Their full length debut, Manners is fun stuff, mildly annoying, but filled with endless keyboards and studio effects that use the 1980’s as a constant reference point.
Sharing the same name with a certain “shoeless” baseball player, Joe Jackson has probably suffered a time or two from an identity crisis. For this Mr. Joe Jackson, the English singer-songwriter, composer, and pianist, he’s probably fine that his otherwise common name provides him a sense of creative freedom.
After the Nirvana revolution, you couldn’t even get two of those 80’s hair bands on a stage together in any house bigger than 5,000. Well if you do the decade math and now some of those same bands that rocked big ampitheaters in the 90’s are doing it again today (with the help of $20 lawn and back reserved pavilion tickets). The one thing is, that of these bands (NIN) sounded mighty relevant while the other (Jane’s Addiction) appeared to be going through the motions on this Phoenix date of the cleverly coined NIN/JA tour.
Bowling Green, Kentucky has never been a hot spot of start-up rock bands, but Cage The Elephant, led by brothers Matt and Brad Shultz have garnered a worthwhile buzz as garage rockers, making them Kentucky’s second most popular rockers behind My Morning Jacket.
Thanks to the good guys at Wespac, they have given the Valley two days of much needed roots music. The past six years of the festival have attracted The Black Crowes, Ratdog, Bruce Hornsby, Solomon Burke, Gov’t Mule and Los Lobos to the mainstage. Let us hope they keep attracting this kind of low-key talent to safeguard the McDowell Mountain Music Festival as one of the better kept secrets on the festival scene.
While other male/female duos like She & Him, have graced the covers of magazines, The Bird and the Bee, have made a fashionable statement while making sounds from the 60’s and 70’s sound contemporary.
Doves, unlike their aviary moniker aren’t so peaceful as they are graceful and edgey, as Kingdom of Rust flies with more sonic flairs.
First things first; just by looking at a picture of Mastodon front-man Brent Hinds, you may not want to stare too hard as his gnarly look, he may jump out of the picture and strangle you to death. But upon listening to his band’s fourth full length effort Crack The Skye, you kind of go the way of Master of Puppets- this shit is heavy by its got melody and texture.
When a band sells out their esteemed hometown club, in this case, First Avenue in Minneapolis, it’s a sign that proclaims –“yeah, we made it.” Such is the theme of the Hold Steady DVD/CD combo – A Positive Rage – where the crowds get bigger and the band is running fast on momentum.
In the midst of a tour supporting two new Merge albums – 2008’s Conor Oberst and Outer South, due May5th – Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band had a couple albums worth of material to rock out to on this April evening. Sporting a big flat brimmed black sombrero that he got on the road a couple days earlier, Oberst looked all the part of his
