Soundboard Calendar
| Today 01.21.13 | Tuesday 01.22.13 | Wednesday 01.23.13 | Thursday 01.24.13 | Friday 01.25.13 | Saturday 01.26.13 | Sunday 01.27.13 |
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The music industry is notorious for chewing up artists and spitting them out—starting a band rates pretty low as a career decision. That’s why bands built on friendship, fun, and love of the craft often last the longest. »
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In the duo Cleared, multi-instrumentalist Michael Vallera launches surges of jagged guitar chords and looming electronic fog banks against Steven Hess’s unyielding drumbeats. In solo settings Vallera sticks to an electric guitar and pedals, but his music hardly sounds limited; without another player to establish a rhythm or set boundaries, he stirs up masses of sound that feel as big as weather systems. »
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As Cross Record, Chicagoan Emily Cross tiptoes along the line between experimental ambient drone and soft-spoken acoustic indie folk—assuming there’s a line there in the first place. Though the south Florida transplant has a delicate, soulful voice that most singer-songwriters would sell their Martin guitars for, her ambition makes her much more than just another ignorable cafe strummer: she often contorts and layers her singing to create a dark, tense atmosphere that’s more likely to elicit a chill down the spine than a gentle sway of the hips. »
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It’s no longer unusual for a classical group to have a name that doesn’t include a word like “quartet” or “ensemble,” or for it to focus on new compositions or on music that draws on pop, jazz, electronica, and the like. All of which means New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider isn’t an oddity these days—but it’s one of the best of this new generation. »
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Sera Cahoone named her recent third solo album, Deer Creek Canyon (Sub Pop), after a park near where she grew up in Colorado; in the mid-90s she moved to Seattle, where she still lives, and played drums in Carissa’s Wierd, Band of Horses, and other groups. Almost every song on Deer Creek Canyon expresses a longing for home, familiarity, and companionship, whether she’s literally yearning for a place (on the title track) or struggling with the pull of romantic nostalgia (on “Rumpshaker” she sings, “But now that I’m here I don’t know why I came at all”). »
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Queens rapper and former chef Action Bronson spent most of last year supporting Blue Chips, a Reebok-sponsored mixtape cut with Brooklyn producer Party Supplies. It was one of the most celebrated rap releases of 2012—the Reader’s Miles Raymer praised its boldly sloppy subversion of NYC hip-hop—and a wave of year-end best-of roundups that mentioned it began right around the same time Bronson released the Alchemist-produced mixtape Rare Chandeliers (Vice/Warner). »
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When Robert Fripp broke up King Crimson in 1974 (for neither the first nor the last time), he explained that he didn’t want to work in an unwieldy, dinosaur-dimensioned formation but rather operate as a “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent unit.” Fripp may not have foreseen what four decades would do to the price of gas (and thus the feasibility of touring in a group with a big pile of gear), but he looks like a soothsayer when you consider the current wave of performers who take the stage with just one instrument and some electronic augmentation. These Wonderful Evils is Zak Boerger, an artist from Bloomington, Illinois, who like Chris Forsyth and Steve Gunn plays solo guitar music informed by eclectic influences and a rock ’n’ roll mind-set. »
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If you’re a forlorn thirtysomething susceptible to nostalgia and still partial to early-aughts emocore—the kind that’s heavy on thick, twangy bass and doleful, out-of-key vocals with syllables drawn out like thiiiiiiiiisss!—the past five years have been pretty kind. Midwestern staples such as Small Brown Bike, Braid, and the Get Up Kids have re-formed and released new material, and just last year Kansas City’s Casket Lottery (who broke up in 2006) did the same, reintroducing their relatively proggy brand of emo with last fall’s Real Fear (No Sleep)—piano and second guitar now included. »
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According to a Village Voice profile by Michaelangelo Matos, San Francisco postrocker turned Brooklyn dance-music producer Daniel Martin-McCormick considers Malcolm X his primary fashion inspiration and says that he tries “to exclusively wear Bob Marley shirts”—in other words, he’s either a completely radical guy or the worst kind of obnoxious smirking ironist. But I don’t care which—Dream On, the 2012 album he released under the pseudonym Ital on incredible British label Planet Mu, is so good that I’d forgive behavior more egregious than fake Marley fandom. »
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Erin McKeown shows off the malleability of the songs on the new Manifestra (TVP) by including a bonus disc that acknowledges her coffeehouse roots with ten acoustic-guitar versions of the polished full-band tracks on the album proper. McKeown has always seemed to me like a pop polymath trapped in the body of a protest singer, but here she approaches politics with a heavy-handedness she’s previously kept in check. »
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Chicago Afrobeat Project—arguably the midwest’s best practitioners of the funky style pioneered more than four decades ago by Nigerian national hero Fela Kuti—adapt Afrobeat to a wide range of music on their new album, Nyash Up! (CAbP Music), including songs by local free-jazz combo the Vandermark 5, Brazilian pop thrush Ceu, and Led Zeppelin. In nearly every case the material has been so heavily remade that the only trace of the original is the occasional lyric or indelible lick—the bass line in Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” for instance, or the vocals of guest singer Ugochi on Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” CABP definitely have Fela’s sound down pat—they even fuse his “Just Like That” with Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” on the opening track—but their take on it sometimes feels self-conscious and bland. »
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