Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Last weekend, Panda Bear (a.k.a. Noah Lennox) navigated his sonic spaceship through Philly and Brooklyn as a part of his North American tour to drum up support for his forthcoming album with Domino Records. Tentatively titled Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, it does not yet have a release date. His two previous mystic dream-pop masterpieces, Person Pitch and Tomboy, set the bar for his new material at an all-time high, but his performances last weekend completely surpassed anything we could have expected, as shows at both Union Transfer in Philadelphia and at Warsaw in […]

Photos by PETE TROSHAK WXPN hosted the 14th annual Non-Commvention at World Cafe Live last week. It’s sort of a semi-private SXSW for non-commercial radio programmers. Besides panels, networking stuff and lots of liquid lunches, the convention also features a lot of short sets by both veteran artists and newbies trying to get noticed. The Both (Aimee Mann and Ted Leo) cracked jokes while delivering a lunchtime set of songs from their impressive first album as a duo, including “Milwaukee” for which the group filmed a video for in Philadelphia. Hamilton Leithauser (formerly of The Walkmen) played an rollicking set […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Michael Gira is rock n’ roll’s last great tyrant, and his band Swans is the last outpost of rock n’ roll Stalinism. Many former members have been exiled to the vast Arctic wastes of the Gulags for the sins of disobedience, insubordination or just missing one of the many, many cues he dispenses onstage with a wink of the eye, a nod of the head or a shrug of the shoulders (take it to the bridge, repeat this chorus, go left at the next light, etc.). In fairness, some great literature came out of those Siberian […]

Photo by DEREK BRAD Controversial ruby-tressed ingénue Lana Del Rey captivated a sold-out crowd at the Skyline Stage at the Mann Music center last night with a mesmerizing 14-song set of her darkly shimmering retro-pop. Del Rey is about to drop her much anticipated album Ultraviolence, which was produced by Black Keys singer Dan Auerbach and cut live in the studio with a Del Rey fronting a seven piece band. Last night, with her big fluttering eye lashes, bee-stung lips, and prevailing air of smoldering carnality, Del Rey looked like a 1940’s pin-up dream girl that just stepped off the […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Ever since he was young Against Me! singer Tom Gabel had a secret: he suffered from gender dysphoria, meaning that while he was outwardly male, he self-identified as female (for more on this see here.) Gabel suffered through 15 years of living a dual life in Against Me!. By day he was a standard-bearer of punk cred in a macho and insular hardcore scene, performing upwards of 200 shows a year. By night, after the show back at the hotel room, lonely but free at last, he would cross dress. In 2012 Gabel made the courageous […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK> On Saturday, Chvrches and Phantogram rocked a gigantic sun-drenched Piazza crowd that included a tsunami-like wave of crowd surfers, a wedding party and two-time Olympic gold medal winning snowboarder Shaun White. The crowd surfers landed safely, the wedding party rocked out on one side of the stage and White was there to catch some good music and to see his his girlfriend, Phantogram singer Sarah Barthel. Those that couldn’t fit in the square took in the show from adjacent building roofs or apartment balconies. Scotland’s Chvrches took the stage first, kicking off their set of sweet-sounding-but-venomous […]

Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA The really cool kids found out about Slint back in 1989. I found out about them in 1993 (hey, I was stationed at the Antarctic weather station of my own lameness at the time, and the record store there refused to carry Touch & Go shit, OK?!?). In all seriousness, Slint did not make it easy for uncool kids like me. They were always an enigma wrapped in a riddle. They were named after the one dude’s pet fish — Slint isn’t even a real word. They hated every picture ever taken of them and let […]

Photo NOAH SILVESTRY It’s still hard out there for a pimp, and these days everybody’s a pimpin’ somethin’. (That’s right, I’m droppin’ my ‘g’s like Obama at the NAACP. Peace out. [I’m bringing it back, OK?]) These are especially hard days for Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. Dissed routinely by ex-BF/collaborator Diplo, litigiously uncoupled from her billionaire baby-daddy Benjamin Bronfman, publicly scourged by Lynn Hirschberg in a New York Times Sunday Magazine takedown for ordering truffle-flavored French fries while talking radical chic, and sued by the NFL for a cool $16.6 million for flipping America the bird at half time […]

Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ The unfinished basement of a venue that is Underground Arts is the perfect venue to see psych-pop prankster Mac DeMarco, an unfinished basement of a man. Friday night, I found myself packed into a sold-out UA crowd of towering 6ft.-something fan boys and drunken kissy-faced couples. Both seem to be his core demographic. Not that I was really surprised given that DeMarco’s songs are almost entirely about life as a grizzly dude, or about loving his sweetie. Sometimes they are about both at the same time. Looking unkempt as ever with a mane of scraggly, […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Gary Numan will always be best known for his 1979 hit “Cars,” but his blazing, 19-song set of electro-rock heaviosity at the Trocadero on Sunday night made it abundantly clear that he is not living in the past. Last year, Numan released Splinter, his 20th album and one of his best-received to date, and he is currently touring support of it following a buzz-generating performance at the SXSW 2014. The irony of a man best-known for pioneering electronic music strapping on a Les Paul — in a hail of blinding strobes and industrial bleeps and blips […]

Photo by ERIC ASHLEIGH I’ve always been intrigued by making it out for home town performances, though they tend to be overhyped or more often, the band shows up exhausted – playing one-off hits for some family and friends after a long tour – mustering whatever they’ve got left to give and not much more. At last night’s gathering, War on Drugs was doing the inverse, celebrating not only the release of their new record, Lost in the Dream, but also launching the tour itself at a sold out home town venue. The crowd was all winter beards and high […]

Photo by ERIC ASHLEIGH BY JONATHAN VALANIA The jagged through-line of agreed-upon rock n’ roll history is marked by epic strategic blunders and stylistic reboot fails that will live on in infamy. The Grateful Dead going disco, Jefferson Airplane becoming Jefferson Starship, REM attempting rap (nothing personal KRS-One, it wasn’t you it was them), the Rolling Stones hiring the Hell’s Angels to keep the peace at Altamont, to name but a few. Add to the list the Arcade Fire getting ‘funk to funky.’ Or trying to, anyway. There seems to be two schools of thought on Reflektor. A) It’s their […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Broken Bells — the collaborative side-project of Shins main man James Mercer and producer/DJ Brian Burton, AKA Danger Mouse — thrilled an overflowing standing room only crowd at the Trocadero last night with an 18-song set of their indie-psych-electronica hybrid. Mercer and Burton arrived on stage dressed in dark business suits and took up positions behind two white Star Trek-like pulpits, embedded with all manner of vintage synths and assorted retro-futuristic keyboard gadgetry, situated on opposite sides of the stage. Behind them were two risers with a drummer on one and a guitarist on the other. […]