Big Day Coming is the new book by music journalist/WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow that tells the story of indie rock as it evolves through the lifespan of Yo La Tengo. Jarnow paints a picture not only of a band’s lifespan or of a genre’s inception, but of multiple decades of rock n roll history, music journalism, and the city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Yo La Tengo, being a band so inextricable from their home venue, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the place […]
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. […]
You’ve Got The World By The Balls: An Interview With The Crowd’s Jim Kaa
In 1979, up in LA, Germs released the legendary GI. A year later, X’s incredible Los Angeles declared itself. In San Francisco: The Avengers happened. It was, we know now, a seminal year for California punk and hardcore. In Huntington Beach, a middle-class suburb in Orange County, CA, this compilation called Beach Blvd. was released in 1979. I found it on the Internet in the early ’00s. The record boasted the best tunes from Orange County bands Rik L Rik (whose […]
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 […]
An Ian Svenonius Zine
One of the few rules I live by is that anything involving Ian Svenonius is going to be good. The guy has never been in a bad band and he dresses better than just about anybody on the planet.
Hating Mississippi and Fearing the Government: A Conversation With Michael Robbins
Michael Robbins really hates living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The poet, whose book Alien vs. Predator was recently released by Penguin, is teaching there until June, and then he’s getting out of dodge. “Hattiesburg smells like a sewer,” he emphatically told me in the middle of our conversation. “You can go online and Google the Hattiesburg smell, it’s an actual thing. I think they actually have wooden water wheels to aerate the sewage. There’s just way too much sewage to properly aerate […]
Three Awesome Things at Once: Twins, Harps, Game of Thrones
Twin sisters playing the Game of Thrones theme on dueling harps can fall under the categories of Enchanting, Kinda Creepy, Kinda Awesome, Really Awesome and Nerdiest Things Ever.
The Sarah Records Story
Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes started Sarah Records around the time that The Smiths called it quits in 1987. A year later Moz gave us Viva Hate and Marr found his way back to music with Electronic, but the death of the most important English band of their generation, along with the release of the famous c86 album, helped nurture the seeds of the new generation of indie pop. With releases by bands like Another Sunny Day, The Field Mice, and Heavenly, Sarah Records […]