Dent May put out one of the few truly great ukulele-driven records with 2009’s The Good Feeling Music Of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, and then he packed the instrument away forever. His latest album, Do Things, is an exercise in the art of soulful pop music (think Philly soul and Orange Juice), and is maybe the only true party album to come out this year. I talked to Dent about the recording process, moving back to Mississippi from New York, […]
Band Booking: Like Pioneers
Chicago’s Like Pioneers have a fantastic new album out, titled Oh, Magic. It’s full of the sort of cathartic indie rock that, when done well, I dig like catnip. It doesn’t hurt that 3/5 of the band previously played together in the excellent Bound Stems, or that Jessie Woghin previously made music in the fantastic The Narrator. In advance of a pair of NYC shows this week (June 21st at Cameo Gallery and June 22nd at Pianos), I caught up with Woghin […]
Band Booking: Wooden Wand
James Jackson Toth plays taut, haunted music with folk roots and a darkness all its own. Most of his work has been released under the name Wooden Wand; most recently, his album Briarwood got the deluxe reissue treatment from Fire Records. And it turns out that the guy’s a prodigious reader, able to smartly discuss musical histories and work from Barry Hannah and William Gass in equal measure.
Band Booking: Night Manager
Night Manager is one of those bands that kind of throws you off the first time you hear them. With Caitlin Seager’s clear-as-a-bell vocals sitting atop a fuzzy guitar canopy of noise produced by Ezana Edwards, Chris Clarke and David Tassy, you’d be forgiven for imagining that this was another 60’s throwback surf rock band. The backbeat provided by Jordyn Blakely helps to reinforce that impression when the sound first hits your eardrums. However, anyone who listens to them for […]
Band Booking: Broken Water
So hey: Olympia, Washington. Yeah, it’s the city from which a bunch of your favorite bands emerged, but it’s also still home to a thriving music scene. The generally excellent three-piece Broken Water, along with the likes of Milk Music, are among the groups helping to keep the city’s scene a vital one. The trio, composed of Jon Hanna, Kanako Pooknyw, and Abigail Ingram, recently released a pair of albums: Tempest, on Hardly Art, and the self-released Seaside and Sedmikrásky. […]
Band Booking: Total Slacker
Total Slacker is a Brooklyn garage rock band based out of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Composed of Tucker Rountree on guitar and vocals, Emily Oppenheimer on bass and vocals and Ross Condon on drums, the group fuses fuzzy alt-rock melodies with humorous lyrics and psychedelic imagery. As one of the best-known acts from Brooklyn’s DIY landscape, the group will serve as scene ambassadors on their upcoming tour of the east coast and Midwest. I caught up with Tucker and Emily last week, […]
Band Booking: K-Holes
K-Holes can creep you out. Their debut album, released by HoZac in 2010, was a dense slab of sinister garage-punk accented with the occasional howl of a saxophone. Dismania, recently released by Hardly Art, takes that same basic sound and expands on it: opener “Child” has enough of a doomy crunch to suggest that K-Holes might well have a metal album in them. And yet they can also keep things energetic, with songs like “Nightshifter” adding an ominous note to […]
Band Booking: Christopher O’Riley
Christopher O’Riley, host of NPR’s From the Top, has recorded several albums of solo piano, including collections of music written by Radiohead and Nick Drake. His latest album, Shuffle. Play. Listen., a collaboration with cellist Matt Haimovitz, is a wide-ranging collection, encompassing everything from Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne to Blonde Redhead’s “Misery Is a Butterfly.” He’s also composed music to accompany a sequence of Anton Chekhov short stories, and — as I’ve learned — may have a collaboration with Mark Z. […]