sigh…late, late, late, as seemingly always. It’s late-evening on Saturday, June 30th, and yours truly just got done entertaining friends & friends’ children here at the house, so I’m only now getting back to the laptop…
Late notice, I know, but there’s a very cool benefit going on tonight (Saturday, June 30th) up at Spring Street Studios (1824 Spring Street) for Girls Rock Camp Houston, a group/cause that’s near & dear to my heart…
More than anything else, on Summer Us, Jody Seabody and The Whirls feel like a band out of time. Sure, the trappings of more straightforward, radio-friendly alternarock are in there, definitely — especially in the opening tracks of the album…
First “real” day of the weekend today, Friday, June 29th, and while it’s not quite as jam-packed as last night was with good stuff, there’s still plenty going on…
Okay, so this feels a little strange. Back in the spring of 2011, I reviewed an album called Unite, by a band called The Wheel Workers that I’d never heard of before but which had seemingly popped, fully-formed, onto the scene…
If the only role Channing Tatum is capable of bringing anything like charisma, humanism, and likeability to is that of an aging male stripper, we still get a good movie out of it with Magic Mike, and that’s almost worth all…
What the…? Is it really only a Thursday (June 28th, to be exact)? Then how in the hell are there so many damn cool things going on tonight? Seriously, there’s more good stuff on the calendar tonight than there is on Friday…
It’s been a little while since I’ve run across The Wild Moccasins. I dearly loved 2010’s Skin Collision Past, but I’ve been sorely missing them in the intervening couple of years, not even managing to catch the band live at Summerfest this year…
You’ve got to love a band (and EP) that makes its mission statement clear right from the word “go.” Weird Party’s new 7″ EP, The Secret Lives of Men, does just that, blowing the quasi-artiness of the title apart with an introductory frenzied…
While Fleet Foxes have already made a name for themselves on the music scene (whatever that means), their second album immediately struck me, because it’s called Helplessness Blues. That name alone made me curious…
When first listening to The Mowgli’s, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. Here came these songs with male and female vocals trading off in a Johnny Cash-June Carter style. There are a lot — and I mean a lot — of group background vocals…
The musical landscape continues to evolve as genre-blurring artists ply their trade in a valiant attempt to create the next big thing. Terms like baroque-folk, moombaton, chillwave, and the ubiquitous and often hollow “indie-rock” have all worked their way…
Having heard nearly everything recorded by The White Stripes, I was more than a little bit intrigued as to what a Jack White solo album would sound like. The majority of solo albums that I can think of (not naming names) sound mostly like the way the band…
Whoa — while we do get sent a crap-ton of MP3 links for various bands, it’s not often that I open the Inbox to find not one but two new tracks from bands I love, particularly not both from right here in H-town…
UPDATE: Okay, so apparently I misunderstood the rules for the voting. You can vote not just once, but once per day on the ballot for whoever you want to win, from now until August 5th…
Okay, so I meant to post about the second-ever Houston Press Houston Web Awards a long, long while back, but as things tend to go, y’know…well, it fell by the wayside. So much so that I stupidly missed both the nominations deadline…
Coming into Sunday, June 24th, now, and despite it being, well, a Sunday, there’s still some good stuff going on. Here’s what sounds/looks good to me…
Very often there is a fine line between making jokes and being a joke. Van Halen does not concern themselves with that line. That’s something I’ve always appreciated about the joy with which they approach their show…
It’s Saturday now, y’all (June 23rd, to be exact), and holy-freaking-wow is there a lot going on, folks. Here goes…
Aaaargh. How does this happen? I always, always plan to get this shit posted earlier, and yet, without fail, things conspire to stop that from happening. sigh. Sorry about the slowness, y’all, but there’s still some really great stuff going on tonight, Friday, June 22nd. Here goes…
Leave it to the Linus Pauling Quartet to come up with something like this, seriously: a monolithic, fuzz-drenched, utterly badass chunk of headbanging stoner-psych-rock all about Cimmerian gods, post-Apocalyptic wastelands, playing D&D, and (of course) somebody else smoking all your pot. If you think I’m kidding, well, you’ve probably never heard the LP4 before…
