Band Booking: Reading About Jung and American Legends with The Casket Girls

Savannah’s The Casket Girls play hypnotic, hallucinatory pop music. Their new album True Love Kills the Fairy Tale moves from ethereal to booming and back again, hitting the right pop-song beats but never letting the listener get too complacement.  In advance of a pair of shows in New York next week, I checked in with members Phaedra Greene, Elsa Greene, and Ryan Graveface to learn about the group’s history, their use of the studio, and more.

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Band Booking: Butchers & Bakers on Noise-Pop and Russell Hoban

Butchers & Bakers

Earlier this year, we published “Tiny Heel,” a story written by Rebecca Keith. Keith is also the singer and keyboard player of Butchers & Bakers, whose latest 7″ ably balances pop hooks with noisier elements. I caught up with Keith and guitarist Eli Jacobowitz via email to discuss songs about brunch, literary influences, and what the future holds for this band.

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Band Booking: Notes on Film and Futures From Cold Beat’s Hannah Lew

Discussing the work of Hannah Lew can lead to sheer exhaustion, or possibly envy — besides making haunting, catchy, jarring music, Lew is also a filmmaker, and has directed videos for several of her contemporaries. She is probably best-known for her work in Grass Widow; her new band, Cold Beat, occupies a similar position, blending decades’ worth of pop know-how with a deeply punk urgency. They recently released their debut single, and it was with this that our conversation began before […]

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Band Booking: Jake Bellows on Borges, Backing Vocals, and More

New Ocean, the new album from Jake Bellows, is a quietly beguiling folk-rock record. It’s the small details that make this particularly captivating: a blissful guitar line; a backing vocal that avoids expectations. Ultimately, it makes for a fresh-sounding album, rooted in certain traditions and rootless in others. If Bellows’s name sounds familiar, it’s likely through his work as frontman for Omaha’s Neva Dinova; Bellows has since relocated to Los Angeles. I caught up with him via email to ask […]

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Band Booking: Talking Warm Fuzzies with Ell V Gore

Ell V Gore is a Toronto goth-rock band who’ve been churning out rockabilly and no wave-inflected tunes for about three years now. Starting off as Brides, a sprawling multi-instrumental project combining brass instruments with more conventional rock instrumentation, the group, led by Elliot Jones, has since become a more stripped down affair, and has started to gain recognition since the release of the EP Sex Static over the summer. When I was living in Toronto, I saw different versions of Brides play […]

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Band Booking: Talking Chiptune and Cyberpunk with Infinity Shred

Last week, the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto V was released, making almost $1 billion on its first day. Coupled with the fact that gross revenue from video game sales eclipsed that of the film industry in 2005, it seems logical that video game culture would have begun making inroads into other realms of pop culture. Digital music has always made reference to the midi tracks of early video games; as technology changes the tools we use to make music, the impulse to revel […]

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Band Booking: Talking Pynchon and DeLillo with Grooms

I saw Grooms play their album release party for their new full-length Infinity Caller at Death By Audio on August 31st. It was maybe the first time I’d been to the venue since the summer began where it didn’t feel like a sauna. The gig was full without being packed in a way that would encourage belligerence. Like a lot of their 90’s throwback peers, Grooms and their fan base nurture a kind of slacker-oriented, music nerd atmosphere at their shows, […]

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Band Booking: Talking Indonesian Folktales with Trabajo

The best music makes you hear sounds in new ways, reframing and re-contextualizing the components of a song so that they create something novel and hopefully unique. In the same way that David Bowie took funk music and gave it an arch, English twist, good music proceeds in a zig-zag, sourcing known materials to produce something that moves the art form forward. It’s rare enough to find a band that genuinely tries to do that, and that’s totally fine. A lot […]

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