The thing about noisy D.C. indie-poppers Black Tambourine is that—given that, you know, the band recorded very few songs around the early '90s and all of them are great—its fans will never be satisfied. The six previously unheard songs that the band released this January as part of a self-titled retrospective—four new recordings, two demos—grew its [...]
'Ello! The Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harmon Hall will host two high-profile British plays next season in what WaPo's Peter Marks describes as a coup for the organization. No longer, it seems, is the Kennedy Center the only D.C. destination for marquee productions from across the pond. The Great Game: Afghanistan opens Sept. 12 and Black [...]
Sean Peoples posted a huge update to the Sockets Records blog last night. Here's what the label has coming up:
A new HUME EP this summer, with a tour to follow.
A Laughing Man EP.
An Aaron Thompson LP, with lotsa guests.
An EP from N'Digo Rose, who plays keys in the Cornel West Theory.
A Cornel West Theory mixtape.
A Sean [...]
Good morning! It is, you know, that day! The one with the pranks! However, today's roundup is prank-free. Really, I promise. Promise promise.
In today's print City Paper, I write about the recent flaring-up of rumors concerning Drunkdriver and Pygmy Shrews drummer Jeremy Villalobos. In the last two weeks, allegations that he'd committed several acts of [...]
We'd have reviewed this record, but we really can't—seeing as, well, one of Black Tambourine's members works here. (In his last e-mail to me pitching record reviews, David Dunlap Jr. wrote, "I would love to do something on Black Tambourine, but am probably DQ'ed after sharing a cubicle with Brian Nelson for four straight years.") So [...]
The new chairman of the Kennedy Center, financier David M. Rubenstein, told the New York Times that he wants to attract "people who don’t have hair color like mine" (read: young people) to the institution. Also, Democrats and Republicans, preferably at the same time. More: WaPo.
The buzzy, skuzzy, poppy Dum Dum Girls' upcoming cassette-only compilation [...]
It's hard to release new Black Tambourine material matter-of-factly. People will notice—the band only released a handful of singles and songs during its brief existence around the early '90s; its YouTube presence is limited to a few fuzzy clips.
So it's strange that a new music video of "For Ex-Lovers Only" making the online rounds today [...]
Ask some fans of noisy indie pop, and they'll tell you the genre hit its apex with Black Tambourine. The D.C. band, one of Slumberland Records' early flagship acts, recorded only a handful of songs around the early '90s—all which, you'd think, were collected on the descriptively titled 1999 release Complete Recordings.
Not so. Slumberland will release [...]
Good morning, people! Lotsa death this week!
First: Howard Zinn, influential leftist historian, and Louis Auchincloss, literary chronicler of the Upper East Side elite, died. Yes, I almost forgot, too! Because J.D. Salinger, the highest common divisor of American letters, is dead. My colleague Ted Scheinman collected some of the Web's more interesting tributes. One that he mentioned [...]
Few independent record labels make it to 20 years, and even fewer can claim the influence of Slumberland. Founded in 1989 by members of Black Tambourine, Velocity Girl, Whorl, and Powderburns, the label blended noise rock and shoegaze with melodic, underground guitar pop, laying the brickwork for what's proved to be an enduring indie-pop aesthetic. Slumberland was [...]