By Sunday, I felt like I was a pro at getting around on the Free Press Summer Fest grounds. The festival organizers were also getting better at knowing what they needed to change…
In the modern American cinematic garden, annual harvests continue to grow ever more bountiful. The Soderbergh and Aronofsky trees, well-rooted and stoic, perpetually plop ripe fruit from their branches. One tends to enjoy a lazy stroll down…
I swear, the more I hear of new-ish noisy, messy, too-smart-for-their-own-good rockers {Peloton}, the more I love ’em. They’re like a holdover from those mid-’90s days when a band could play music that was full-on noise, all sharp-edged guitars, crushing, bottom-of-the-sea bass…
I can’t recall the last time I saw Say Anything live — it must’ve been at least three years ago, maybe more — but I finally got to see them again in April, the first time since then, and let me tell you, they put on a heck of a show…
I’ve been sitting on this album for a while, because I was hoping that if I went back to it I might like it a bit better. The first song, “Loverboy,” is catchy in both the lyrics and the music — it’s got a great toe-tapping beat that makes me wish the whole album was like this…
It’s short notice, I know, but among the pile of pretty great shows going on tonight (The Cult/Against Me!, football, etc., Dr. Ralph Stanley, & Rel the Chosen are all very cool, too), there’s one that stands out for me…
Just the other day, SCR got a tour of the new Vinal Edge location on 19th Street in the Heights. It’s located on the same block as the old Harolds In The Heights, right next to…
With three EPs under their collective belts, The Manichean boys — Cory Sinclair, Justice Tirapelli-Jamail, and their capable entourage of musicians — are not the young upstarts that I met three years ago…
There once was a band called Black Flag. This band had an original vocalist named Keith Morris, who would later go on to form Circle Jerks, whilst Black Flag would become more known as being a vehicle for Henry Rollins. Then a bunch of time passed, as it always seems to do, and Keith Morris came out with this band called OFF!. When I was growing up, I didn’t know a whole lot about hardcore punk. I guess in some ways I knew what it was, but didn’t, really…
I don’t like to do lists. I think it’s a cheap way to get out of writing a review. However, as you can tell by the title of this album, Marisa Monte does not sing in English. This — in my opinion — makes the music harder to relate to, because I have no idea what she’s singing about, no matter how well she sings. Thus, I bring you some items you probably don’t know about this album and Marisa Monte (and life) in general…
Last day of the weekend, Sunday, June 17th, and while there’s not a lot going on, what is going on is pretty much all badass. Unfortunately, I’ll be off doing Father’s Day stuff this evening, most likely, but I may try to make it up to Fitzgerald’s, should the opportunity arise…
It’s Saturday, June 16th, and unfortunately, the little guy decided not to take a nice, long nap this afternoon, so I’ve got to keep this one a little on the brief side, too. I didn’t want to miss out on tonight’s shows, though, because there’s some awesome stuff going on. Here we go…
Just got some cool, cool news from Jack over at Post Punk’d, who’s one of the organizers of the Sound & Vision music showcases that’ve popped up on the list a few times…
Gotta keep this brief, but there is some cool stuff going on tonight, Friday, June 15th. Here goes…
I didn’t really enjoy the Free Press Summerfest… I devoured it. When I go to a concert with my wife, I try to enjoy myself, take it slow, kick back and relax, but by myself…
I’ve been really, truly remiss in not mentioning this ’til now, but I just wanted to point to it before the time runs out: the nominations for the 2012 Houston Press Music Awards end today…
I’d always wondered what happened to the guys from once-iconic, ultra-political Houston hardcore band Die Young (er, sorry — Die Young (TX), that is; I completely forgot about that idiotic lawsuit). They were one of those bands that I always meant to…
Miike Snow is not what you think he is (er, they are; sorry). To call the band “poptronica” would be the most accurate genre to pigeonhole them in, but the music they make is not that simple. In ways, the sound reminds me of Peter Gabriel or…
This was the fourth installment of an exhilarating, up-and-coming summertime weekend music festival in the fair city of Houston, thrown by the preeminent local events and entertainment rag of the same name, the Free Press. In its first year, the Free Press Summer Fest featured Broken Social Scene as one of the headliners. Don’t get me wrong…
