In his cover story for this week's Music in Review issue, Aaron Leitko notes the shuttering of the DIY venue Kansas House, and laments that an era of punk and indie-rock houses located in Arlington has finally ended. He writes:
DIY record labels like Teenbeat, Dischord, and Simple Machines, as well as activist groups like Positive [...]
The Apes are dead; long live Midnight Kids.
Check out this clip—full of all the psychy power sludge you'd expect from the band's members—from the group's live debut at the Black Cat last month. (Hat tip: @allournoise.)
Ask veterans of Dischord Records, and they'll tell you that 1985 was their Summer of Love. It was the "Revolution Summer," when strands of D.C.'s punk scene cohered into the forward-thinking, inward-looking sound—epitomized by Embrace, Rites of Spring, and others—by which the label made its bones. A pedant might say it was the moment when [...]
D.C.'s Black Eyes was one of those bands where you ended up collecting every song. The quintet didn't record a lot of them, for one thing—fewer than 30 in the three years it existed. That, and the group's chaotic, genre-hopping, paranoid post-hardcore was—and remains—utterly singular.
You can get a small sense of how that sound emerged at [...]
Story/Stereo—a concert/reading series that pairs local musicians with local writers/poets—just announced two new events.
First, Asa Osborne—formerly of Baltimore gnostic/punk quartet Lungfish—will perform with his guitar/organ project, Zomes. Lisa Selin Davis will read. That's kind of a tough gig, though, considering the last person to put words in or around Osborne's music was Dan Higgs.
Then, in [...]
If a scene happened thirty years ago and no one paid attention, should anyone care now? Two new documentaries make the case by covering bands not regularly associated with the infancy of American punk. Let Them Know: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records is a fond reminiscence; You Weren’t There: A History of [...]
In which the author contemplates the Boss' misguided affinity for an obscure New York no-wave duo.
Louis P. Mazur's excellent Slate piece on Bruce Springsteen's 1975 album Born to Run hails the hit record as the fruit of one visionary's dogged persistence. Springsteen, laboring Lincoln-like through the 1970s, had twice failed to make good on [...]
On Daisy, Brand New is still providing soundtrack material for countless unwritten bildungsromans, the kind set in suburban high schools, dorm rooms, and first apartments, and which feature protagonists who didn't have it rough growing up, and don't have it all that rough now, but who, deep down, would rather feel pissed off for no [...]
Perhaps you've heard there's a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven't, well, there's a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking [...]
Imperial China's mathy post-punk probably won't be the next dispensable soundtrack to an iPod commerical, and the D.C. band knows it. The trio is playing a free set in the Apple Store at the Tysons Corner mall tonight at 6 p.m., and the performance apparently merits this disclaimer: "Yes, really."
OK, so Imperial China's jagged, discursive [...]
