In addition to running his own record label (Hiphop is Music) and sharing the stage with Ohmega Watts in Lightheaded, Portland’s Bryan Winchester has somehow found the time to release solo records under his emcee moniker Braille. If your personal golden era of hiphop begins with Arrested Development and ends when Tribe Called Quest hung […]
Ezra Ace Caraeff
Ezra Ace Caraeff is the former Music Editor for the Mercury, and spent nearly a third of his life working at the paper. More importantly, he is the owner of Olive, the Mercury’s unofficial office dog. His writing has appeared in The Fader, The Stranger, The Onion's A.V. Club, ESPN's TrueHoop network, and countless fanzines that are thankfully long out of print. He makes a mean tofu scramble and yes, Ace is really his middle name.
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Once More with Feeling
Strike Anywhere
Me and Punk don’t talk much anymore. I mean, like, we were totally close for so many years, but these days when I need that jittery spark of energy, a musical kickstart, I just listen to hiphop. Sure, there was a time when I’d lose Chuck Taylors in mosh pits (much to my mom’s chagrin), […]
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Once More with Feeling
Keane
The hardest part about disliking Keane, which I do, is drumming up the passion to do so. Normally vitriol toward a band comes easy for me, as expressing it is what I get paid to do. But Keane is a rare exception, a band that is so utterly plain and predictable, with each note more […]
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Once More With Feeling
Best of 2006, #1
Simply put, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper is not just the best album of 2006; it’s the future of music. In the wake of BitTorrent, the death of Tower Records, and just about any of the other numerous signs that the music industry is F-U-C-K-E-D, it’s clear that music as we know it is evolving and […]
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Once More with Feeling
Best of 2006, #2
The greatest skill of the Mountain Goats has always been their ability to make fictional songs about very real things. The lion’s share of early material for John Darnielle’s mostly acoustic band is supposedly all the work of his imagination, while his latest few albums were his first forays into autobiographical material. Now with Get […]
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Once More with Feeling
Best of 2006, #3
I get the Hold Steady. The references to “chill-out tents” and “party pits,” the boozing post-college bar rock, the love of pop culture, indie minutia, drugs, and Thin Lizzy—all of those things, I get. In fact—and this is not a compliment to either the band or myself—I even look like a guy who’d be in […]
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Once More with Feeling
Best of 2006, #4
This past March, by the time Ghostface Killah took the stage at Berbati’s; he was already blown out of the water. As a support act on the Fishscale tour—a thankless job which at best you’re just killing time before Ghostface decides to hit the stage—M-1 wowed the crowd with a potent mix of new solo […]
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Once More with Feeling
Best of 2006, #5
Picture a Maginot Line, one that poorly divides music in two halves. On one half there is Brand New, and on the other half there is everyone else. That is what it seems like when you discuss Brand New, a wildly successful band with a swirling mass of fans—and at the same time a band […]
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once more with feeling
Logan Whitehurst
This past Sunday, December 3, at his family’s home in Los Banos, CA, Logan Whitehurst passed away after a multi-year battle with cancer. He was 29 years old. Full disclosure states that in addition to being a close friend to Logan, my record label released albums by a band he played drums for (the Velvet […]
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Drunken Uncle
Eric Bachmann: In a Van Down by the River
IN MY HEAD, swimming around with all those other delusional thoughts of indie-rock minutia, Eric Bachmann (of Crooked Fingers, and formerly of Archers of Loaf) lives in a mansion somewhere; feet confidently perched on a mahogany desk while he counts his large stacks of indie-rock royalties. Instead, as it turns out, Bachmann has recently been […]
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Once More with Feeling
Lunchbox
Let’s face it, with fewer and fewer people actually buying music these days, it’s hard for independent musicians to climb out of the overcrowded scene and make some money at their craft. One of the surefire ways to pad your wallet is to license your music to advertisements. If done with taste (Volkswagen’s Nick Drake […]
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Once More with Feeling
The Album vs. The Single
As far as I’m concerned, commercial music as we know it is currently teetering on the cusp of collapsing entirely. The digital file, in all its iPod convenience and instant satisfaction glory, has done more damage to the actual product of music than anyone could have ever predicted. Beyond the generations who no longer associate […]