Progressive rock has been a niche genre since it largely receded from public consciousness in the late 1970s. Like any niche, it has a small base of insanely dedicated fans, and Romantic Warriors, a documentary airing in the D.C. area several times over the next few days, is a paean to those devotees.
It's easy [...]
Doom metal—that slow, sludgy, Black Sabbath-influenced brand of extreme metal—is nothing new to the D.C. area. Two of the originators of the genre—Saint Vitus and Pentagram —hail from Maryland and Virginia, respectively. Scott “Wino” Weinrich, who joined Saint Vitus in 1986 and is responsible for other major stoner and doom metal icons like The Obsessed [...]
Tomorrow night, arguably the biggest, bestest Sonic Circuits festival yet ends with a bang at La Maison Française. This year's festival has seen a huge variety of local and (inter)national acts playing all around the D.C. area, drawing people from all over the country and even the world. Saturday's final show is a real [...]
Back in 2007, French ambient guitarist Richard Pinhas, accompanied by longtime collaborator Jerome Schmidt on electronics, played to a packed house at the Velvet Lounge. Tomorrow, Pinhas returns, this time at La Maison Française with another collaborator twiddling knobs (or staring at a laptop screen): Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow. This kicks [...]
The Muffins in Rockville in 1979
It’s a somewhat ludicrous thing to say about an event that spotlights so many alienating artists, but in its 10th year, the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music feels, well, kind of big.
This year there are veteran prog and avant-rock draws, like Magma and Univers Zero, and the noise and [...]
"Jazz Ruins Everything," read the sticker on bassist Devin Hoff's electric instrument, but if anything the Nels Cline Singers have gotten more jazzy, or at least less noisy, over the past couple of years. That didn't make last night's packed-house show (there may well have been more folks crammed into the Black Cat backstage than [...]
"Thanks again. We're gone."
Those are the last sounds that atmospheric metal band Isis left in their fans' ears as they exited the stage at the 9:30 Club last night. Having announced the end of the band in May, Isis are currently on a "farewell tour" with the Melvins, and while listening to Isis live is [...]
Last weekend, literally thousands of metalheads from around the world descended on Baltimore for the annual Maryland Deathfest, which just seems to keep getting bigger each year. For the 2010 version, there were two outdoor stages in addition to the main inside stage. While I was only able to make Friday of this year's three-day [...]
Six months had passed since Jucifer's last performance in the D.C. area, so it was time for another: last night's show at the Black Cat was the duo's second in the states since it wrapped up a lengthy European tour (the first being a brief set last Saturday at Maryland Deathfest). Drummer Edgar Livengood was [...]
Yesterday was the first night of Taylor Swift's sold-out two-night stand at the Verizon Center. Swift played all of her hits with some crowd-pleasing gimmicks thrown in—namely, playing a few songs in the middle of one of the lower-level concourses, surrounded by fans, then making her way down to the floor and playing to the [...]
