The sun shone bright Saturday at this year's Virgin FreeFest at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and while the grounds were a bit muddier than last year, at least the Dance Forest wasn't as dusty. It was the first nice afternoon in weeks—as well as the day before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the start of [...]
Marginal Man, one of the early bands on Dischord Records, played a one-off reunion show to a packed Black Cat on Saturday night. "When [Government Issue] did their reunion show back in December, [Marginal Man drummer] Mike Manos and I sat in on a couple of Marginal Man songs with Set to Explode, who opened [...]
The youthful exuberance and the huge guitar sound of Surfer Blood took over the main floor of the Rock & Roll Hotel last night. Lead singer John Paul Pitts did all he could to ensure there was no boundary between band and audience on what was his 24th birthday. He left the stage more than [...]
Last night, art-scene doyenne Philippa Hughes had some friends over to discuss the art on her walls, but the real attraction was the art living in her apartment: Since Sunday, Pittsburgh's Agnes Bolt has been staying in a plastic bubble inside Hughes' home. Check out our slideshow of last night's surreal interaction between art, artist, collector, [...]
Alejandro Escovedo is one of those artists who has lived three or four lives in the space of one. He's seen what most have only read about in books, and thankfully, puts these experiences into his songs for us to hear. Escovedo brought his genre-spanning catalog to the 9:30 Club stage on Sunday with his [...]
It's easy to love The Black Angels. At the 9:30 Club last night, the band offered a wonderful aural mixing bowl of my favorite musical eras: huge pounding drums à la Maureen Tucker, big Epiphone guitars à la Johnny Cash, hooks straight out of late-'80s Madchester. The result was a gritty and sensual sound that, when paired with the [...]
D.C. was well-represented this year at South by Southwest, with a ton of local bands present at showcases like DC Does TX and others. Amid the massive festival's insanity, I caught a sampling of D.C. talent, from These United States and Wild Flag (featuring Mary Timony) to Ted Leo (hey, he lived here for a while) and Bad Brains. Shooting the [...]
If they are to be believed, the Canadian duo Nicholas and Sheila Pye have packed a ton of interrelated themes into their new six-image series at Curator’s Office—“the death of a relationship, vulnerability, denial, acceptance and release, with an ambiguous undercurrent of hopeful transformation and resurrection.” Maybe, maybe not, but the large color photographs mounted [...]
When you think of photographers who document their families, Sally Mann immediately leaps to mind. Wisely, “Close to Home” chooses to spotlight a half-dozen other photographers, most of whom are less widely known. Virginia Beahan’s photographs of her elderly mother are grippingly intense, several of them with her eyes closed seemingly almost to the point [...]
The three artists currently showing at the Studio Gallery all use photography to one degree or another, but their finished works couldn’t be more different from each other. Iwan Bagus’s work is intensely personal, reflecting his experience as an immigrant from Indonesia—self-portraits in which he dresses as figures in Indonesian proverbs; an image of him [...]
