If you’ve heard The Apples in Stereo, then you can probably guess that they put on a pretty good live show. The most accessibly poppy group of the now legendary Elephant 6 collective, they’ve been creating feel-good songs…
In 2007, director Frederick Wiseman applied his renowned cinema verité to Austin, Texas’ Lord’s Gym. Without interviews or narrators, Wiseman employs the patience of a Buddha, waiting for events to unfold around him…
I was needing something a little laidback and trippy to just unwind a bit. It had been a busy, slightly stressful couple of weeks for me lately, when I came across 7 Miles from the Sun’s self-titled EP. It was just five tracks, but five tracks of slightly acoustic, spacey, instrumental noodling…
Much as I like lyrics in general, I’m fully of the opinion that at the end of the day, you don’t really need them. At least, you don’t necessarily need to be able to understand them to be able to get the emotion behind them…
A very cool new-ish local label, run (I think) by the Digital Warehaus guys, and one that’s got pretty wide-ranging (and excellent) tastes in music…
Richmond, TX.
I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Roky Moon & BOLT (then just known as “BOLT,” all caps), I thought it sounded fun, but I seriously doubted it would last. It seemed like one of those one-off things a bunch of scenesters do when they get bored…
So, the two-song 7″ Well & Goode is supposedly the product of a mysterious, possibly psychotic duo of adopted Irishmen, Upton O. Goode and Midas Wells, who stalked power-pop hero Brendan Benson over the course of his last overseas tour…
Javelin’s sound is remarkably broad. Much more broad than most bands. Javelin, a duo based in New York, likes to try doing just about anything. Their sound revolves around samplers and keyboards and has a digital groove to it, but that’s about the only defining quality…
Senses Fail rocked the stage in the “Out With The In Crowd” tour at Warehouse Live. The New Jersey post-hardcore band toured with Bayside, Title Fight, and last but not least, Balance and Composure…
Hey, all — one insane weekend coming up (yeesh…don’t y’all band people go visit your families & whatnot for Thanksgiving?), but unfortunately, I’m kinda short on time to talk about it all, so I’m going to have to run through the next three days (Fri.-Sun., November 26th-28th) real quickly…
Turkey Day today, and a time to be thankful for all kinds of stuff — hopefully everybody out there’s having a good time (or planning to, anyway) with their loved ones… If you’re not planning on spending the evening on the couch, feeling bloated & hanging out with the family unit…
Ah, damn. Thanksgiving’s supposed to be a time for good news, not bombs dropped off-handedly like this… Got word earlier today that Houston-/Austin-dwelling “stoner-pop” hero {Arthur Yoria} will soon be forsaking H-town…
Just when I think I’ve got the Born Liars all figured out, have ’em pegged down neatly on the Great Big Board of Bands as a no-frills garage-punk band and not much else — and hell, that’s great right there — they go and change on me…
There’s a point early in Roky Moon & BOLT where you can feel the change, like a switch being flipped. Suddenly, it feels less like you’re listening to an album by a rock band and more like you’re listening to/watching some quirky, sidewise-smirking musical about a mythic rock band…
Tonight at the MFAH, Soul Kitchen premieres, as part of the museum’s Premieres: Contemporary World Cinema series…
Just in time for all the Thanksgiving madness, folks, we’ve got another very cool giveaway deal over here at SCR: we’ve got two tickets to go see Brendan Benson (and headliners The Posies and openers Aqueduct, too, obviously) this coming Saturday, November 27th…
Wolf Parade’s music has always been a little bit all over the place. Their penchant for reverb-drenched vocals and brash, buzzing guitar has always kept them on the messier side of indie-rock. This messiness isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
Last day of the weekend, Sunday, November 21st, and there’s still plenty going on… I’m afraid I’ve got some house-y stuff to do, so I’ve got to make it a bit quick; here goes…
Spring, TX. Press: “press” at “groundslothmedia dot com” Customer Service: “store” at “groundslothmedia dot com” Sales: “wholesale” at “groundslothmedia dot com”
