Beach House, the Baltimore-based shoegaze duo comprised of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, is an unceasing storm of brilliance with an impressive catalogue of seven albums spanning 13 years. The just-released 7 is by far the dream pop duo’s most complicated and mature record yet. They play the Tower on Thursday and we have a pair of tix to give away to some lucky Phawker reader. All you have to do to qualify to win is follow us on Twitter and send us an email saying you have done so (or already follow us) to Phawker66@gmail.com along with your […]
MUST READ: Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel
EDITOR’S NOTE: **This was originally posted to Forbes on Sunday, Mar 11. Forbes took it down today. This is the explanation I received from the editor. Here is the original article in full: CHRIS LADD: Many Christian movements take the title “evangelical,” including many African-American denominations. However, evangelicalism today has been coopted as a preferred description for Christians who were looking to shed an older, largely discredited title: Fundamentalist. A quick glance at a map showing concentrations of adherents and weekly church attendance reveals the evangelical movement’s center of gravity in the Old South. And among those evangelical churches, […]
TONIGHT: Free Jazz Hands
Philly’s Mage Hand began as a three-piece instrumental video-game-inspired prog-rock outfit in 2014, with founding members, Sam Palmer (keys), Dallas Conrad (drums), and Mark Tocco (bass). Having recently gained a guitarist and a second keyboardist, they exist now as a five-piece, self-proclaimed “battle jazz” band. I came across them at a house venue in Bluebell called The Stoop where my friend’s jazz fusion band, Kingfisher, was the preceding act, and Dallas happened to join in on my footbag circle before the bands started. Little did I know that the sweaty, shirtless, denim-vest-wearing stranger was the drummer of one of […]
BEING THERE: Pixies + Weezer @ BB&T Pavilion
Photo by MATT SHAVER I have no control over the Spotify playlist when cruising the highways and byways with my wee men, and while I am afforded at least one or two selections over a 40-minute span, the majority of my time behind the wheel is scored by the likes of Drake, Post Malone and Logic. Yet the most inexplicable queue add of late was Toto’s “Africa,” which only after a cursory screen-face peek revealed itself to be a Weezer cover. From 2018. If you read the backstory on why THAT cover, it all but underlines the band’s enduring appeal. […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
THE OBSERVER: Journalists are natural egotists. Even so, we generally prefer not to be at the centre of the news we are reporting. Yet as George Orwell knew, there are times when the journalist cannot avoid being part of the story. Carole Cadwalladr, winner of this year’s Orwell prize for journalism, has made a virtue of this necessity. Not only has she broken some of the most important stories of the last two years, she has also involved her readers in her own voyage of discovery, taking us with her as she navigates the murky waters of the Brexit […]
BEING THERE: Beck @ Festival Pier
PHOTO BY JOSH PELTA-HELLER As a rule, I hate concerts with hand-clapping. The one and only exception to my rule is Beck last night at the Festival Pier on the final stop of Colors tour. Having long worshipped the 90’s experimental rock god from the first time my dad played “Loser” for me on a car radio back in 2008, finally seeing him live was surreal to say the least. As the band opened with an earth-shaking rendition of “Devils Haircut,” the stage lit up with a colorfully morphing visual display on the two-story back screen. The vibrant 90’s designs […]
LORD OF THE BROS: Talking Comedy, Tragedy, Entourage & Louis CK With Actor Jeremy Piven
via TWITTER BY JONATHAN VALANIA “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” arguably Raymond Carver’s most beloved and depressive short story, is about a broken down, bottomed-out alcoholic supervising a yard sale on his front lawn where he’s selling off the sad pieces of his shattered life, and it’s not really clear if he’s selling off his belongings to so he can start his life over or because he plans to end his life. Hence the tantalizing ambiguity of the title — Carver doesn’t tell you what we talk about when we talk about love, that’s for the […]
BEING THERE: Arcade Fire @ Festival Pier
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Under the ethereal light of a half moon, I kicked up sand with every step closer to the stage at Festival Pier. The six members of Arcade Fire wove a path through the crowd under glaring spotlight, mobbed on either side by ecstatic fans. There was a blip in the beginning of their set, as Win Butler paused the show to summon First Aid for a concertgoer, a typically conscientious and empathetic gesture. Recovering, the band launched into “No Cars Go,” off Neon Bible. A diverse range of instruments were used to create their dynamic, ever-evolving […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Dirty Projectors Lamp Lit Prose
Since their inception in 2002, Dirty Projectors have undergone a multi-stage evolution from charmingly freaky lo-fi balladry, to orchestral experiments, to rhythmically glitchy compositions of juxtaposed sounds, and beyond. The band has reached a new stage on their latest album, Lamp Lit Prose. Dirty Projectors’ fourth studio album, 2005’s The Getty Address marked the introduction of ideas most fundamental to their current sound, which features the glitchy rhythms, spooky vocal harmonies, and unconventional percussion found on most of their work thereafter, including Rise Above (2007), an album consisting of outlandish interpretations of Black Flag songs. A factor in the […]
EXCERPT: Anthony Bourdain’s Last Interview
ANTHONY BOURDAIN: If you wanna burn down Washington to the fucking ground, you know, I’m with ya. I’m just waiting for a mob to assemble. I don’t quite see that happening. And who will be leading this charge? Because if Susan Sarandon is anywhere among the joyful revelers, I’ve clearly chosen the wrong pony! POPULA: No, it’s not happening. But look what happened when Keith Ellison was supposed to lead the DNC. That was like, the most important thing to me that’s happened this entire time. He had the backing of Schumer. He had the real leftists and the […]
CINEMA: Free Tix To A Special VIP Advanced Screening Of Unfriended: The Dark Web Wednesday
Blumhouse Tilt is at it again slicing off another piece of high concept low-budget genre this time with the sequel to the mega-profitable found footage horror film Unfriended. Unfriended: Dark Web,which hits theaters next Friday, July 20th ups the ante of the found footage premise of the original with the events in this stand-alone tale of online horror transpiring in real time. The film centers on a millennial who happens upon a cache of hidden files on his new MacBook, luring him and his friends on a trip into the depths of the dark web. They soon discover someone has […]
BEING THERE: Quiet Slang @ Underground Arts
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER A couple years back, James Alex’s new pop punk project Beach Slang was catapulted into the national spotlight, and nobody was more surprised by the attention than him. During interviews conducted around around the time of their first tour (including one with Phawker), Alex would cite a personal benchmark for his songwriting to which he referred as “the campfire test.” “What I do is,” Alex explained, “I challenge myself with, can it hold up if it’s just me and my acoustic guitar?,” and reasoned, “if it can hold up in that simplest form, then there’s some […]
WORTH REPEATING: Being Michael Avenatti
NEW YORK TIMES: Neither Avenatti’s mother nor father graduated from college, and they expected their only son to support himself from an early age. (Avenatti has two half-siblings, from his mother’s first marriage.) In 1989, he worked part time for Representative Dick Gephardt, a Democrat, and enrolled in St. Louis University, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania as a political-science major. Photos from that time depict a scrawny kid; his hair is dark and full, his glare preternaturally confident. “I used to call him the little man with the brown briefcase,” Avenatti’s first wife, Christine Avenatti-Carlin, told me. […]