The crowd was characterized by its collective hats. There was the straw cowboy, the porkpie, the fedora, the floppy knit in neutral colors that held volumes upon volumes of hair, the short-brimmed military and of course, the newsboy. The cross-section of headgear present to witness the cross-section of bands: opener Jonathan Wilson, a sort of J. Mascis-lite—younger, skinnier and only slightly grey in the hair department, but on pointe with the guitar acrobatics—headliner Vetiver—as quiet and unassuming folkies as their...
Especially in the last decade and a half, musicians on the East coast of Canada have been trying to shake the image that the rest of the world has of them. Not that it isn’t cultivated; if you believe the lyric sheets of the top or longest standing maritime bands, the band members perpetually do their lovers wrong or are wronged regularly by them, they’re usually sauced out of their minds or are gearing up for another epic bar mission...
What do you get when you mix members of The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, Generation X, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Reef? Everyone has a sound in their minds right now—no doubt about it—but, whatever you’re thinking, you’d be wrong. In point of fact that conglomeration is what makes up Carbon/Silicon and, from note one, track one of The Last Post, the band erupts with a stream of easy-to-listen-to but very-confrontational pop that is the aural equivalent of a candy apple:...
The final date of Kate Nash’s month-long U.S. ended at historic Fillmore in San Francisco and Ground Control was there to snap off a few shots to capture this spectacular evening. Beginning her tour in Atlanta on April 15, she zigzagged her way across our great country with stops in Boston, Chicago, Portland and even beat the heat out in Indio, CA, at Coachella. Nash is making her way back to Europe for some dates in Leeds beginning May 24,...
Ahhh the 80s…a simpler time when email, the Internet and Blackberrys were things we just saw in movies like Back to the Future and weren’t everyday necessities. This was also a time when music choices weren't as complicated—the choice was pretty much 80s pop or heavy metal. Those were my Jr. High and High School years when young impressionable minds tend to gravitate toward heavy guitar riffs, pounding drums, and lyrics about war, the occult and morbid scenes depicting a...
On the list of peculiar things to define in print, Punch Brothers’ new album cross-wires the typically upbeat nature of old-timey hill music with the shadows of Southern Gothic before placing the hybrid in a high-brow concert hall context complete with classically styled compositional forms. It’s like listening to tales of hellfire and damnation drenched in sunshine and played with the reserve of cultured men that prefer to wallow in the pig pen rather than roost in the hen house....
Seventeen years ago, a global trust of disaffected youth found sanctuary in the aggressive rock of the Seventies (all genres included—hard rock, punk, metal and more) and the sounds of the early Eighties underground along with hardcore. Those with instruments began to intermingle those sounds and came up with something all their own that someone (it has been credited to Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees) called ‘grunge.‘ Fifteen years or so after that explosion, the current batch of very ineffectual...
Side projects undertaken by the members of established bands have always been funny things that, like it as not, have always been pretty easy o qualify when one looks at the players involved. The Breeders, for example, started out as a side project that afforded Pixies bassist Kim Deal the opportunity to indulge in her love of catchy pop songs and The Beatles. It only grew and got built up when The Pixies fell apart. The same could be said...
Times have changed at Epitaph Records. In the last few years, the label has seen the departure of several large-draw bands (including Pennywise, Rancid and Dropkick Murphys among others) and in their place have arrived less than punk-inclined names like Lyrics Born, Sage Francis, Man Man and The Coup. Epitaph is expanding and growing out of its punk rock roots—that much is apparent—but there are some acts still hanging around that were once considered solid second-stringers that may now get...
When you're making a film whose premise seems strangely surreal and psychedelic (celebrity impersonators holed up in a mythical place), it seems only natural to have a soundtrack scored by a guy who has referred to himself as J. Spaceman in liner notes for quite some time now. Add to it the psychedelic twang and meandering of Sun City Girls and you have a record as surreal as the film it accompanies. But to be honest, it's essentially an instrumental...