Posts by Bryan Rodgers

Take one part brooding electro pop, a dash of self-absorbed emo, a couple tokes of hip-hop, mix with a cache of catchy tunes, and you’ve got a recipe for The Neighbourhood’s squeal-inducing sound. The front row at their recent Raleigh, NC tour stop was teeming with fawning teens and 20-somethings who crowded down front to […]

Sunday at Bonnaroo can be a beast. The schedule is frequently crammed with conflicts, yet the human body may not want to traverse the breadth of the farm another dozen times after doing so for three days. Yet it is the last day, so there’s a desire to do as much as possible before the […]

Saturday at Bonnaroo 2014 finally felt like Bonnaroo, weather-wise. The persistent clouds cleared and allowed the sun to properly bake the farm and its inhabitants. There’s something extra visceral about tens of thousands of people engaging the elements in the name of music, and there was a wide variety of both to experience on this […]

After an average Thursday warmup, Bonnaroo attendees were treated to a veritable smorgasbord of daytime, evening, and late-night options on Friday. The schedule was at its most diverse, making for a marathon day of music. Damp but blissfully cool weather and generally good spirits among the fresh-faced crowd certainly helped the enjoyment factor, and even […]

Thursday at Bonnaroo usually means fast and furious sets from some of the younger and rising bands on the bill, and there was a deluge of intriguing music to experience on a moist evening in Manchester, TN. The festival’s first stanza included an especially fine lineup at That Tent, kicking off with an eclectic set […]

Widespread Panic’s Raleigh shows have become as reliable as the spectacular sunsets at Red Hat Amphitheater. The veteran band’s concerts in the Oak City are always an enjoyable escape, year after year, and this steamy Thursday night show was no different. In this case, the instrumental explorations were plentiful and the setlist was particularly remarkable, […]

[rating=8.00] For their eighth studio release, Umphrey’s McGee set out to make a rock and roll album. Similar Skin sounds huge and clean and finds the band locked into some of their heavier material. It’s the most intense album they’ve released yet, the result of a more focused approach.  Umphrey’s has never fallen into the […]

For the first time ever, Bonnaroo will feature three scheduled SuperJams. After midnight on Friday June 13 at That Tent, Derek Trucks will lead a jam that includes Chaka Khan, Taj Mahal, Eric Krasno, James Gadson, David Hidalgo and Adam Deitch with special guests Andrew Bird, Susan Tedeschi, Ben Folds and more. At the same […]

As the second set of Umphrey’s McGee’s Wednesday night Winston-Salem show came to a close, it appeared that Brendan Bayliss tossed his copy of the night’s set list into the audience. It might have been with a bit of disdain, as the band had just missed a few key turns on the way to what […]

[rating=7.00] With Band of Outsiders, Mike Dillon made an album in a manner most befitting his maniacal quartet: all four members in one room, playing live, with a straightforward production approach. It’s hard to imagine that their barely contained maelstrom of funk, punk, jazz, and high-minded composition could have been captured any other way. To […]

[rating=7.00] The first release from Les Claypool’s Duo De Twang, Four Foot Shack, sounds like it was recorded in the titular setting, perhaps situated far from civilization. It’s a no-frills album featuring Claypool on bass and vocals with longtime pal Bryan Kehoe handling guitar duties. Together, they weirdly work through 15 tracks of selected Claypool […]

Perhaps no yearly event has the explosive potential for collaboration and unforgettable music of Warren Haynes’ annual Christmas Jam in Asheville, and for the 25th iteration of the event, Haynes and company maxed out the lineup and expanded to two grueling nights of music. The result was nearly 20 hours of watching music and wondering […]

Mike Doughty Used to be in Soul Coughing. That’s not just a statement – it was how his most recent run of shows was billed. For the first time in over a decade, the enigmatic songwriter fully embraced the surrealist intensity of his old band’s material, which he has completely reclaimed as his own. Doughty […]

Jeremy Garrett, fiddler for The Infamous Stringdusters and board member of the International Bluegrass Music Association, told the board that they needed to create a “bluegrass frenzy” in Raleigh for their annual event’s first year in North Carolina. Garrett and the rest of the IBMA must have been giddy with the results of their work, […]

[rating=7.00] Mike Doughty’s latest release, the unwieldy title of which will be abbreviated here as Circles, is much more than a re-hash of Soul Coughing tunes. This is a redemptive, personal album and there’s a lengthy and often unnerving back story to how Doughty arrived at this collection of his once-shunned songs. Here’s a short […]

When the last notes of the 2013 Hopscotch Music Festival finally decayed and there was time to reflect on the raucous weekend in Raleigh, it became clear that both the event and the city have come incredibly far. 10 years ago, downtown Raleigh was among the last places one would name to hold a cutting-edge, […]

[rating=7.00] During a break from recording and touring, Acoustic Syndicate’s trademark patchwork of bluegrass, rock, jazz, and reggae must have still been evolving somehow. After semi-disbanding in 2005, the band began playing shows again a few years later. It seemed for a while that playing occasional southeastern shows would be whole of the band’s future. […]

As the late-summer co-headlining tour of Umphrey’s McGee and STS9 progressed, the Umphrey’s setlists seemed to grow ever more appealing each night. By the time the band rolled into Raleigh’s Red Hat Amphitheater on a superbly mild Sunday, the six-piece rock juggernaut had hit their stride. With masterful song selection from their gigantic catalogue of […]

A sense of camaraderie and joy that is increasingly elusive pervaded Raleigh’s Red Hat Amphitheater when Warren Haynes led the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration into town. A perfectly cool evening lent itself to a relaxed, musically invigorating experience that elicited reflection, laughter, sporadic dancing, and emotion. Haynes, playing Garcia’s iconic “Wolf” guitar, was joined by […]

Sunday is a day of exodus and closure at Bonnaroo, but this was not a year to pack up early and head for home. An extremely high-quality evening of music greeted those who stuck it out until the end. After witnessing the festival’s final acts, it was no wonder that the farm was more packed […]