This was not my first time at the dance. Ages ago, mere weeks into last August, I marveled at the Echo’s tidy ambience as a slew of strange bands paraded across the stage and Annie Clark stomped out a fiery lullaby of smashed guitars and freckles. Now, only a few yards beneath the Echo at it’s larger twin the Echoplex, that memory is quickly fading. The Echoplex appears much larger and more proprietary than its upstairs stage. The bar is...
Oxford-based indie-dance-rock band Foals have announced the release of their debut full-length, Antidotes, due out April 8 on the mother of all indie labels, Sub Pop. After meeting up in Oxford, the five gents crowded around 20-year-old Yannis Philippakis and forged on to make dance music for yuppies, or maybe even dance music for athletes? Yannis explains, “We wanted to make music that was very technical, that wasn’t just party music, but at the same time you could dance to...
In 1975 when Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was performed live, accusations of Peter Gabriel being "pretentious" were the buzz words among prog-rock’s self inflated elitists. I missed that tour—didn't discover Genesis until 1977, after the original band broke up, but I did not miss Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's performance of the "We Must Learn More" tour; or whatever the hell you want to call what happened at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I actually felt...
I've experienced a strange phenomenon at every single Mates of State show I've ever been to: I'm by far one of the oldest people in attendance. Seeing how I haven't been to a show by the duo in two years, I can only assume that this will be far worse once they start touring in support of Re-Arrange Us, their fifth album, which was announced today. The recording and release of Re-Arrange Us was scheduled around the birth of their...
There is no denying that Siouxsie Sioux is an icon. From her days as a Sex Pistols groupie during the birth of punk rock, to her rise as one of the leaders of the post punk/goth movement with both The Banshees and The Creatures, she has reinvented herself over and over, while at the same time keeping true to her beliefs, her attitude and most importantly, her music. Siouxsie has stood tall atop the rock that is the test of...
There’s no denying that Jeff Lynne is a genius. There is also no denying that he rocks the best afro/beard the world has ever seen despite the best efforts of Questlove, that guy from TV on the Radio and Bob Ross. And, when he isn’t out, accidentally starting one of the greatest super groups of all time (The Traveling Wilburys), Lynne runs a little outfit named the Electric Light Orchestra. Chances are if you’ve seen a modern movie rife with...
Throughout this decade, Boris have always been able to outdo themselves musically with each album. They shift, squirm and fight their way out of getting pigeonholed in any way. And just before you say they’re doom or sludge metal or psyche-rock or just plain experimental, they drop something entirely new. "We are always looking for exciting, stimulating and interesting music at the moment and expressing in that way,” the band states, “therefore our style is changing spontaneously and that change...
There haven’t been many times in human history that new ideas haven’t been met with resistance. Any philosophy student in any university in the world can (and will) tell you that Socrates was asked to drink hemlock by the governing bodies of the day because he had corrupted the young. A few centuries later, a bunch of mildly longhaired free thinkers took Bo Diddley’s heartbeat rhythm, built the groundwork for rock ‘n’ roll on top of it and were the...