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, […]
Music
Coverage of the music scene in Humboldt County with upcoming shows from locals and out-of-town acts, reviews, interviews and more.
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Smuin Ballet
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 […]
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Dirt Don’t Hurt
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 […]
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Not the King of Pop
I’ve never fully understood why Richard Thompson never achieved the popularity and the cultural icon status of some of his compatriots. He’s a stellar guitar player — when Rolling Stone magazine assembled a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, he was in the top 20. And his songwriting is absolutely brilliant. Songs […]
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Soft Airplane
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. […]
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Furr
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?) […]
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Riding On
The name sets the stage: New Riders of the Purple Sage was theoretically an update on a cowboy band from the ’30s, which in turn was named for a seminal cowboy novel by Zane Grey, the guy who basically invented the Western genre. The New Riders came together toward the end of the ’60s. The […]
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Microcastle
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 […]
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Sons of Harry Smith
It was way back in 1952 when mystic artist, experimental filmmaker, ethnomusicologist and record collector Harry Smith assembled The Anthology of American Folk Music, an annotated box set with selections from his vast collection of 78s in the blues, country, old timey and gospel vein. Smith’s masterwork influenced musicians from Bob Dylan to the Grateful […]
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Hippie/Punk Mumbo Jumbo
Anti-folk singer Kimya Dawson seems an unlikely superstar. I’m sure she’d blanch at the suggestion that she’s a star of any sort, but the truth is her sweet little lo-fi love songs set the tone for the movie Juno, filling it with a simple honesty that helped turn it into a surprise hit, thus thrusting […]
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What We Do Is Secret
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 […]
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Acid Tongue
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 […]