Of Note
I saw Shonen Knife sometime around ’94, and I remember this odd feeling that I was playing out a role that had been written for me by hipsters who didn’t really know what they were …
It was close to midnight, and there was an old guy out on the street scrubbing plastic restaurant floor mats. The restaurant was closed. I said hello, we made eye contact, and then he said …
They call themselves the Mashtis: Itai Faierman is back with a new band after a four-year hiatus. Before he took off, Faierman spent a lot of time on the local singer-songwriter stages, combining his intricate …
The Ditty Bops’ song “Walk or Ride” starts off sounding as if it’s going to be an environmentalist-lesbian-cycling anthem. That would make sense: Ditty Bops leaders Abby DeWald and Amanda Barrett are, after all, a …
My wife is a practical Midwesterner and doesn’t have a lot of patience for songs that go on for more than three minutes. If we’re playing a CD in the car and a guitar solo …
Sit down and pour yourself a big cup of melancholy, and while you’re at it, set some extra places at the table tonight for panic, desolation, and a dark and hellish nightmare or two. That …
When As Tall as Lions played the Casbah this summer, Dan Nigro told the audience that he’d been waiting 27 years (basically, his entire life) to rock the Casbah. “It was a joke, you know? …
When the Andy Warhol Museum decided recently to hire a band to write a soundtrack for Warhol’s famous silent-film screen tests, it couldn’t have picked a more appropriate act than Dean & Britta. Watching the …
The Rolling Stones, who have not recorded anything of consequence for 20 years, have become a road show with their best songs behind them. No matter how large an arena spectacle, musically the Stones are …
Miike Snow appeared earlier this year as a near-anonymous trio of Swedes with a name that looks like a typo and a logo that looks like a jackalope. But despite the humility, the three multi-instrumentalist …
Twenty-three years ago, the British music paper NME (New Musical Express) released C86 on cassette, featuring 22 songs by 22 new bands. Soon, music critics started using the term “C86” to describe other bands that …
What did the critics at Pitchfork.com hear when they vetted Why There Are Mountains, the debut album from New York’s Cymbals Eat Guitars? They heard the rumbling, screeching, and howling of an electric guitar (front …
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Esperanza Spalding says she got the notion to make music her life’s work at the age of four. This, following a television episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in which the …
A friend told me she likes Throw Me the Statue because they remind her of Guided by Voices. That’s kind of odd: TMTS is a one-man project partial to drum machines, synths, and hushed vocals; …