Casey Neill and the Norway Rats are on the road. I found Casey in Los Angeles getting ready to depart for San Francisco on a tour with a few more stops, including one in Arcata for a Saturday night show at the Jambalaya. Then its back to home base in Portland. Neill explains that the […]
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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Third
Album by Portishead. Island Records Third is an unnecessary album. From the beginning, all Portishead needed in the way of legacy was a pair of albums that felt like they’d dropped out of nowhere — somebody’s attic, maybe, or rescued from the flooded basement of a bankrupt ’70s soul label. Portishead built songs carefully out […]
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Daniel Variations
Album by Steve Reich. Nonesuch. Steve Reich’s work stands today as one of the pillars of modern music. Along with his contemporaries Philip Glass and Terry Riley, his exploration of the potential emotional weight of the cyclical repetition of music phrases in the 1960s and ’70s was not only one of the last great movements […]
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Kimya Dawson
April 28 house concert in Arcata. House shows often make a virtue out of necessity, providing a place for touring bands that sometimes can’t find another venue, and providing a more intimate musical experience. The erasure of the segregation between audience and performer is a central tenet of the punk DIY ethic as well. So […]
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The Feel Good Record of the Year
Album by No Use for a Name. Fat Wreck Chords. For fans of West Coast melodic pop-punk it’d be hard to find a better new album than The Feel Good Record of the Yearfrom established masters of the genre, No Use for a Name (NUFAN). When Tony Sly and Rory Koff started NUFAN back in […]
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All Is Well
Album by Sam Amidon. Bedroom Community. The past several years have been bumper-crop years for singer-songwriters following down the path of what is loosely defined as contemporary "Americana." The folk songs rescued and documented by legendary musical archivists Harry Smith and Alan Lomax have found a resurgence and inspired an attentive younger generation. Again. Harry […]
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Collision Course (Star Trek Academy)
Book by William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Pocket Books. A year from now a new Star Trek movie will be hitting the big screens, featuring new young actors playing Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest of the original series crew, in a prequel to the TV series. J.J. Abrams (creator of the […]
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Scientist v. Evil Vampires
The minimalist, bass-heavy, effects-laden variation on reggae known as dub has some serious aficionados (this writer among them), but not a lot of people listen to it. The exception may be the music of Jamaican dub master Overton Brown, better known as Scientist, or The Scientist. Millions have been listening to his album, Scientist Rids […]
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Where You Go With The Notes
In a certain sense, Patty Larkin is your basic singer/songwriter, a woman with a guitar who plays chords and melody, works on them to fit her intelligent lyrics. She’s been doing it for 20-some-odd years, starting out busking on the streets of Cambridge then learning jazz licks at Berklee. Then about 10 years ago her […]
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Pure Abstractions
Spring dance concert April 17 at HSU’s Van Duzer Theater Thursday evening’s opening performance of HSU’s spring dance concert, Pure Abstractions, was a total blast. Being a modern dancer from New York, I could barely contain myself when I heard the opening strains of a live quartet playing John Coltrane’s Impressionsas groupings of modern dancers […]
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The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America
Book by David Hajdu. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As the medium of comics has gained mainstream respect in recent years, several books have looked back on the unruly, disreputable origins of the art form. The most recent of these is David Hajdu’s chronicle of the early days of the comic book, its rise to mass […]
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A Virtual Landslide
CD by Pete Molinari. Damaged Goods. With the release of his second full-length album, A Virtual Landslide, singer-songwriter Pete Molinari has created a beautiful, warm and sincere record of classic heartbreak songs. A Virtual Landslide is a series of perfect marriages, artistically speaking, making it one of the finest albums to be released so far […]