Music In Review

"Blitzen what?" is the typical response you would get if you asked a handful of people about Blitzen Trapper. The next most common answer might be, "Yeah, I’ve heard of them. They’re pretty good." You would be hard pressed to find a more passionate response. Such was the scene outside of the Red Fox Tavern […]

Musician, songwriter and vocalist Holly Golightly hasn’t slowed up much. Since her time in the mid-’90s with the garage band Thee Headcoatees, the all-female counterpart to Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats, Golightly has released over a dozen full-length studio albums. Her styles, like her moods, swung with each of her records, from rockabilly to folk to […]

Over the past three years, San Diego’s Earthless has steadily built a following based on the strength of its intense live performances and absurdly long, yet captivating, instrumental jams. Its reputation earned it an invitation to this year’s annual Roadburn Festival in Holland, where organizers unexpectedly asked Earthless to perform on the festival’s main stage, […]

I wanted to be dazzled. Christmas ballet programs are high-tech, high-quality entertainment. I wasn’t looking to be moved, only pleasantly distracted. From the start, Smuin Ballet’s The Classical Christmas wasn’t going to deliver. Although the requisite dance chops were present, the troupe’s unisons and executions were not piquant. The thing about great ballet: it has […]

The early songs by the lo-fi indie pioneer Robert Pollard and his "band," Guided By Voices, sounded as if they were recorded in a basement. They were. Today’s singers/songwriters have access to a wide array of technologies, old and current, allowing them to create recordings that you would never guess were made in someone’s basement. […]

Portland’s Blitzen Trapper have been kicking around the Northwest for a while. Earlier records like Field Rexx revealed a band unsure of its identity. Lo-fi noise jams alternated with bluegrass field recordings, and it seemed like they could be just another annoyingly smart-ass indie band that mistook eclecticism for creativity (Beck, what hath you wrought?) […]

Listening to the Atlanta-based band Deerhunter, you wouldn’t immediately suspect that the band has endured a great deal of drama. Yet it has. In 2004, prior to the recording of their first full-length album, Deerhunter (subtitled "Turn It Up Faggot"), the band’s original bassist, Justin Bosworth, died due to head injuries suffered from a skateboarding […]

The power of myth. In many cases, the myth overshadows the reality. For the legendary L.A. punk band The Germs, who experienced a meteoric rise during the late 1970s, this was always the case. More often than not, Germs shows were chaotic episodes, with unfinished sets. In 1979, the Germs released their first and only […]

t’s time to start taking Jenny Lewis seriously. Probably we should’ve started a long time ago — around 2002, when her band Rilo Kiley released The Execution of All Things (still, I think, their best album). But she was a former child actor. She did have The Wizard, Troop Beverly Hills and Foxfire to live […]

Steve Wynn, singer, songwriter and founder of L.A. band Dream Syndicate, is a journeyman — both literally and figuratively. Musically, since the dissolve of Dream Syndicate, Wynn has taken both a collaborative and solo path, with some of his strongest post-Syndicate work in collaborations. Wynn worked with Green on Red’s co-founder Dan Stuart under the […]

Moses Pendleton, founder/director of Momix, is a complex artist known for crafting fantastical voyages out of the human form that straddle the line between spectacular art and circusy entertainment. Often his use of larger-than-life props, jokes and stunning backdrops become gimmicks diminishing his ultra-athletic and acrobatic dancers’ artistry. Wednesday night’s The Best of Momix was […]

D.I.Y. Do-It-Yourself. This was a phrase attached to the ethic from frontier days of punk music, both here and abroad, but it was not so exclusive to the particular musical genre. The “No Wave” movement in New York (and later, Chicago and Los Angeles) also took more experimental forms and performed in a variety of […]