All Of This Happened While You Were Sleeping

WENT TO PLACES UNKNOWN: Spoon, Starlight Ballroom, Last Night BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Most bands are lucky to live one nasty, brutish and short life — much of it spent travelling vast distances to play for minuscule audiences, waking up in the back of stinky rental vans and finding breakfast at the bottom of a Budweiser can — but like a cat, Spoon seems to have nine lives. Spoon keeps coming back from one curiosity-killing foray into the unknown after another — trusting a major label, aping the Pixies, dabbling in white funk, etc. Some religions call it […]

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We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] AMY SAYS: Patti Smith is 60 and graying, a widow, the mother of two grown children. Somewhere in the last few years, people began referring to her less as “punk priestess” and more as “punk matriarch.” Her new album, Twelve, is a genre- and generation-spanning collection of covers that has kinder critics saying she’s coming full circle now, which would almost make sense were there anything cyclical, round, or non-linear about Patti Smith. Her body is like an arrow always pointing forward, the direction all visionaries cast their eyes. She may not get there with us, […]

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LIVE REVIEW: TV ON THE RADIO, Troc, Last Night

EVA SAYS: Overall, the show was relatively mediocre. And this is coming from someone who’s a pretty big TV On The Radio fan. In general, I really dig the whole Fela Kuti + The Roots + The Killers thing they’ve got going on. To me, they’re the epitome of what integrated urban culture sounds like. It’s not white and it’s not black and it’s not rock and it’s not rap. And it’s not exactly electro or world music either, though it does combine all of those things. Early on, it seemed like they were off to a good start. Lead […]

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We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It

LONE STARS: Norah Jones & M. Ward, Tower Theater, Last Night BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Judging by Friday’s night’s performance at the Tower, every drop of the gallons of ink spilled extolling the virtues of Norah Jones is justified. She is a poised and classy young lady with a Natalie Portman-esque bearing, blessed with enormous talent and a voice that is wise and soulful beyond her relatively tender years. And it will be our pleasure to hear her grow into that voice in the coming years. However, a Grammy-winner like Jones doesn’t need the Inquirer’s megaphone to alert […]

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EARLY WORD: My Fleeting House

Tim Buckley was an experimental vocalist and performer who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, and avant-garde rock in a short career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. He often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent most exploited on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. He was the father of musician and singer Jeff Buckley, also known for his three-and-a-half octave voice, who died in 1997. Buckley released his debut album Tim Buckley on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. He went on to release Goodbye and […]

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LIVE ACTS: Mad Shit Going Down At The Mann, Yo

BY AMY Z. QUINN There are moments — say, on a swampy summer evening when Lucinda Williams’ between-song patter is accented by the rumble of August thunder, or when you’re 17 and dancing at an REM concert instead of at your Senior mixer — when the Mann Center for the Performing Arts is a magical place. And yeah, in recent years the quality of the acts booked at the Fairmount Park venue was spotty at best, but don’t blame that all on the Tweeter Center. Because fact is, no matter how good the performer, the biggest problem with the Mann […]

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