Of Note
Fountains of Wayne seems like a weird choice for an all-acoustic set at Anthology. The band’s songwriters, Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger, are best known for writing irresistible, catchy power pop with jokey, name-checking lyrics …
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have a sound on loan from the heart of the ’60s. It is a brassy inner-city soul/funk flavored by the Civil Rights movement and the church, a sound that was …
Beach House is the name of the band, but “Bleak House” is more like it. The duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally specializes in beautiful but slightly unsettling music built on slow drumbeats, droning …
Taken as a whole, the real-life history of the Meat Puppets reads like the first round of edits of a James Crumley crime novel. Edits, as in stuff that would have been rated too grisly …
Old punk rockers who are still willing and able: that list would include Mike Watt. But unless you were a fan of the Minutemen or fIREHOSE or ’80s Southern California punk revival in general, you’ve …
Political folk-punk band This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb has been around for more than ten years, but it feels weird to be writing about them in a big weekly newspaper. In an age of …
There’s a funk band playing just about every night in some packed club somewhere, and the best or most famous funk bands tour all the time. But funk bands typically don’t sell a lot of …
The Grapes of Wrath, you probably remember from high school, is John Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel of the working poor. The novel exposed some of the nightmares behind the California dream and helped win Steinbeck …
When I read Wayne “the Train” Hancock called himself “the stab wound in the fabric of country music,” I knew that I had to talk to him. What is the problem with country music? In …
Los Angeles five-piece Darker My Love takes their name from a song by the punk band TSOL, and one of their two vocalists used to be in the hardcore band the Nerve Agents, but that …
My dream list of bands to play at Barack Obama’s inauguration in January includes Bad Brains. Why not? They are controversial, they have a huge reputation, and Washington, D.C., is their hometown. They started there …