In 2007, for one brief moment, the sun came out on The Clientele. The moody London-based quartet's breakthrough–'05s Strange Geometry–framed suburban melancholy in surrealist lyrics and reverb-laden guitars. It was somber stuff. But by the time the band completed its next record, God Save the Clientele, it's outlook had improved. Interviewed back then, guitarist/songwriter Alasdair [...]
Psychedelic rock is kind of like pornography, you know what it is when you see it. The Beach Boy's sunshine-soaked pop and the 13th Floor Elevators grimy riffs don't have much in common, yet an iTunes genre-grid can't seem to tell them apart. But however you choose to define psychedelic music, the tag certainly [...]
Most bands break up for pretty silly reasons—money issues, personality conflicts, longstanding arguments about whether or not to play free-jazz.
North Carolina trio Fin Fang Foom, on the other hand, has encountered some very real and serious obstacles. The band's original drummer, Peter Enriquez, passed away in an automobile accident. In 2004 guitarist Michael Triplett spent [...]
When Britton Powell, of D.C. psych-rock band Hume, returned home earlier this summer after a sojourn in India, he wanted his band to come back with a punch. So he composed "Mirroring," a thirty-minute, two-movement, piece for seven musicians and made plans to drag it caravan-style up and down the East coast of the United [...]
So, Argentinian electro-folk-chanteuse (sorry, that's a bit of a mouthful) Juana Molina is, apparently, going to be performing at Iota tomorrow evening. That may only be news to me, though. I'll admit that I completely spaced on this one, otherwise I would have made a much bigger deal about it on the blog earlier in [...]
Earthless is about as close as stoner-rock gets to workout music. The procerus, the zygomaticus, and all of the other face-scrunching muscles take a real beating when subjected to the San Diego trio's unhinged psych-blooz-boogie-rock explorations. Earthless can do dynamics, shifting from hazy clouds of feedback to sludgy doom riffage, but they generally don't. Instead [...]
