Somewhere in the nether zone where the rip-and-burn ethos of the Digital Age bumps up against the you-break-it-you-bought-it copyright laws of the Analogue Age is where Girl Talk opens his laptop and throws a party. That may sound about as sexy as an algebra equation on paper, but as parties go, it’s a deathless, breathless unstoppable good time: smoke, confetti, toilet paper streamers, and, like, all your favorite songs — together at last! Unlike most, DJs, Girl Talk, aka acclaimed Pittsburgh-based mixologist Gregg Gillis, doesn’t cut and paste from obscure […]
TONIGHT: TV On The Radio
Now playing on Phawker Radio! (right after the new Girl Talk) TVOTR plays the Electric Factory tonight!
THE EARLY WORD: Rufus Is A Tit Man
Valentine’s Day Performance with Rufus Wainwright and Special Guest Martha Wainwright Added to Kimmel Center 2008-09 Season Tickets on Sale Monday, October 13, 2008 at 10am! Genre-bending vocalist Rufus Wainwright will make his Kimmel Center debut with special guest singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright for a Valentine’s Day performance in Verizon Hall on Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 8pm. The son of folk music icons Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Rufus has been performing since the age of 13, and has toured extensively both as a solo artist as well as alongside Tori Amos, Sting and Guster. Rufus Wainwright will showcase […]
TONITE: Walk Like A Man, Talk Like A Girl
[Photo by ANDREW STRASSER] BY DAVE ALLEN Talk about getting your peanut butter in my chocolate: Lil Mama rhyming about her lipgloss mashed-up with the hammering of Metallica‘s “One.” Youngbloodz declaring that he don’t give a fuck to the smooth organ strains of Procol Harum. The dance music of Girl Talk, AKA Gregg Gillis, is so loaded with these types of bizarre combinations that you could almost measure it in terms of WTFs instead of BPMs, but Gillis’ skills in keeping the grooves seamless behind the constantly-changing samples makes his latest, Feed the Animals, an ear-worming winner (now playing on […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Fliers warning that people with outstanding warrants or unpaid parking tickets could be arrested if they show up at the polls on election day appeared recently in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Zach Stalberg, the president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Committee of Seventy, suggests that a Republican Party supporter may have posted the fliers in an effort discourage voters. A native Philadelphian, Stalberg was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News for 20 years. In 2005, he became president of the Committee of Seventy, a group founded in 1904 with a mission to improve the Philadelphia region […]
Top Five Reasons You Shoulda Blown Off The Debate To See Nick Cave At The Electric Factory Last Night
1. Nick Cave is not dead yet. Without hanging too much on the whole “Lazarus” metaphor, Nick Cave does seem to be back to doing what he does best. The greasy factory as church and even greasier congregation groping through the darkness as they approach judgment? Yeah, still intact. (SEE “We Call Upon the Author”) Biblical parables that veer into porno and somehow emerge as romance? Yup. (SEE “Lie Down Here (and Be My Girl)”) Songs that start out delicately and comforting with the patient beauty of an emerging butterfly before shaking you awake with visions of baby-eating wolves? Hell […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] FRESH AIR Author and activist Antonia Juhasz argues that the oil industry’s grip on policy and government has never been stronger. What’s more, Juhasz says, the business and politics of oil’s production pose such grave implications on so many fronts — the environment, human rights, the economy, worker safety, public health — that the current state of petroleum-industry affairs is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Juhasz, a fellow at the petro-critic organization Oil Change International and at the Institute for Policy Studies, documents her concerns — and lays out proposed remedies — in her new book, The […]
HEAR YE: Bob Dylan Tell Tale Signs
DAN DELUCA: Bob Dylan’s new album isn’t exactly a new Bob Dylan album. Instead, Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006 (Columbia ***½), is one of those alternative-history compilations, like the Beatles’ Anthology series or Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks, that considers a major artist’s career from an off-center angle, using unreleased cuts and little-heard gems to take a fresh look at a musical titan who, in this case, has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Tell Tale (a.k.a. “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8”) is the most prominent of a clutch of new releases hitting stores today. It covers the startlingly […]