Here in the northeast, we’re in that peak/past peak moment with foliage. We balance precariously at this point for quite a few days before one day the weatherman pronounces decisively, “we’re past peak,” and you know it’s true. It’s also a time when we balance precariously between two radically different views of the future — […]
Folk, Rock, and Noise at the Future
| Music
The beauty of the Future as a venue is its obscurity and its diversity. The space is small, intimate, so intimate that sometimes it freaks you out a little. Bands routinely try to chat up the audience just to break the weird tension that arises when you’re setting up with people four feet away, just […]
Live at the Future: The Suitcase Junket, Bella’s Bartok, Wooly Mar
The Future Collective keep bringing us great music. Their latest show featured The Suitcase Junket, a one-man band led by Matt Lorenz, a Vermonter now living in Amherst who’s already getting airplay on The River. In addition to having an amazing voice and top notch songs, in a quirky folk vein, he also knows how […]
Channeling Rimsky-Korsakov On The Simpsons
The other night, I happened to be listening to Pan Voyevoda by Rimsky-Korsakov when, to my surprise, out popped the Simpsons theme song. Not literally, but the theme R-K used to open his suite is the same, almost note for note, as the theme to the Simpsons. It’s slower, to be sure, and unsyncopated, but […]
Future Fest 3
| Music
For the last year (2013 inclusive), I did nothing but complain about new music. Then I discovered The Future Collective, an arts and music organization in my very own town of Brattleboro, VT. Crazy how these things turn out — that just as I had despaired of finding happening music outside a big city, a […]
What’s Old Is New And Other Musings
| Music
A while back I heard that Kim’s in NYC was closing. It felt like another sad sign of the times, as music in a format you can touch and own went the way of all things digitizable. Fortunately, it wasn’t completely true. Kim’s Music didn’t disappear but its main location did close, leaving only one […]
2013 Sucked For New Music
| Music
The Blood Oranges
| Music
Why I Hate Cloud Music
| Music
I remember a year or two ago hearing a Sony exec announce that the mp3 format was dead. “Music will all be in the cloud,” he said. At the time I thought he was overstating but he was right and quickly too. Today, most artists are releasing their stuff via Sound Cloud or other service, […]
Deacon Blues
| Music
Future Bible Heroes and Gothic Archies Artifacts
| Music
I grew up in the heyday of the long playing record, spent my babysitting years buying albums, made mix tapes like everybody else in the 80s, segued into CDs in the 90s, and then sometime in the 2000s, there stopped being records. By records, I mean physical copies of music with packaging, cover art, and […]
I Know This World Is Killing You
| Music
One of my favorite web sites seems to have died or maybe it’s just in a coma. BetterPropaganda.com hasn’t had any new content since December 2012. BP used to be my go-to source for interesting new music. It was all free and legal, released by the artist or the label. And it had great contributors, […]
Dent May – Best Friend
| Songs
Sweet Life by Frank Ocean
| Songs
Not that many records have impressed me this year, but there’s something about Sweet Life by Frank Ocean that stuck with me even though lyrically, it’s completely alien to my life. Somewhere between rap and R&B, Sweet Life takes you to a land of milk and honey somewhere in Beverly Hills where happy young people enjoy […]
Spiral by Wye Oak
| Songs
I’ve been intrigued by Wye Oak for a few years, partly because they’re called Wye Oak (the ancient oak tree in Maryland that died a few years back) and partly because they’re from my old home town of Baltimore. “Civilian” was one of my favorite tracks of 2011 and now they’re back with “Spiral,” a […]