After punk, the smart rockers graduate to alt-country. It’s a career path that’s worked wonders for Holly Golightly, former lead singer of ’90s faves Thee Headcoatees, an all-girl garage group associated with eccentric British punk-rock mastermind Billy Childish’s “Medway scene.”
These days, Holly rocks vintage dresses, strums a hollowbody and lives in a Georgia farmhouse with [...]
December 11, 2009 at 9:04 am | Share |
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It’s hard to talk about music and religious experiences without sounding grandiose. We think of religious themes as being epic and religious experiences as being life-changing. But if spirituality is about connecting with some kind of animating principal, about engaging matters of the soul, that can happen on a small scale, too.
The Mountain Goats make [...]
December 2, 2009 at 7:30 am | Share |
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In an expansive mood midway through a performance Wednesday at the Masonic Temple in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, singer and guitarist Alex Chilton opened his arms wide and stepped to the microphone to address an audience shouting requests.
“Speak your minds, as if it were a Tea Party,” he cracked.
It was far more congenial than all that, [...]
November 19, 2009 at 9:36 am | Share |
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It’s not every day that you walk into Brooklyn Academy of Music’s gorgeous Howard Gilman Opera House expecting to hear the chants and cheers of a ball game. But that’s precisely what happened. Twenty minutes before the start of ”The Long Count,” a multimedia collaboration by musicians Bryce Dessner and Aaron Dessner (of The National) and [...]
November 5, 2009 at 9:05 am | Share |
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Brought together by a mutual appreciation for the work of Jack Kerouac, Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard discovered a musical affinity as well on “One Fast Move or I’m Gone,” a soundtrack they recorded for a Kerouac documentary of the same name. (Farrar discusses the project here.)
Their rapport is no fluke, as the pair demonstrated [...]
October 29, 2009 at 12:09 pm | Share |
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Sometimes a hearty does of stoner rock just does a body good.
In this case, it was a few dozen bodies who turned up to see Dead Meadow perform Wednesday night at Daniel Street in Milford, Conn. The Los Angeles (by way of Washington D.C.) trio obliged with a set of sludgy, psychedelic tunes wreathed in [...]
September 17, 2009 at 11:30 am | Share |
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Until Michael Buble makes his Elvis tribute album, Imelda May will likely remain the contemporary singer with the best chance of selling rockabilly music to soccer moms.
That’s not a diss: May, a native Dubliner with a great voice and even greater look, doesn’t present herself as some kind of hardcore rock-a-betty genre artist. It’s a [...]
September 16, 2009 at 10:00 am | Share |
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If Bob Dylan can tour minor-league ballparks all summer long, why not Wilco? Evidently, the Chicago band sees it the same way, and they’ve gone all out on their mini-stadium mini-tour with a baseball-style program (including a set-list score card), baseball caps at the merch booth and by posting the starting lineup on the scoreboard [...]
July 12, 2009 at 8:00 am | Share |
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OK, so Listen, Dammit, really digs the Hold Steady. We’ll try to keep the gushing under control and not oversaturate with coverage, but the band’s show Tuesday night at the Bowery Ballroom is worth mentioning.
First, the set list included all of the group’s 2005 album “Separation Sunday,” which came as a pleasant surprise given the [...]
June 10, 2009 at 12:27 pm | Share |
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Not only does Art Brut sing a lot about the democracy and community of rock ‘n’ roll, the band actually seems to live it.
For example: Instead of waiting backstage for their turn to perform Tuesday at the Mercury Lounge in New York (part of a five-night stand), members of the band hung out in the [...]
June 3, 2009 at 11:00 am | Share |
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