JAMES SQUEAKY’S BelowPDX label is home to some of this city’s best noise adventuring—and most of it his own outstanding Argumentix recordings. A big surprise came, then, last year when Squeaky put out Mattress’ Eldorado, a heavy piece of weird-cabaret-dance-crazy-pop. Free of irony (and most any influences you can pin to it) Eldorado is some […]
Adam Gnade
Posted inMusic
The Scene Report
Final Column
By the time you read this, I’ll no longer be at the Mercury and Ezra Ace Caraeff will be handling all things music. If you want to get in touch with Ezroar, email him at ezra@portlandmercury.com or send your bands’ records to 605 NE 21st, #200, Portland, Oregon, 97232. For my last column I thought […]
Posted inMusic
No Rules Rules
World’s Honey Owens and Adam Forkner as One
EVERY GREAT artist or writer or band is bound to go off the map at some point. Kerouac left behind Thomas Wolfe-ian prose for craziness culminating in Old Angel Midnight‘s dreamscape-flow. Hella ditched speed prog-rock for alien noise adventures. The list goes on, those big bruisers who left their popularly accepted aesthetic for something uncharted, […]
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The Scene Report
Local Music News
When I got word last week that Someday Lounge had fired their booker, Noah Mickens, it struck me as kind of odd. If you talk to most anybody about the club, you’ll hear some impressive things about Mickens, about his vision, and his booking choices. Mickens was committed, smart, good to his acts, and his […]
Posted inBooks
The Zinester’s Guide to Portland
Iremember the lost days more than anything—driving from the Southeast to downtown, up into the hills, out to St. Johns looking for anything to make mine… a good bar, a decent place to eat, somewhere to buy records that didn’t make me feel like a cretin. I’m speaking here of a universal lostness, the heavy […]
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The Scene Report
Local Music News
If you checked out last year’s Halleluwah Festival—and I hope you did—you know how packed and intense and varied the thing was. Films, noise, psyche bands, electronic music, folksingers, tabling; it was a festival in the truest sense of the word. Now, as another Halleluwah looms in the future, event organizers Chantelle Hylton and Mike […]
Posted inMovies & TV
And I Make Do
Carmelo Sanchez’s Constant Sorrow
The heartbreaking and beautifully shot documentary Romántico follows Carmelo Sanchez, an undocumented mariachi musician, through the Mission District of San Francisco, where he sings to tables of drunken white people (“We like happy” one says, making a vague request for mood music, “like, happy romantic”) and through three rough and sorrowful years. Like most people […]
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The Thunder Rolls
Repetition, Numbers, and Drama with Me Con
SOMETHING RIDICULOUS always happens to me whenever I’m on my way to a Me Con show—and it’s kept me from seeing one of my favorite local bands live. This, then, is my big chance. Not gonna mess this one up. Oh, and for the record, the four songs bassist/singer Meghan Remy talks about in our […]
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The Scene Report
Local Music News
A new issue of Dagger is on the streets but the next one’ll be a big fucker; it’s the local zine’s 20TH ANNIVERSARY. I know, fuckin’ a, huh? Longer than you’ve been listening to music, right? I got a hold of Dagger publisher Tim Hinely, who also does some Mercury freelancing. Says Tim, “The new […]
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Shake Down
Ape Shape Party for Their Right to Fight
IN A MUSIC WORLD where self-absorbed introspection and shallow party songs move units, Portland’s Ape Shape choose substance and messages over status quo. Theirs are protest songs turned into party songs, big beats and rowdy punk pop songs co-opted from the spineless and used to forward a proactive, progressive, smart set of ideas. I talked […]
Posted inMusic
Extremely Alien
Silentist, Smart and Difficult
I’M LISTENING TO SILENTIST’S last EP, House on the Hill, as it rolls through bassy, slow-building, uneasy, dark rock that feels like pure creeping doom, but never seems to get there. It hints, it flirts, and then—grrughrrgghaa!—we’re pulverized by hellish nightmare screams and keyboards that just feel wrong. A lot of this feels wrong—like something […]
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The Scene Report
Local Music News
I was having an email “conversation” this morning with a friend about the Midas touch, about people who can’t lose and drop goodness every time they decide to put their shit out there. Going through the music calendar an hour or two later I began to see a ton of acts that have that innate […]