Music In Review

Album by Mates of State Barsuk The last time Mates of State blew my mind was in 2003. This makes me feel old, and at first it makes me kind of disappointed that they haven’t done much blowing, mind-wise, since then. The brilliance of their first trio of records – My SoloProject,Our Constant Concern,and Team […]

Be Your Own Pet. Universal/Ecstatic Peace.   This just in: Record labels are stupid. In the case of Be Your Own Pet, Universal Records was doubly stupid in removing the three best songs tracks from BYOP’s sophomore album Get Awkward for dubious reasons, thereby encouraging people to download the original version of the album instead […]

Triclops! Alternative Tentacles     Alien-baby vocal phaser, check. Underwater flanger, check. Four SF Bay Area musicians melting down their collective experiences from a flurry of substantive groups such as Bottles and Skulls, Fleshies, Lower Forty-Eight and Victim’s Family into a single, righteous offering to the lords of punk; check. Commence rock. With a battalion of […]

June 21, Dell’Arte Some people hear the name Tim Robbins and immediately think, Hollywood star. Actually, as Robbins himself explained it, this star’s mission is to work against everything Hollywood and corporate media stand for. Along with being famous in the movies and married to the lovely Susan Sarandon, Robbins is a successful theatre actor, […]

By Frightened Rabbit. FatCat Records. With their sophomore effort, The Midnight Organ Fight, the band Frightened Rabbit delivers a deft assortment of songs, filled with dark, painful longings, performed with dramatic dynamics and immediacy. Recorded in two weeks with producer and engineer Peter Katis, who worked with Mercury Rev and Interpol, Frightened Rabbit have created […]

Album by Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Drag City. For those still under the spell of Will Oldham’s majestic The Letting Go, or perhaps the superb show at Eureka’s tiny Synapsis Gallery, this latest Bonnie "Prince" Billy album may at first be a disappointment. It enters with a warm, countrified splash of fiddles, banjo, piano and vocal […]

Ballet performance by North Coast Dance. June 7 at the Arkley Center It was a pleasure to sit in the tastefully ornate Arkley Center in Eureka on a Saturday afternoon. North Coast Dance’s artistic director, Danny Furlong, choreographed his vision of Jack and the Beanstalk as a vehicle for his company members and younger students […]

Live music June 7 at Benbow. George Clinton danced by the Eel River in a peacock headdress, pink and yellow mini-braids, and a checkered brown baller jacket down to his knees. The crowd sang out, "We want the funk! Gotta have the funk!" and bounced together in the same collective energy. Little girls danced on […]

Album by By The Sword. Kemado Records. When The Sword’s Age of Winters dropped in 2006, the album was received with a great deal of enthusiasm, especially by those heralding the band as part of the retro-metal movement that has barreled its way through the indie underground in recent years. Paying equal homage to both […]

Roller derby, May 28 at Redwood Acres. It was girl-powered mayhem in the heart of Eureka. Inside Redwood Acres Fairgrounds, hundreds of ballistic screaming roller derby fans filled the bleachers, floors and walls on both sides of the brightly lit auditorium-turned roller rink. Dirty hippies, rednecks, chuckling groups of young guys, suave punk-rockers, polite looking […]

Album by Bon Iver. Jagjaguwar. It is the stuff of folklore how songwriter Justin Vernon (under the name of "Bon Iver") created and produced his sparkling solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. After spending several years in North Carolina with the band DeYarmond Edison, Vernon returned to his native home in Eau Claire, Wisc. He […]

Album by Vetiver Gnomonsong When The Band released Music From the Big Pink in 1968, the record was a revelation, a watershed, especially among fellow musicians and singer-songwriters across the globe. It was a new type of Americana — one that embraced a lost songbook of American folk, blues, rock and country and reinterpreted them […]