Photo by MATT SHAVER “Who’s playing in there tonight?” said a passerby outside of the Tower last night. “Hanson,” I said. “Hanson? You mean ‘mmmmmmbop’ Hanson?” “Yeah.” “They’re still around? Good for them.” I try to keep up, but things change so often, I inevitably lose track of bands, and I feel the worst about the 90s. “MmmBop” was a blip on everyones radar, but that jet blew past me and off to the horizon. Hanson, alongside acts like The Presidents of USA and Spin Doctors, went in to some vault in my brain that has only recently been opened […]

Photo by HENRY SAVAGE Last night, fans of hometown hero Ron Gallo gathered in the basement of the First Unitarian Church to welcome his return in glorified house show style. As Coltrane deep cuts played between sets of bluesy Laurel Canyon harmonies from two Nashville-based openers Twen and Ian Ferguson, locals exchanged beers, handshakes, and tales of the last time they saw Gallo play the church. Having found his music a few months ago through Instagram posts from one of his tour photographers, I let these exaggerated claims of Gallo’s “indescribable awesomeness” feed my anticipation. The band members emerged, each […]

Photo by MARK LIKOSKY With the perfect certainty of a heavy ocean wave crashing upon the shore, Low is a force of nature. That wave may start off small, might eat you up and crash you into the rocks or it may lift you higher into the suns rays. Although they still rock the slowcore vibe which they were only loosely associated with, Low now also has this sort of “I-don’t-know-but-whatever-it-is-I-like-it-core” vibe in that each album wiggles around different genres while still maintaining their strange and peaceful aesthetic. When they first started getting a bit more poppy I suppose I […]

PHOTO BY HENRY SAVAGE Last night at World Cafe Live, the age range of the audience was so diverse it was likely you saw your mom’s tennis partner Regina and the neighborhood pest Shane who just started high school. That’s the appeal of Darwin Deez, regardless of who you are, he’s still going to have you on your feet and bouncing to his indie pop hits. If you aren’t dancing as hard as he is, he’ll drop down into the crowd to show you how. Even his opener brought fire to the stage, Soren Bryce, a badass electronic pop musician […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Last night, the kitschy-cool underground of Philadelphia gathered at First Unitarian to worship at the altar of Shannon & The Clams, one of the only modern bands whose sound is a manifestation of a rock and roll that reaches from the Ronettes to The Clash, and everything that’s followed. The sold-out crowd was dappled with heads of hair as vibrantly colorful as the wigs in the video for “Backstreets” (see below) off their new LP, Onion. Crowned in shades of lavender and burnt orange and neon green, fans of the Oakland retro rockers dressed in loud […]

Photo by DAN LONG The warriors: Thurston Moore, James Sedwards, Deb Googe. Their weapons: identical Fender Electric XII 12-string guitars and a Squier Bass VI, respectively. But, there’s one more player: Steve Shelley sits at his throne behind the drum set, rhythmically guiding the total of thirty vibrating strings into a droning battle of angelic overtones. The battleground: RUBA Club on Green Street, right behind Silk City Diner, last night. The entire set was one continuous jam entitled “Alice Moki Jayne,” a piece Thurstone wrote, which was inspired by the works of Alice Coltrane, Moki Cherry, and Jayne Cortez. Conductor […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Halfway through a triumphant set at the Fillmore on Thursday night, Garbage singer and Scottish firebrand Shirley Manson stared out into a crowd and asked “Who would’ve pegged Garbage as a band that would’ve fucking survived the nineties?” Manson along with guitarists Steve Marker and Duke Erikson and bad-ass drummer/uber producer Butch Vig have not only survived but thrived over the course of 25 years since their debut. With Jane’s Addiction Eric Avery taking on bass duties, the band set out on tour this year to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of their second album Version 2.0, […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER When I was three years old, I tripped on the wooden floorboards of my family’s small home in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, my head landed on a nail that gashed my left eyebrow open. Far-removed from any town or decent phone service, my panicked parents rushed me to the closest hospital they could think of, praying their first-born daughter wouldn’t lose her eyesight from the accident. Nearly twenty years later, driving with my mother to that same house in the mountains, I heard Adrianne Lenker’s screaming voice in “Mythological Beauty” detail her own experience of toddler-age blood-gushing head […]

Photo by JOHN VETTESE Typically I make a point to miss the opener at shows, but I would’ve been sorry to miss Overcoats. The New York-based duo, Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell, emerged straight from the 70’s in flowy white blouses and corduroy blazers, their aesthetic reminiscent of Heart’s Anne and Nancy Wilson. Their music runs in the vein of indie electro pop, full of pulsing digital beats and synchronized harmonies. The set was composed of songs from their debut album Young, a work that may not be the most musically complex but is driven instead by an overarching sense […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER “Welcome to our 40th!” bellowed PiL frontman John Lydon (a.k.a. former Sex Pistol, Johnny Rotten) by way of a greeting to last night’s crowd at Union Transfer with his trademark sardonic smirk, that look of devilish joy he’s proudly worn throughout the span of his musical life. Currently on the North American leg of their The Public Image Is Rotten tour, and with a documentary of the same name to promote, Public Image Ltd. (Lydon, and current drummer Bruce Smith, guitarist Lu Edmonds, and bassist Scott Firth) is celebrating 40 years of Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols amalgam […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Never to be pigeonholed, Swedish genre-benders Little Dragon delivered a face-melting set of dancehall R&B synth-pop disco-tronica at Underground Arts on Friday. You wouldn’t have known it if your cell phone was vibrating that night, not through Frederik Wallin’s pants-rockin’ bass-guitar grooves, anchoring singer Yukimi Nagano’s smoky, sultry vocals. There was no stage-banter to speak of, not much acknowledgement of the proverbial “fourth wall.” Shrouded in mystery — or at least what looked like potentially really warm head-to-toe stage costumes — the singer managed to make sure she reached out to connect in her own way, […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER There’s a plotline to all the mayhem, if you’re interested, some backstory to the wild exploits of this virtual band, that serves to nominally explain why lovable scamps 2D, Murdoc, Russell and Noodle are always under attack by anachronistic seaplanes, what Noodle’s doing with that machine gun that’s as big as she is and why she’s a cyborg now, and why Bruce Willis is trying to kill them. But at their live shows, somewhere between the mesmerizing blazing lights and colors of Jamie Hewlett’s beautifully animated eye candy, Damon Albarn’s enchanting incantations and all of the […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER I will remain forever in awe of Liz Phair’s ability to seamlessly slip the word “fucked” into a dreamy, cloudy-brained pop anthem like “Why Can’t I?” My preoccupation with the song began at the age of ten. It was marked explicit in iTunes and therefore deemed too adult for the music library of my silver iPod Nano. I spent an embarrassing amount of time poring over the song, humming, singing, intently listening each time it came on the radio, searching for the goddamn expletive. The charm of “Why Can’t I?” persisted with the years to come. […]