8-year old Ryan Bingham sounds like a smoky roadhouse, complete with white whiskers and gnarly Marlboros enabling him to sound years beyond the tender late 20's.
With half undecipherable melodies, half indie pop, Dirty Projectors mash up a style that reflects the work of Deerhoof, capturing a disjointed knack of melody that is otherwise fascinating and pretentiously artsy. At first listen, you’ll probably want to run to the more “welcoming” sounds of Wilco..
Unfortunate for those that despise hearing anything to do with Dave Matthews Band and his musical duffle of summer-time fun, but a new DMB album seems to always hit around #1 on the charts – such as the case here with this latest effort – Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King.
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.
