The Tough & LovelyTues October 18Berbati’s Pan10 SW 3rd Why is the music of modern love generally so unromantic? All that cheating, lying, deceiving, crying—plus the long-distance shit, the dating sudden deaths, the two-timing devils. Maybe such a fantasy is just a Grease-induced hallucination, but it all used to sound so much simpler in song—the […]
Jennifer Maerz
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Dungen and Dragons
Sweden’s New Cult Kings Psych Out
It’s rarely good news when a story about a band sidelines into their relationship with a major label. For all the support the big guns supply their rosters, there’s also the horror stories about industry purse strings becoming nooses, strangling
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The Way the World Went Dark
NIN’s King of Pain
Nine Inch Nails Sat Sept 24 Rose Garden 1 Center Court Certain albums epitomize adolescence. My awkward years are best remembered to the sound of Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine, a cassette coursing with so much bitter, bilious fluid, it practically corroded my stereo—both from the amount of venomous energy it helped […]
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Rock in Shining Armor
Diamond Nights’ 14-Karat Hooks
Diamond Nights Mon July 18 Doug Fir 830 E Burnside Diamond Nights are all too familiar with confectionizing hard rock, having earlier this year released an excellent debut EP, Once We Were Diamonds, that sprinkles sweetener on galloping twin-lead guitars, lyrics like “never thought that a popsicle chick could taste so good,” and delivering deep, […]
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Crash of the Titan
Ezee Tiger: One-Man Band
Ezee Tiger Sat June 25 Acme SE 8th & Main When I say that Ezee Tiger is a one-man band, I don’t mean it in the style of, say, some major-label outcast doing his best Dylan on the old acoustic. Or that Ezee tickles the iMac under a fluorescent glow. I mean he’s a one-man […]
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Psychedelic Circus
Jennifer Gentle’s Rabbit Hole Dementia
Jennifer Gentle Sat April 9 Berbati’s Pan 10 SW 3rd The modern world holds few terrestrial boundaries for Jennifer Gentle’s psychedelic spectrum. Sure, the band members’ passports are Italian and 21st-century dates grace their CDs, but their music easily traverses time and continents. It floats like dandelion seeds between momentary placeholders, creating a delicate patchwork […]
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Haunting Hibernation
Grizzly Bear’s Homespun Cave-Core
Grizzly Bear Mon Feb 28 Holocene 1001 SE Morrison Despite the name, Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear don’t flash piercing fangs in song; they’re a different sort of animal, more befitting of the cozy warmth of self-imposed hibernation than snarling assaults. Frontman Edward Droste’s hushed 6:00 a.m. confessions hang in a delicate fog over the gossamer instrumentation […]
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Mt So-Called Band
Aqueduct Scores One for the Lovelorn
Aqueduct Fri Feb 25 Loveland 320 SE 2nd Ave These days, networks are practically spawned by selling sensitive indie soundtracks, what with Scrubs releasing a comp featuring Guided by Voices and the Shins performing on Gilmore Girls. One Northwest songwriter, David Terry, is becoming well versed in the musician friendly world of licensing material for […]
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Mountain Man
Stephen McBean’s Classic-Rock Patchworks
Black Mountain Sun Feb 13 Dunes 1905 NE MLK For every future-focused rock movement there’s a complementary group still tinkering with the past. Vancouver’s Stephen McBean is unapologetically tethered to the latter classification, as the Vietnam era flashes like amber-tinted slides across the buttes and bluffs in his bands, Pink Mountaintops and Black Mountain. Both […]
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Rough Riders
RTX Kick Up Dust
RTX Sat Jan 22 Dour Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside Throughout the ’90s, Royal Trux were a rock anomaly. Barely tethered to this green Earth by twin trash-punk junkies Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the group swept up particles of mystic space rock, Stonesy twang, and cracked, guttural utterings across 10 static-deluged recordings. Broken blues […]
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Rattle and Hum
Big Business Bust Out
Big Business Fri Jan 7 Sabala’s Mt Tabor 4811 SE Hawthorne “I think as a kid growing up in a small town, you’re looking for total obliteration,” says Coady Willis, the brick-fisted drummer for the gigantic-sounding Seattle twosome Big Business. “The Melvins, and music like that, was [perfect for] when I just wanted something that […]
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Pearly Gates of Rock
Death From Above 1979 Walk Among Us
Death From Above 1979 Fri Nov 12 Dante’s 1 SW 3rd Some bands careen into your life with the subtlety of a J. G. Ballard fender-bender and refuse to clean up the carnage, ending up on your iPod in such heavy rotation you can almost hear the damn player roll its eyes every time you […]