MOUNT EERIE frontman Phil Elverum is a modern-day Dante, charting and mapping metaphysical terrain and explaining it precisely. This Halloween, he’ll be bringing his wonderfully strange and intense musical gaze here to Portland town, playing two shows in a row, at the Artistery and Reed Chapel. Doubtlessly this is one of the most exciting things […]
Garett Strickland
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Appreciating M. Ward
Local Boy Makes Good, Rocks it Up a Notch
IT’S EASY TO TAKE M. Ward for granted. As is the case with most other Portland artists who have gained some national notoriety, we tend to react with jaded nonchalance. Yeah, whatever, they’re ours—who needs to be impressed? We’ve got Gus Van Sant; we’ve got Chuck Palahniuk; we’ve got M. Ward (at least we did […]
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Subtle
Obviously Awesome
A NOTE TO ALL BANDS and individual musicians alike: It doesn’t matter how talented you are in private. The performative aspects of live music can make or break a career and determine whether or not an artist is worth our hard-earned dollars. Good album? So what. If you can’t put on a good show, then […]
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Interview With Halleluwah Headliner Vashti Bunyan
MERCURY: You’re heralded as a kind of foremother of the current folk aesthetic that has blown up over the last few years. Do you think your aesthetic influenced the direction folk music has taken? VASHTI BUNYAN: It makes me smile of course to think of myself as having been any kind of influence on anything—but […]
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CocoRosieland
Decay that Reassembles
HERE’S A LITTLE SCENARIO for you: Drunk on a $4 bottle of wine, you find yourself in a part of town you’ve never been before. Residential on the edge of industrial—factories spewing up great black clouds above dead lawns covered with broken children’s toys. The houses look abandoned. The sun sets. Shadows crowd the streets. […]
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Catch that Beat!
Jona Bechtolt Spreads the Love (and the Funny)
THERE HAVE ALWAYS been certain members of the Portland community who seem practically omnipresent. Jona Bechtolt is one of those dudes. Beatmaster for the Blow, one-half of We Two and the Universe, laptop maestro of YACHT, and co-pilot for the ever-popular UrbanHonking.com, now Bechtolt has yet another title to chalk up on his resume of […]
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O’Death! O’Death!
Death is a Party—Get Buried in It!
SCARY IS FUN. We learn this fact in childhood, and it stays with us to some degree, but never quite so strongly as it did while we were learning it—sleepovers, bonfires, nights spent under covers reading books with terrifying illustrations. Ghost stories. Was there anything worse or better than being scared out of your pants […]
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Safe as Parentheses
An Interview with Zac Pennington
FORMER MERCURY music editor Zac Pennington is set to release Safe as Houses, the sophomore album from his band Parenthetical Girls, a lo-fi Spector pop outfit spiced with glockenspiel and androgyny. For the follow-up to 2004’s (((GRRRLS))), Zac (AKA Empress Preenington), was joined in the studio by Jherek Bischoff and Sam Mickens of Dead Science, […]
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Words Come Flooding
Storytime with Neko Case
IN WRITING ABOUT the latest Neko Case album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to simply type out the entire lyrics sheet in favor of attempting to distill any of the music’s quality or mood. There are songs on this album that have given me the shivers. Partially because […]
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…worms = Punk
Getting to the Horrible and Gorgeous Core
O WHAT SHAME that such a plethora of unspeakably terrible and talentless bands have made a clumsy spectacle of themselves trying to pass their efforts off as punk! Such history and offshoots—loud (C), emotive (R), whiny (A), fashionable (P)—have only served to inform B.F.E. what the word represents and means for those who know it, […]
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Cast Out the Fakers!
Rose Melberg’s Mitten-Cozy Sincerity
A QUINTESSENTIAL figure in indiepop throughout the ’90s, Rose Melberg made a big name for herself (albeit modestly) amid the fanzine-reading, familial masses, lending a strong, knitted mitten-cozy hand in popularizing the scene and genre. As a part of Tiger Trap, Go Sailor, and the Softies, she coined her own brand of sweet-voiced, sincere, and […]
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Thanksgiving!
It Is Ours, This Modest Pondering
ASK ANY MEMBER OF Portland’s creative class; it’s easy to feel envious of musician Adrian Orange. At only 20 years old, Orange (AKA Thanksgiving) has already managed nine releases and shows no sign of yielding. Co-founder of PDX’s Marriage Records, he has become one of the most notable figures to come out of the NW […]