My last memory of JT’s Pub & Grill prior to Friday night was pissing off a large group of drunken Steelers fans during a playoff game by blaring the cheesiest country music imaginable from the jukebox. Vitriolic shouts and icy …

Los Angeles-based alt-rapper Busdriver commanded the Soda Bar’s minute stage like a chameleon, blending with shifting sounds and patterns. “I’m just here to hold your hand when you die,” he proclaimed over the jittery flute of “Imaginary Places,” as the …

Rhode Island’s Sage Francis emerged from the turn of the century indie rap boom and backpacker movement as the godfather of confessional hip-hop. Set against a genre historically predisposed toward image over reality, Sage favored a poetic delivery fraught with …

The seven-headed beast Doomtree roared through a sold-out Casbah and brought their nuanced, inspirational boom bap along for the ride. Through a setlist consisting largely of No Kings material and a canvas of war drums, P.O.S. and his Midwestern comrades …

Fifth Avenue sat quiet just prior to midnight, as the haunting wail of Kera & the Lesbians owned the little rectangle of a venue that is Tin Can Ale House. Hailing from Escondido, the band has built a solid local …

By the time Astronautalis finished a six-minute freestyle that weaved together a fable about Louisiana BBQ, an invincible dog, and harpoons, any residual doubters in the Casbah were definitively silenced. This Minneapolis-based wordsmith, consistently one of folk rap's finest showmen, …