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 [...]
This review involves a lot of name-dropping. So don't say you weren't warned.
And, really, how else to consider Free Energy? The Philadelphia-based blogosphere favorite doesn't strive for originality, nor even hipster cachet: You can hear Television or Big Star all you want in the quintet's peppy, big-guitar sound, but really, these guys are all about [...]
Pastiche can be a funny thing: When Paul Sprangers and Scott Wells played fuzzy, proggy slacker pop in the St. Paul, Minn., band Hockey Night, I figured that as long as Stephen Malkmus keeps pumping out decent-or-better albums every few years, my brain just doesn't have the RAM for a Pavement Lite.
If this is beginning [...]
"We're trying to have fun right now and not make it too serious," Travis "Cobruhhh" Jackson, the drummer of D.C.'s noisiest party punkers The Points said yesterday, discussing the pitfalls of long-distance rock 'n' roll — Jackson moved to Blacksburg, Va., not long ago, and his bandmate, guitarist and singer George "Geo" White, now lives [...]
To hear its members tell it, Girl Loves Distortion is a group obsessed with substance and sound. "I can't sing songs that are about nothing," Jenn Thomas, who sings and plays drums and keyboard, told me yesterday, a few minutes after my voice recorder had run out of memory. She had much to say about [...]
