A song by Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra comes on like a thunderstorm. The skies darken, things creak in the stillness, someone remarks on the ominous mood and suddenly the world erupts in a calamity of lightning and upheaval. When you think the world is saturated with such unrest, it peters out and the [...]
The Kills at House of Blues January 26
The Kills’ sexed-up strut rock is the kind that sounds perfect throbbing from behind a motel room door, so it’s befitting that it’s how they got their start. Alison “VV” Mosshart was on tour with her band Discount when she heard James “Hotel” Hince practicing one floor up, and the spell was cast. They recorded [...]
Korpiklaani at the Hangar December 11
The “Louhen Yhdeksäs Polka” begins with an almost familiar (in these parts, anyway) acrobatic accordion line that quickly gets battered by thundering drum rolls and detonations from a hopelessly distorted guitar. Yet, the accordion persists, like a minion of Thor galloping through the mists, war-hammer aloft. Someone bellows “HEY” from a tortured larynx and the [...]
Sondre Lerche at One Eyed Jacks November 13
We all, presumably, like songs. We like there to be dedicated, sensitive souls to write them and then to sing them, yet, there is something about the term “singer/songwriter” that sets the most open-hearted of us on edge. Maybe it’s how a singer/songwriter lays bare the process of writing and you sometimes feel you are [...]
Wye Oak at Tipitina’s September 16
Wye Oak, the Baltimore indie rock duo named for a 460-year old tree in their home state of Maryland, give off an appropriate balance of rooted strength and breezy pliability. They began as stylistic seedlings from a lineage of other bands, the product of, say, the Police’s Ghost in the Machine passed down through Yo [...]
Gillian Welch at Tipitina’s, August 11
Gillian Welch is the truest kind of cool, the kind that lingers in the background letting the hotshots and attention hogs perform their circus acts and press junkets and media campaigns and when their dizzying dust settles, she steps back up to the mic and shows everybody how it’s done. Her release schedule is a [...]
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the Parish at House of Blues July 27
We may be at the point where we can stop referring to Jason Isbell as a former member of Drive-By Truckers. Here We Rest, his third studio album as a solo artist, establishes Isbell as an artist and bandleader with his own nuanced artistic vision. The album takes its name from his home state of [...]
Guitar Wolf at Siberia, June 6
The only time I thought I was in the presence of superheroes was in the late ’90s at a Guitar Wolf show. The trio appeared suddenly on stage with a thunderclap coming from Drum Wolf on the risers. The late Bass Wolf stood stage left, sneering over a low, diesel-powered throb generated by his instrument [...]
Junip at Republic, May 12
“Folktronica” sounds like the worst idea on paper and yet is one of the best in reality. It is a bending of the infinite entrainment engine of electronic music toward the more sylvan, contemplative end of things, like trip-hop without being so self-consciously noir. Gothenburg, Sweden’s José González (born in Argentina, if you were curious) [...]
Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour
Under the ragged flag of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, some of the most enduring and endearing music of the 1990s was crafted by Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples in Stereo, Of Montreal, and countless other loosely defined projects born in a nebulous cloud of creativity and friendship that started in Ruston, Louisiana, then took [...]
