Listening to Promises from The Boxer Rebellion is like gorging yourself on chocolate for a bit before you start to get tired of it and suddenly remember that you can add some things to the chocolate to make it even better.
Coming from their hometown of New Orleans, Dumpstaphunk have steadily expanded their sound to achieve global funk success. Dirty Word is the latest from the band and shows off the professional funkateers in winning fashion.
Shooter fearlessly confronts the duality of man’s nature. Can Saturday night and Sunday morning learn to live side by side? Directly quoting one of his father’s songs, he asks, “Don’t y’all think this ‘outlaw’ bit done got outta hand?” As a lens through which to view and contemplate the finer points of man’s perplexing nature, The Other Life is not just Shooter’s birthright but a surprisingly fertile platform for hard-won philosophical insights.
Stones Fest proved to be a veritable jukebox of Stones tunes, as each track elicited howls of approval from the locked in and packed crowd. (Truth be told, the setlist was more of the greatest hits variety, but you don’t really hear people clamoring for much post-1989 Stones material, anyways.)
At its core Modern Vampires of the City still has the clever hooks and effortless melodies that made the band blogosphere darlings in 2008, but underneath the gloss there's a less easy, more fatalistic worldview
If Day 1 of the 2013 Sasquatch! Music Festival was more subdued and inconsistent, Day 2 was its total opposite, bringing bands that kept the energy high, crowds dancing and laughing and with a never yielding dose of sun. Surely there will be plenty more sunburns tomorrow morning, but the general consensus seems it's been well worth it, as Saturday really delivered in every way.
Days 2 and 3 of Sasquatch! Music Festival – they're two different beasts, but as the Festival begins to taper off, they definitely show their individual colors. By Sunday (Day 3), most are feeling the fatigue of doing three days nonstop- from Thursday's camping adventures to the music of Friday and Saturday. So, thankfully Sunday's early scheduling was a bit soft, making it able to ease into the day.
Rain started in the early hours of Friday, and continued until midday, which put a considerable pall over the campgrounds (music wasn't starting until 4PM). Even so, festivalgoers got out as much as they could, and the excitement for the day was palpable. That said, it took a while for the show to get its groove going.
There's a certain kind of heft to Wakin on a Pretty Daze that wasn't present on a Kurt Vile LP before. And not just with regards to the length of several of the songs that appear on this eleven-track collection bookended by the nine-and-a-half minute "Wakin on a Pretty Day" and the mesmerizing ten-plus minute comedown "Goldtone". What is more prevalent perhaps is the sense of ease by which the songs seem to just roll out of your headphones as Vile and his current primary Violators–multi-instrumentalists Jesse Trbovich and Rob Laakso–submerge the street cool of late-80s Lou Reed into that hazy psych-rock thing he's been doing since since his bedroom dubbing days, albeit less volatile from the sounds of such key tracks as "Was All Talk" and "Shame Chamber".
If Queen and AC/DC could have a baby…it’s name would be the Darkness. And with that combination of rock and roll DNA, you really can’t go wrong. The members of the band, Ed Graham (drums), sporting a Darkness T-shirt, Dan Hawkins (guitar), with his signature Thin Lizzy T, Justin Hawkins (vocals and guitar), channeling Freddie Mercury’s style with a black and white vertical striped cat-suit and Frankie Poullain (bass) in his Sci-Fi Samurai cowboy get-up – walked out on stage, held hands and raised them into the air to the cheers of their ecstatic fans.
