Our favorite band of the week turned out to be my favorite band of last year, despite the fact that I only just discovered them — The Breaks Inc. and their amazing album Hotel Earth. Also, belatedly, a couple of tracks from the Chillhop Winter Essentials disc and new music from Mogwai. Not to […]
A Politically Motivated Punk and Funk Show
| Radio
It was March the second, and we had just emerged from our caves after two weeks with influenza (we assume that’s what it was — we certainly felt awful enough). The day before, Bernie had lost Nevada and somehow, that seemed like the end of the world to me. So we took off on a […]
Our Bloody Valentines
| Radio
Bubble Wrap
Bubble Wrap is a new show on WVEW-LP in Brattleboro, VT, our local community radio station. I’m co-host with my partner CG, and together we dish up what the program guide calls “an amalgamation of indie pop, rock, and funk.” This enables us to play all the eras and genres of music that we like, […]
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, […]