You know who I had forgotten about until just now? The White Stripes. Sure, there was the Raconteurs album, but there was a concerted effort on the part of Jack White to make sure that wasn't a WS side project. So really, after five or six years of an almost continuous stream of White Stripes news, rumours and general malarkey, things have been quite quiet in their hand-breakin', twin fakin', real marryin', star datin' world. So Jack and Meg have...
If you have ears, a beating heart and breathe air, then you probably have a soft spot for Nick Drake, and a desire to hear anything that this brilliant musician ever touched or recorded. For me, I would even take a rare answering machine recording of him if one was available on eBay. So the news that a new—huge—release of unheard Nick Drake material made a lot of people really excited. The most interesting part about Family Tree, to be...
We're pretty unapologetic around at GC about our love for M. Ward, and for good reason. Other people seem to like him too, which is how he gets to play shows (and record stuff, too!) with the impossibly cute Zooey Deschanel and play on Letterman with people like Andrew WK. Now, the arbiters of high taste have latched onto the man as well – for two nights in June, Ward will have the backing of the Boston Symphony Pops. Anyone...
Cautionary is a klaxon’s purpose. Neither rave nor new, the electromechanical alerts found on submarines and old automobiles are sounded to warn listeners of the vehicle’s arrival, departure or danger; and England’s “new-rave” all-stars—also running with the name Klaxons—are messengers of the future, predicating the next wave of musical adventures situated within modern-lit and rave-culture influences, adherents of the not-so-distant past, to ultimately set a trend for the near future. Myths of the...
Numbers played an integral part at last Monday’s Ratatat concert at the Henry Fonda theatre. One sole orange foam finger sporting the Ratatat insignia was used to full effect by Despot, a Queens-based rapper, who was able to get the restless opening droves of Ratatat fans on his side via his grimy break-neck beats. Built on a wall of sound, as extended intros and outros flooded out the high-end décor of the venue, which only then circulated through the ear...
For about 10 years, Mice Parade have been dipping their toes in the waters of experimental indie-electronic music, always coming out with something new and fresh, or this time, with the self-titled Mice Parade, something comforting. The brains behind the operation point to a New Yorker named Adam Pierce. He started off the band as solo project, releasing a single called “My Funny Friend Scott” in 1998, which eventually led him to the full-length debut entitled The True Meaning of...
One of the original ideas that got kicked around during the early days of Ground Control was that of a concert calendar; one that was customizable by region and was viewable in actual calendar format, as opposed to the unwieldy–yet still convenient–lists of shows like Pollstar. Here's the problem: we didn't really know how to implement it, and so it fell by the wayside in favor of things we could do with decent levels of kick-assery, like live coverage, streaming...
San Francisco has its share of crazy shows and exclusive one-off nights where some band has wandered into town and set-up shop down in someone's basement and rocked it all secret and exclusive style. People set up shows outside the above-ground train station and get unplugged and booted within seconds. That said, it's still not every day that you get the chance to see five Japanese girls get up onstage at a regular venue and play a mixture of Bow...
The curtain rose Friday night for the first of two sold-out shows at the Henry Fonda Music Box with TV on the Radio drumming on logs, drummers strumming and the sweetest rendition of “Tonight” sounding brilliantly across the hall. The scene epitomized the essence of the band remarkably. That is to say that TV on the Radio is one of the most soulful, unconventional bands to come along in a while. This was already apparent when I first encountered them...
As my buddy said in a reply to this news, “Now there’s a welcome piece of news that made my year. Now we can relive the summer of 92 with two new Danzig albums. Let’s find an outdoor weightroom we can heckle people from.” It’s true, those days included a lot of Danzig and working out for our football summer camp. So, if you’re at all like us, you will be happy to hear that on May 29th, evilive will...