Ah, cool; I’d heard about this particular label many moons ago now, but then they dropped off my radar, at least… Glad to see they’re still around; while I wasn’t looking, they’ve steadily put out release after release of mostly old-school-style punk rock…
Hadn’t heard about this before now, and that’s a shame, because it sounds very cool. Tomorrow (11/20) is the next date for the Houston Re-Market…
Day 2 of a fairly show-packed weekend — coming up on Saturday, November 20th, and it definitely is a busy day, all ’round. Here goes…
Damn. Tonight’s another busy-as-hell Friday (November 19th, to be precise), and there is a ton of stuff going on, a lot of it awesomely good. Here goes…
A few months back, Passion Pit stopped by our fair city and brought with them the relatively unknown BRAHMS. A wonderful show overall, but it was BRAHMS who served as the perfect foil for Passion Pit’s sugary sweet, love-stricken beats…
Another of those H-town things that sound damn, damn cool and that I’ve always meant to check out… This coming Saturday and Sunday, November 20th & 21st, is the Houston installment of the Via Colori Street Painting Festival, once again benefiting the Center for Hearing and Speech…
What? It’s Thursday, seriously? You couldn’t tell it by looking at the schedule, I swear… There’s a crap-ton of good-sounding stuff going on tonight; I don’t have the brainpower left to talk about all of it, but here’s what looks cool…
With It Comes Electric, Featherface does the near-impossible — in my book, at least — by taking loose-limbed, organic, all-over-the-map psych-rock and marrying it to full-on, wide-grinning, right-in-your-ear arena-pop…
An hour didn’t seem so long to wait once we entered the Senses Fail tour bus. La June and I had arrived promptly at 3 o’clock, looking for someone to speak to about the interview we had set up at 4…
What Cheer? Brigade is a 19-piece brass band that borrows from Bollywood, balkan, New Orleans, and samba, and rev everything up to the level of punk rock, in a similar way to Mucca Pazza or other marching bands. The tunes on their debut, We Blow You Suck…
Okay, this is pretty awesome. Got this early in the AM; I honestly had no idea these cartoons-with-robo-voice things had become an honest-to-God meme, but yep, the {KTRU} sale is now part of it…
I know it’s been a little while since I posted anything about the possible sale of student-run, student-founded Rice University radio station {KTRU} to the University of Houston. And yeah, I’ll admit it — after UH actually signed on the line that’s dotted…
Giveaway time, folks… Paul Haggis-directed thriller The Next Three Days (from Lionsgate) opens this weekend, and it looks pretty damn neat, at least to me; I’m not familiar with the movie Haggis is remaking, French film Pour Elle, but I like the general plot line quite a bit…
Bluefinger, the play based on the Black Francis concept album, starring Matt Kelly as Herman Brood and Michael Haaga as Black Francis opened this past weekend…
Well, it ain’t as crazy as it’s been, but tonight, Sunday, November 14th, still has some cool-sounding shows going on. Here’s what I’m liking at the moment…
John Nova Lomax‘s hero, the late, great Sig Byrd, wrote about Houston in a way that made the city feel downright intimate. Tiny, in fact. The city was smaller then, in the 1950s, but as he spent mornings downtown, afternoons in the then-nearer suburbs…
Holy crap. There are an insane number of cool-sounding shows going on tomorrow, Saturday, November 13th — I mean, seriously, a shitload of good shows, so many I’m pretty sure I’m missing some. Here goes…
Every so often, a group of musicians walk on the stage and really owns every aspect of the performance. They have a magnetic energy that attracts people from both poles and anywhere in between, causing them to migrate…
Ah, crap — I knew I was forgetting something in my intro to the weekend rundown… In case you haven’t been paying attention, writer Creg Lovett has been working his ass off to cover this weekend’s debut…
Busy, busy, busy weekend upon us, y’all, so here’s a first taste of what’s going on… Before I get there though, a bit of possibly-depressing news — if you hadn’t heard already, Joanna Newsom‘s show this evening…
