Of Note
The Slackers from New York City have a San Diego connection: meet David Hillyard, the band’s sax player. Now 45, he was born here and raised in a neighborhood in the northern part of La …
“Hazy rabbits-foot jams” — what a strange band Octagrape is, and I mean that in a good way. Over the three years of this quartet’s life, fans and pop-music critics alike have put every possible …
The news comes before dawn about the passing of B.B. King, making it next to impossible to keep focused on the actual subject of this week’s column. An internet search turns up random scraps of …
In January, Brian Tristan announced that he would assume the identity of his alter ego, Kid Congo Powers, full-time, at least onstage. Not such a bad move — Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds’ …
Is jazz the new rock? Yes and no. Some of jazz culture will forever remain mired in the 1950s, which the industry will support by design not unlike radio’s ultracautious love for tried-and-true music like …
An aural collection of every kind of shoegaze/dream pop you’ve ever heard, but with a hard left turn. Vaadat Charigim is the name of a band from Tel-Aviv, a trio consisting of guitarist/vocalist Yuval Haring, …
OK Go is a band less famous for its music than its videos, some of which have gone viral on YouTube to the tune of 10 million hits, including one that netted the band a …
Enter Shikari brings the full menu to the stage: post hardcore, alt metal, metal core, electronica, trance, industrial, and that sound that is death to most subwoofers, dubstep. They’re from Hertfordshire, a city that is …
Music journos have called Current Swell Vancouver Island’s answer to surf rock. Originally a backyard party band from Canada, they gelled into something (give or take a few personnel changes) and then gained an audience …
To criticize the progressive whitening of the blues, a trend that may have gotten jump-started during the electrified 1970s, would be pointless. African-American origins notwithstanding, blues audiences have shifted away from those roots, as have …
The job of any Texas blues-rock guitarist is to rise above all other such Texas guitarists that came before him or her and, good lordy, that deck is stacked. The Lone Star State has given …
The two SoKos: first, there’s a dream-pop side where sensory input is reduced to a simple trickle of fragile chords and a voice that sounds as if filtered through layers of gauze, or, the darker …
Two saxophones and a drummer — that’s Moon Hooch from Brooklyn. Michael Wilbur, one of the sax players, calls the Reader from a tour stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re looking forward to getting out west,” he …
Credit to whoever at Fat Cat Records saw through the lo-fi veneer of Honeyblood’s self-made release and heard the songcrafting for what it was: money. Honeyblood wasn’t actually trying to be scuzzy. One mic and …
If you asked me to make a top ten list of my favorite bands of the year thus far, this San Francisco–based garage band would be somewhere near the top. Happy Fangs’ first full-length CD …
You remember your first high school crush, yes? Who doesn’t recall that queasy over-the-falls feeling that percolated in the back of your head like some form of madness? Well, as a band, that’s where Taking …