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 […]
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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No Paraskavedekatriaphobia
Did you notice the date on this paper? It’s Thursday the 12th of June, which makes Friday June 13th. That’s right, Friday the Thirteenth. I guess it’s no coincidence that M. Night Shyamalan’s latest scary movie, The Happening, opens that night. What’s the big deal that makes it an unlucky day? Hard to say. Those […]
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Some Excellent Funky Beats
funk — noun Origin mid-18th cent. (first recorded as slang at Oxford University in Oxford, England perhaps from funk in the slang sense (tobacco smoke) or from obsolete Flemish fonck: "disturbance, agitation." a style of popular dance music of U.S. black origin, based on elements of blues and soul and having a strong rhythm that […]
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The Hot Tempers vs. The Cold Hearts
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 […]
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For Emma, Forever Ago
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 […]
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Thing of the Past
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 […]
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Dreamers
When I met Israeli rocker David Stitch from The Mother’s Anger a couple of years ago, he was living some weird version of the American rock dream, traveling around the states, living in the band van, calling no particular place home, playing soaring guitar and writing intense songs. Last week he called me from his […]
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Street Horrrsing
Album by Fuck Buttons ATP Recordings I’m not entirely sure what a Fuck Button is. As a noun, it could be what you press in times of distress. As a simple statement, it perhaps expresses a preference for zippers. With an added comma, it denotes that a preference for zippers has been denied: “Fuck, buttons.” […]
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Homecoming
I don’t imagine they know each other, but Ethan Miller and Mario Matteoli have followed parallel paths. Both were born and raised in Eureka. Both left Humboldt County just out of high school and established music careers elsewhere, then quit their bands to establish new projects. And both are coming home this week for shows […]
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The Education of Hopey Glass
Graphic novel by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics. It’s a commonplace claim that comic books (pardon me, Graphic Novels) are now literature. Jaime Hernandez’s latest graphic novel is typically engrossing, and may very well be literature, but it’s also a lot more fun to read than most "real" novels. The Education of Hopey Glass is as character-driven […]
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Knockemstiff
Book by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday. Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories has some obvious antecedents: the trailer park realism of Raymond Carver and the comic Faulkner of the Snopes cycle, maybe even the drug-soaked prose of Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son. Pollock has his own strong voice, though, writing intense stories that are […]
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Trouble In Mind
By Hayes Carll. Lost Highway. "…sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." — Edward Albee, from The Zoo Story Though only in his early 30s, Hayes Carll seemed to have taken the long way ‘round. But his way. The Texas singer-songwriter […]