This is coverage of Day 1 of the 2008 Outside Lands Festival. Click for coverage of Day 2 and Day 3 . There are some moments when I’m so overcome with love for my City by the Bay that I have to sort of pinch myself just to make sure it’s real. Friday night—as I stood less than a football field from Thom Yorke singing “Karma Police," the cool summer fog rolling in from the ocean and blanketing the park,...

Taking the combined pedigrees of Jim Guthrie and Nick Thorburn into account, it’s a pretty safe assumption that, walking in, listeners have an idea what they’re going to get from the duo’s joint side project. Guthrie was the ad hoc namesake for the now-defunct Three Gut Records (once home to a host of meek folk and rock acts – and The Constantines) and built his name on making a sort of folk rock comparable to an indie informed, Harvest Moon-era...

When Hawksley Workman released Between The Beautifuls earlier this year, it was to tremendous critical response and fans justifiably awestruck at the singer’s sudden turn. Where once the singer found new innovative and fantastic ways to intermingle spirits of romance both high and low brow with garish electronics and hooks that had a habit of catching you when you weren’t looking, Between The Beautifuls saw him spontaneously changing directions into distinctly and unmistakably classic rock-sounding provinces. Suddenly Bruce...

Basking in the summer sun, a crowd of beautiful young people gathered together with barbecue and plastic cups of beer on a recent Saturday to listen to the sun-drenched, island-flavored indie rock of Islands. Except we weren't on a tropical beach—we were in a parking lot on the east side of Manhattan, flanked by a highway and the not-particularly inviting waters of the East River. But then, Islands' songs are mostly about dying of thirst under a blistering sun, so...

How strange is the world that Amanda Palmer has sketched for herself. Since she first appeared with Dresden Dolls professing to perform a “Brechtian punk cabaret” – so named because the singer couldn’t bear the thought of letting others mistakenly call it something synonymous with ‘goth’ – Palmer (along with drummer Brian Viglione) has reveled in producing a series of three-penny psychodramas that, with each successive release, put more flesh on the grainy bones of a strange, sepia tone celluloid...

When Coldplay first appeared ten years ago sporting distinctly collegiate guitar tones and singing about the color yellow, every reasonable assumption was that Britain had won the global race to break a modestly intentioned, heart-on-its-sleeve (and hence non-threatening) indie band and negotiated a way to present the sound on the largest imaginable scale. They were huge from the word go, but amazingly they got even bigger; A Rush Of Blood To The Head did better than evade the sophomore slump,...

Anyone who assumed (and rightly so) that, after five albums (plus one more live offering) and thirteen years of pushing themselves beyond conventionally observed limits of human endurance (the road stories of band members continuing to play after sustaining serious injuries at shows are well-documented), Iowa’s leading musical export would either ease up or attempt a safer musical avenue would be dead wrong. If anything, All Hope Is Gone illustrates the exact opposite; for their sixth studio-recorded album, Slipknot has...

For the last twenty-nine years, Negativland has successfully weathered lawsuits, scrutiny both political and personal, hatred, envy and adulation as well as inciting anger, unease and revulsion in every corner of the musical landscape with which they’ve come into contact. That’s no small feat for any band, but what the group has achieved becomes totally unbelievable when you realize that they’ve done it without uttering a single original word; the audio has always been composed of a pastiche of samples...

Montreal’s own Land of Talk announced not too long ago that a new album was in the works and I’ve been counting down the days till the newest addition to the Saddle Creek roster was going to drop that bomb on the indie world. The release date for Some Are Lakes is October 7, 2008, and you can pre-order that bad boy here. And in true modern-day fashion, Land of Talk are giving people a sneak peak at the song...

Funny thing about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – the member that joined last has been singularly responsible for keeping the other three from going broke. Since the group’s hippy-dippy heyday in the early 70s, Neil Young has kept a constant release schedule and has been the one to – perhaps out of a sense of charity – keep reconvening the quartet as their stacks of medical bills grow ever taller and continually rehash the same well-worn standards for a...