Don’t you hate it when the band you leave the house to see isn’t the headliner?
You pay for the bigger act just to catch a shorter set with second rate set design and a crowd with only half its heart into it. But despite all those inherent drawbacks, Knoxville quintet Whitechapel played a tight and versatile supporting set at Mr. Smalls Theatre on Monday that was as formidable as it was sincere, featuring a good portion of the band’s career-best seventh album The Valley. Continue reading Concert Review: Whitechapel at Mr. Smalls Theatre, Millvale, PA (Oct. 28)→
In music and film, there’s a certain sweet spot of nostalgia for the middle of the latter half of the 20th century, probably because so many people alive today have lived through it. Hollywood often loads its period pieces of that time, like Boogie Nights, Inherent Vice or Starsky and Hutch, with classic songs like “Afternoon Delight,” “Close to You” or “Stayin’ Alive.” But on California Son, Morrissey’s new cover album of 60s and 70s songs, he digs deeper than radio hits to repurpose for his own narrative use, choosing songs that have ties to our own historical moment.Continue reading Morrissey breathes new life into 12 songs from the 60s and 70s to craft a very 2019 album→
Stephen Malkmus’ signature brand of abstract and non sequitur lyrics can most often be found floating over the instrumentals of Pavement and his own band, The Jicks. Raucous guitars and bombastic drums match his frenetic singing and shrieking crescendos, shirking any notions of predictability.
