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 […]
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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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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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 […]
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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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Acid Jazz at the Fox
They call it the "Red Fox Acid Jazz Experiment" with B. Swizlo and his Funky Friends, promising a "new line-up every week," on Monday nights at the Red Fox Tavern. This coming Monday they’re up to Vol. 3, and the plan, says keyboard whiz Brian "B" Swizlo (aka just plain Swiz), is to keep it […]
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Dystopia
Album by Dystopia Life is Abuse Records Dystopia’s reign over the 1990s hardcore crust scene, particularly here on the West Coast, is one of legend, with its tattered remnants still clinging to the fading black denim of scenesters new and old alike. It’s not that their brand of acrid and crushing doom-ridden punk was groundbreaking […]
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The Evangelist
Album by Robert Forster. Yep Roc Records The story of The Go-Betweens is, to paraphrase a Jean Luc-Godard film, one of a "band of outsiders," one of travelling along the fringes of contemporary pop music, without ever breaking into the mainstream. When The Go-Betweens first started, they developed in the mid-1970s alongside more "rogue" Australian […]
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Parsons Dance
Performance May 10 at the Van Duzer Theater. "That was cool," my 9-year-old exclaimed as the light went out after Hand Dance,performed by Parsons Dance, choreographed by artistic director David Parsons, a former principal dancer of The Paul Taylor Dance Company. Five pairs of hands were all that appeared, moving clever and playfully in the […]