Dunno about you but we here at Phawker could watch Steve Coogan and Rob Brydal act like petulant man-babies as they road trip across Europe doing their Michael Caine-offs until the cows come home. If that sounds like a good way to wind up your Labor Day weekend, have we got a deal for you. All you have to do is follow us on Twitter and then drop us a line at FEED@PHAWKER.COM saying you just did so. Or if you already follow us on Twitter, drop us a line saying as much. Make sure you put the magic words […]
BEING THERE: Sleep @ Union Transfer
Photo by DAN LONG It was easy to fade into the ether last night. Between the langorous doom-riddled sludge of Windhand and the colossal cannabinoidal metallurgy of Sleep, one could get seriously lost in the shear density of each performance, not to mention all the sonic ooze lathering the venue much to the absolute delight of the sold out crowd at Union Transfer. Bodies were flung, necks were tested, weed was incinerated and any unplugged ears, I’m certain, were rendered inoperable within the first few minutes of Sleep’s set. Following a series of recorded NASA transmissions which aired as the […]
Miley Cyrus’ Homeless Dude VMA Switcheroo Was Bravest/Coolest Use Of Celebrity Power Since Marlon Brando Sent Sacheen Littlefeather To Decline His Oscar For The Godfather In Protest
WIKIPEDIA: Marlon Brando became involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the early 1970s. In 1973, he decided to make a statement about the Wounded Knee incident and contacted AIM about providing a person to accept the Oscar for him. Dennis Banks and Russell Means picked Sacheen Littlefeather. She represented Brando and his boycott of the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), as a way to protest the ongoing siege at Wounded Knee and Hollywood‘s and television‘s misrepresentation of American Indians. Brando had written a 15-page speech for Littlefeather to […]
SUPER BAD: Win Tix To Get On The Good Foot
There are two kinds of people in this world: the soulful and the soulless. If you are bothering to read this we’re gonna go out on a limb here and wager you fit into the former category. Which works out well because papa just so happens to have a brand new bag filled with free passes to see Get On Up, Taylor Hackford’s soul-powered, superbad, Mick Jagger-produced biopic of the Godfather of Soul himself, Mr. James Brown. See David Denby’s review below for the deets, but suffice it to say that if you like to have fun, you will LOVE […]
BEING THERE: XPoNential Festival 2014
Photos by PETE TROSHAK One of the must-see musical events of summer is radio station WXPN’s annual XPoNential Music Festival, which features alternating sets on two outdoor stages at Wiggins Park during the day and a main stage show at night at Susquehanna Bank Center adding up to 12 hours of non-stop music each day. This year’s edition carried on the tradition of an eclectic mix of music featuring less heralded but worthy acts and more famous acts like this year’s headliners Ryan Adams and Beck. Philly based Strand of Oaks set the bar high early on Saturday for the […]
BEING THERE: Nick Cave @ The Mann
Nick Cave, Mann Music Center, 9:01 pm Friday by DAN LONG DAN DELUCA: Way back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Australian punk-goth songwriter Cave was in the early stages of what has become a legendary career, I was a Nick Cave skeptic. Sure, I was attuned to the sheer force of the music he made with The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, with its combustive mixture of gospel, blues, and early rock and roll influences, and the way his sound was shot through with intermingling gangsta-outlaw and Biblical imagery. But it all seemed a too humorless and […]
BEING THERE: Ryan Adams @ XPoNential Fest
Ryan Adams, XPoNential Fest, 9:31 pm last night by PETE TROSHAK Tune in tomorrow for complete XPoNential Fest coverage.
Win Tix To See Nick Cave @ The Mann On Friday
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In the beginning, there was the Birthday Party. And it was good. Rock ‘n’ roll as sonic aneurysm: screeching, cataclysmic and cruel. The Birthday Party was scary. Not in the silly Count Chocula way of the Goths who would follow in its steps, but, like, Exorcist scary. Danger was the Birthday Party’s business, and in the early ‘80s, business was good. Nick Cave was the human cannonball at the microphone, the band would light the fuse and run for cover. When the audience demanded blood, Cave could open up and bleed with the best of them. […]
BEING THERE: Slasher Flicks @ Johnny Brenda’s
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Arriving at the spooky little dimly-lit venue that is Johnny Brenda’s last night, I definitely felt like I was in the right place to hear Avey Tare’s Slasher Flick’s play a set. I got there around the time doors opened, which is basically when the major dweebs with too much free time arrive for these affairs. It was pretty empty except for a few other people, so I had time to check the place out. The mini-skeletons hanging along the bar provoked the kleptomaniac in me, while the broken photo booth in the back left […]
Win Tix To See Ryan Adams @ XPoNential Fest
Artwork by ENCORE Ryan Adams is one of those love him or hate him artists. I go back and forth. Sure, he’s an inveterate attention whore, a piss-poor editor of his own creativity and a drama queen man-child too in love with his own legend. But when the planets do align, and The Fates allow it, he is also a top-shelf singer-songwriter in the grand tradition of the great denim bards of Laurel Canyon. His last album, 2011’s Ashes & Fire is one of those occasions (a new LP, 1984 drops in September). It is not, as the growing consensus […]
BEING THERE: Veruca Salt @ The TLA
Photo by PETE TROSHAK In the mid-1990s, Veruca Salt released two well-received albums of post-Breeders girlie grunge-pop before a 1998 cat fight between co-lead singers/guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post [pictured, above] caused Gordon to abandon ship and the original lineup to dissolve. Post recruited new members and carried on under the Veruca Salt banner, releasing a few albums that failed to capture original lineup’s magic while Gordon embarked on a solo career that included one successful album and undoubtedly the greatest N.W.A. cover ever. Ten plus years later, Post and Gordon reconnected via email and buried their hatchets, paving […]
Win Tix To See Beck @ The XPoNential Fest
PAPER MAGAZINE: We were shooting Beck [for the cover of our 1996 music issue] and he had been very picky. He wanted Ellen Von Unwerth to shoot it and his team was just very high maintenance about the whole experience. And at that time in our history we were very much not into having a celebrity make requests like that. We resented it. If someone even suggested a photographer who they wanted to shoot them, we were outraged. Now we realize that, of course, that’s totally normal and happens a lot. So we had the photographer Dah-Len shoot him, […]
EXCLUSIVE: Q&A With Neutral Milk’s Jeff Mangum
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like Pet Sounds or My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless or Love’s Forever Changes, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade. Or once a lifetime. In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to […]