Photo by Mary Lynn Dominguez Early Friday morning, I took the blow of a complicated, dramatic break-up. It was another one of those “It’s not you, it’s me,” “No, wait, it’s you, you are afraid of being alone,” “It’s just bad timing,” “I need space”— You know, a gross concoction of blame and excuses to address that it’s just not working out. Later that afternoon, half in preparation for the show and half as a remedy for being dumped, I put on Julia Holter’s 2015 full-length Have You In My Wilderness and took a walk around my neighborhood. Temperatures were […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Ty Segall @ The Troc
Ty Segall is a bad moon rising. Ty Segall smells like victory. Ty Segall is what happens when good people do bad angel dust. Ty Segall is the sound of one hand crapping. Ty Segall is what happened to the dude that sold you shitty brown weed in the boy’s room of the seventh grade of your mind. Ty Segall is what happens when you give Sam Kinison a tab of purple sunshine and a copy of The Slider instead of a bag of coke and Appetite For Destruction. Ty Segall is what would have happened if the Butthole […]
BEING THERE: Audio Social Dissent Tour @ JB’s
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ I arrived at Johnny Brenda’s to meet my blind date — the three-band triumvirate of Jack White’s ‘Third Man’ record label’s Audio Social Dissent Tour. I guess all I had to go on as far as looks and personality is that Jack White is all about and a promise of ‘revolutionary punk rock.’ ??It sort of made sense to me when the first band, Regression 696 took the stage. A dudely duo took the stage behind a guitar and a music stand fitted with a board of switches, and a harmonica. The harmonica was a […]
Win Tix To See Best Coast + Wavves @ E-Factory
There are two kinds of bands: the ones that write all kinds of songs, some great, some good, some not so much. Think the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac. And then there are the bands that write the same song over and over again, but we are willing to overlook that fact because it’s a great song. Think the Ramones or the Jesus and Mary Chain or Metallica. Best Coast, the blog-famous Cali fuzz-pop duo fronted by indie-rock It Girl Bethany Cosentino, fits into the latter category. I’m not the first one to point this out, which may […]
BEING THERE: Fetty Wap @ The Foundry
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ When I climbed into the Uber that would take me to the Fillmore to see Fetty Wap, I had two realistic expectations in mind: getting ‘too turnt,’ and as a result, risking ‘alcohol-exposed’ pregnancy as advised against by the CDC. Ouseman, the Uber driver, had been busy driving degenerates like myself to the sold-out Fillmore all night. He attempted to casually switch his preferred jazz station to a hip hop one that I guess seemed more appropriate for a young trap queen like he assumed I was. Meek Mill began to blare, nearly making us […]
CALLING ALL NERDS: Win Tix To Star Trek The Ultimate Voyage 50th Anniversary Concert @ Tower
The “Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage” concert, which features a live symphony orchestra performing Trek tunes — from Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager — beneath hi-def Trek clips projected on a 40 foot widescreeen, is currently in the midst of a 100-city tour that beams down to the Tower on Friday. And we have a coupla pair of tix to give to some lucky redshirts […]
THIS JUST IN: Wilco @ The Mann 6/4
Tickets go on sale Friday, February 12th at 10AM online via MannCenter.org, Ticketmaster.com, 800-745-3000, AEGLive.com, & the Mann Center Box Office. PREVIOUSLY: It has often been said that Wilco is the American Radiohead — an edgy, 21st-century rock band whose audience only seems to grow the more they challenge it. Less remarked on is the more obvious fact that they are also the new Grateful Dead — populist guarantors of the heartland verities of cosmic Americana. Like the Dead, the continuum of Wilco’s concertizing has come to matter far more than their individual albums. For the better part of […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To Low’s Sold Out Show @ JB’s
The sadcore avatars of Low are a proverbial riddle wrapped in enigmas: The infinite reverb, the psychotropic tremolos, the barbituated tempos, the endless Sphinx-like silences between the notes, the darkness at the edge of Duluth, the Mormonism, the Rihanna cover, the fact that the lead singer of Led Zeppelin is the president of their fan club, the 2005 breakdown in a remote cabin in the woods where singer-guitarist Alan Sparhawk’s became convinced he was the Antichrist and refused to open his eyes or speak for days, and the fact that after 22 years of soft parading they are more […]
RATTLE & HUM: Q&A w/ The Feelies’ Glenn Mercer
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Feelies are one of those inscrutable but beloved band’s bands whose influence far exceeds their royalty statements and, as a consequence, the period on the last sentence in their bio keeps turning into a comma. Borne of the suburban garages of North Haledon, New Jersey, they released Crazy Rhythms in 1980 to massive acclaim and minimal sales and then promptly split off into a myriad of minor side projects, only to resurface again in 1986 with the altogether wonderful The Good Earth, produced by Peter Buck, guitarist for REM, whose early sound is deeply indebted to […]
BEST OF: Our Favorite Albums Of 2015
In the immortal words of the Chairman Of The Board, it was a very good year. So was last year, and the one before that and the one before that and so on. Why? Mostly, we can thank the disruptive, game-eating power of the Internet. The best thing that ever happened to music was the web-abetted collapse of the music industry’s one-size-fit-most paradigm and the death of radio as the prime determinant of what people like. Now people find music everywhere, it literally rains out of everything with an electric pulse, which has triggered a radical re-calibration of the vectors […]
REM: Radio Free Europe (Live Letterman ’83)
October 6th, 1983. The national television of a no-name band out of Athens, GA. And then they followed it up with the gorgeous CCR-inflected “South Central Rain,” a song they hadn’t even recorded yet. Who even does that? You know, I’ve had to take a fair amount of shit over the years for unabashedly loving REM, still do. I just want you to know that it was all worth it. Every sling and arrow, every derisive sneer, every snarky aside, every thrown elbow from black-hearted moshpit bruisers — it was an honor and a privilege. And it still is. I […]
BEING THERE: The Arcs @ The Fillmore
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER When the opening act is a mariachi band, it makes it pretty hard to guess what to expect next. I never bothered to check to see who the opener was, so when four women graced the stage of The Fillmore at about 8:15 pm dressed in spangled vests and concho belts and carrying a trumpet, violin, guitarron and guitarra de golpe (this gringo had to look up those last two), I began to wonder whether I came to an Arcs concert or accidentally stumbled into the wrong venue and was about to watch the San Mateo […]
Win Tix To See The City And Colour @ The Tower
Of all the unapologetically stubble-faced folkies/flannel-clad lite rockists wearing thrift store fedoras at a jaunty angle to drop out of the Canadian indie firmament like October leaves, Dallas Green, who records under the moniker City And Colour, gets the essential ratios of prettiness to mopery and preciousness to true grit the rightest. “The Girl,” from 2008’s Bring Me Your Love is/was his Shins/”New Slang,” absent a poignant Zach Braff/Natalie Portman cinematic moment. Ever since the midnight bedroom folk ruminations of Bring Me Your Love, City And Colour records have ventured more and more into traditional electric rock arrangements. Compared […]