“How do they see when there is no light?”
“They live by night, they live by night!”
“Where do they go, and when do they sleep?”
“They live by night, they live with me!”
I was super excited about seeing one of my musical heroes, Grant Hart, for the first time ever, on a cold night (in a cold city, in a cold cold cold cold world). It was maybe not everything that I dreamed of, but was totally, well, interesting. I’m really glad I saw him; I’ve been [...]
I hardly ever take advantage of the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, which offers free performances every day in a wide variety of art forms. On a whim, I went yesterday to check out Jayme Stone, a Canadian banjo player who explores worldwide folk traditions. It was good! Stone wasn’t a banjo virtuoso (not that I’m [...]
2010 was a great year for music — aren’t they all? I missed more great shows than I went to, but I still saw a lot of amazing performances. Looking back, it is hard to determine what my favorite show was, but I will have to say it was Unrest at their crazy triple-reunion show [...]
There’s been an influx of gypsy, Yiddish, and Slavic–influenced music in the indie-rock scene in recent years, but I haven’t paid super close attention to it. On the one hand, it sounds like my kinda thang: I love when cultures intermingle, and I know a fair amount about eastern Europe and its cultural traditions. On [...]
So it seems like Imperial China are still going strong, playing lots of shows around town, going on a few out-of-town jaunts, getting some nice publicity at the end of the year for their album Phosphenes (I reviewed it here). I think this band has a tough go of it. The kind of music they [...]
I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for the first time a couple years ago and it was a hell of a show. I have become a huge fan over the past 5 or 6 years; I find Cave to be perhaps the most interesting aging rocker in history. His past couple of Bad [...]
Around a decade ago I caught some sort of K Records-related traveling extravaganza at a warehouse in Shaw. Calvin Johnson did stand-up comedy (!?), my then-sort-of-friends Dead Meadow did an acoustic set, and this chick did a random performance under the moniker Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano. That was a [...]
The Corin Tucker Band was in interesting prospect! I have really missed Sleater-Kinney in recent years; no one has quite replaced their role in underground music. Sleater-Kinney were passionate and full of fire and conviction, righteous anger, and indignation. We have been living through awfully dark times and it seems like nobody is out there [...]
Two of my favorite albums of the past decade involve Mark Lanegan: his solo album Bubblegum and his first collaboration with Isobel Campbell, Ballad of the Broken Seas. I know his work with Campbell is supposed to be her showcase rather than his, but I am a much bigger fan of his grittier work and [...]
Way back when, I kinda liked Dan Snaith’s project Manitoba, but not enough to follow him when he had to change his name to Caribou. Yet apparently a lot of people did. They packed the Black Cat for abstract electronic quasi-rock. Sometimes these things seem weird to me. But then, Caribou turned out to be [...]
