Compared to the utter preposterousness that was Lady Gaga at the VMAs, last night’s show in Richmond was surprisingly tame. Still, if you’ve got tickets for Gaga’s show tonight at DAR Constitution Hall, you’re in for a pretty bizarre spectacle. Lots of photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Read More “Photos: Lady Gaga @ Landmark Theater, Richmond” »

If having your first name added to the name of your band is a bellwether for burgeoning celebrity, then you could say 22-year-old Davy Knowles has arrived. A British blues guitarist with a soulful baritone, Knowles has sort of an Stevie Ray Vaughan-meets-Richie Havens thing going on. His band, Back Door Slam Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam, released an album earlier this summer called Coming Up For Air. Produced by Peter Frampton, the record is very much pop with a blues sensibility, rather than the other way around.

In many ways, Knowles & BDS sounds like the younger brother of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals; both jam-ish blues-pop bands with lead singers who have great pipes and love to show them off—the main difference being that Knowles plays guitar, and Potter plays keyboards your heartstrings.

Speaking of Knowles’s weapon-of-choice, the dude flat-out shreds. For guitar nerds, this will be well worth the drive to Alexandria.

DAVY KNOWLES & BACK DOOR SLAM, TONIGHT @ BIRCHMERE, 7:30 P.M. $20

Some 14 years after their first big hit, No Doubt is still a far bigger draw than I would have imagined, nearly selling out the 25,000-capacity Nissan Pavilion. After watching their stage show, that fact becomes a bit more comprehensible: these are incredibly professional entertainers with hit song after hit song after hit song to draw from. And they treat their fans well, particularly one whom Gwen Stefani pulled up onstage for a hug and a quick photo of the two of them with tens of thousands of cheering fans in the background.

Paramore, who in a lot of ways are the new generation’s version of No Doubt—complete with their own rabid and rapidly expanding fan base— were a fitting opener alongside Swedish new-wavers The Sounds.

Check out more photos after the jump or the full gallery at Flickr.

Read More “Photos: No Doubt @ Nissan Pavilion” »

Yeah, that’s right. Had enough of SXSW coverage and all that damn hipster music? Armed with photo pass and camera and ready and willing to destroy any last vestige of my music-snob credibility, I joined thousands of fans, parents and curious observers for the biggest concert in town last night, Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls at the Verizon Center.

Photos of the Pussycat Dolls are in this Flickr gallery; for contractual reasons I have to post the Britney Spears photos right here on the blog, so you’ll find a huge number of photos after the jump, as well as some brief thoughts on the little bit of the show that I saw.

Read More “Photos: Britney Spears @ the Verizon Center” »

“I’m like a sugar bomb,” Lenka Kripac sings in “Skipalong,” and that about sums it up.

The former vocalist/keyboardist for Australian post-rockers Decoder Ring played a decidedly un-post-rock set at DC9 last night. In sharp contrast to her old band’s material, Lenka’s solo writing is basically straight-up indie pop, and almost relentlessly upbeat—even the breakup song (”Knock Knock”) is bouncy. She’s the kind of artist many of the folks at BrightestYoungThings would totally lose their shit over, and even I—as a grumpy City Paper curmudgeon—found myself caught up in the feel-good vibes.

Read More “Photos: Lenka @ DC9″ »

If Breathe Carolina is any indication of the direction in which post-hardcore is headed, EATMEWHILEIMHOT! is either ahead of the curve or trying desperately to catch up (notice that EMWIH & BC share a thing for dirty-boy glamour shots).

EMWIH’s early releases suggest that the members of the band (one of whom is Nevershoutnever’s Christian/vegetarian Christoph(f?)er Drew) opted for sampling chunks of the styles that influenced them instead of coming up with a coherent sound of their own.

The only two tracks I’ve listened to more than once contain geeky screaming and deathcore growls, super-slow, doom-metal breakdowns, lots of palm-muted rhythm lines, sparse electronica beats, judicious use of double-bass, and saccharine pop-punk choruses. There’s even a pirate “Argh!” somewhere near the end of “Two Armed Man,” and a tribute to Leave it to Beaver The Andy Griffith Show in “The Point.” But neither combination amounts to much. If I want post-hardcore, I’m going to listen to Burden of a Day, Oceana, or Underoath, or five or six of the other bands that do the crowd proud (and if I want new post-hardcore, I’m going to listen to Hand to Hand–post forthcoming). There’s better pop, too, like The Academy Is… (see next week’s City Lights) and Emery. And it’s telling that the more-focused “The Point” is a better song.

Ultimately, the price of being artsy–if mindless eclecticism counts as art–totals up to a limited true-fanbase, a possible quick rise to indie fame, and ultimately, obsolescence. So long as they’re working off a gimic, EMWIH will never hear their songs on indie FM stations, and I doubt they’ll release anything  beyond an EP. In other words, if they last more than a season, it means that EATMEWHILEIMHOT! will have picked a genre and stuck with it.