CD by The Magnetic Fields. Nonesuch Records Distortion is supposed to be Stephen Merritt’s take on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy.This from Merritt himself, who’s been touting J&MC’s 1985 masterpiece as the last good pop album ever made in recent interviews. (Maybe he never heard Radiohead. Or Oasis. Or Nirvana. Or the Postal Service. […]
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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I Made a MySpace
If you’ve been listening to Lila Nelson’s radio show, "Meet Me In the Morning" Sunday mornings on KHUM, you’ve heard about her "Write Your Own Damn Song" contest. (If you come up with an idea, she writes a song around it.) This Sunday she’ll be singing a "damn" song about Humboldt’s MySpace scene, and in […]
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Bill Frisell Trio
Live performance Jan. 20 at Yoshi’s San Francisco Seattle-based jazz guitarist Bill Frisell claims two very different guitar players as main influences: Jim Hall and Jimi Hendrix. He was a student of Hall, whose cool harmonic style was Frisell’s primary jazz influence, and like most electric guitarists who came of age in the ’60s he […]
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Pet Genius
CD by Pet Genius. Hydrahead. From the primal angst of Cave In to the quirky pop meanderings of his numerous side and solo projects, Stephen Brodsky has always displayed a penchant for inspired and inventive songwriting. What is baffling, however, is that outside limited circles of the indie underground, Brodsky has not received the success […]
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Sigur Ros: Heima
DVD Directed by Dean DeBlois. Xl Recordings Since critics are legally required to refer to their music as "epic," you might expect a film about Sigur Ros, who are better at creating spacious hugeness than any other working rock (post- or otherwise) band, to be overtly grandiose itself. Two obvious predecessors, U2’s Rattle and Humand […]
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Always Going Somewhere
Unless you’re up to date on the world of contemporary jazz, the names Myra Melford and Marty Ehrilch may not mean much to you. New Yorker magazine included the duo’s 2007 release, Spark!, on a short list of the best of the year. Pianist Melford has also earned acclaim for her work with Trio M, […]
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Andre Nickatina
Live performance Jan. 18 at the Mateel Community Center Andre Nickatina, formerly known as Dre Dog, graced SoHum with his presence this past Friday, Jan. 18. That’s right, the Bay Area rap artist, along with a slew of other hyphy rap acts, played to a sold-out crowd at the Mateel as part of the Urban […]
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Lost: Season Three
On DVD from Buena Vista Home Entertainment It’s winter. Hibernating is perfectly natural, and for those who need justification for such activities as lying on the couch, allow me to encourage TV on DVD. No commercials, pause option and if you pick something like the Lost series, be ready for hours of uninterrupted top-notch entertainment […]
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Raiding the Airwaves Volume One
by Various Artists. Humboldt Free Radio Alliance. Take a look behind any local music scene and you’ll usually find a handful of dedicated people working hard to keep music alive and accessible. Fortunately for those of us behind the Redwood Curtain, there exist a number of individuals and organizations that selflessly commit themselves to this […]
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The Wire
HBO series Produced by David Simon HBO’s The Wire, now in its fifth and final season, may be the most critically acclaimed television series nobody knows about. In addition to receiving a Peabody award, the police drama has been rated the best in its genre by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, TIME,and […]
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Plus ça change
By capitalizing the "S" in the middle of BeauSoleil, the Cajun band’s name becomes beautiful sun, but the truth is the band is named for an Acadian resistance fighter. Joseph Broussard Beausoleil fought the English in the mid-1700s during what is known as The Great Upheaval (or Le Grand Dérangement), when a British governor removed […]
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Jesus Christ Superstar
Live performance at HSU’s Van Duzer Theatre, Jan. 8. The night lurked, heavy with portent, as a sickly white substance filtered through the theater’s airspace and settled ever so lightly about the seated audience, who breathed in and breathed out. In. Out. The lights were still on, so this was odd: Every particle of mysterious […]