Paula Cole Tim Llewellyn One of the most emotionally crushing songs to be released this year comes from a somewhat surprising source: singer/songwriter Paula Cole. At least, it will come as a shock to anyone who only knows the 51-year-old for her early hits “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and “I Don’t Want To […]
Robert Ham
Robert Ham is the Mercury's former Copy Chief. He writes regularly about music, film, arts, sports, and tech. He lives semi-consciously in far SE Portland with his wife, child, and four ornery cats.
Posted inMovies & TV
First Love Review: Takashi Miike’s Tale of Tender Romance (and Beheadings)
As the title of Takashi Miike’s latest film spells out, there’s a budding relationship at the heart of First Love—a tender, tentative romance between Leo (Masataka Kubota), a boxer with a brain tumor, and Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a young, drug-addicted woman forced into prostitution to pay off the debts of her abusive father. And as […]
Posted inSports
Can the People Wanting to Bring Major League Baseball to Portland Succeed Where Others Have Failed?
Terminal 2 is bleak. On a wet, gray, late-summer morning, the 45-acre property owned by the Port of Portland—just north of downtown—feels desolate. The hulking cranes are immobile. A massive metal storage building appears, from a distance, to be completely empty. And the parking lots that skirt the edge of Northwest Front are being taken […]
Posted inMusic
With New Album Hallowed, Doom Metal Quintet Alltar Are Hitting Their Stride
Alltar Casey Braunger The odyssey that culminated in the release of Hallowed, the first album by Portland doom metal quintet Alltar (often stylized as A//TAR), followed a similar path that many of the band’s songs do. It started off slowly, with guitarist Tim Burke teasing out musical ideas—glassy, turgid melodies augmented by synth drones and […]
Posted inMusic
Interview: Colin Blunstone on the Musical Odessey of The Zombies
The Zombies When Odessey and Oracle, the second album by UK pop group The Zombies, was released in 1968, it barely made a dent commercially. And a year later, when “Time of the Season,” the fourth single taken from the record, became a worldwide hit, the band had already broken up, with its members moving […]
Posted inMusic
Upcoming Jazz, Classical, and Opera Events You Won’t Want To Miss
New Performances from Creative Music Guild, Portland Percussion Ensemble, PDX Jazz, and Portland Opera
Shahzad Ismaily With the help of our Fall Arts Guide, we’ve already filled our calendars for the next few months with performances and exhibitions that we just can’t miss. But, as is always the case, the hits just keep on coming. Our inboxes are continually getting stuffed with announcements for new events happening in the […]
Posted inFeature
A Guide to the Can’t Miss Spots of Foster-Powell
Let’s celebrate the gritty, unaffected charm of Foster-Powell
Posted inMusic
Swedish Dream Pop Quartet Hater Keep Moving Forward
Hater Paul Botwid Indie artists have long figured out the formula to sustaining a career in the wilds of the music industry: don’t slow down. Keep cranking out new material at the most fevered pace you can manage and playing as many shows as your schedule will allow. If they can’t avoid you, they might […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
TBA 2019 at First Presbyterian: Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Quiet Swells of Sound Demand Reverence
Robert Ham It’s impossible to do anything quietly within the Portland’s nearly 130-year-old First Presbyterian Church. Everything inside is made of wood: the pews, the seats, the floors, the doors. And that wood creaks and groans with the slightest shift of your body. Or if you want to leave the sanctuary unobtrusively—after listening to an […]
Posted inSports
After Four-Alarm Fire, the Fight Continues at Grand Avenue Boxing Club
Grand Avenue Boxing Club RH The smell of smoke still permeates the air around NE 84th and Russell. The majority of the buildings—and all the used cars that once sat on the block, overflow from nearby Cascade Auto—are now hollowed-out shells of their former selves. It’s the result of an August four-alarm blaze that started […]
Posted inMovies & TV
So What’cha Watching? Our Current TV and Streaming Obsessions
This Way Up, Hyperdrive, Gallery Girls, and More
This Way Up Channel 4 To steal a line from the current-best show on TV, HBO’s Succession: Here at the Mercury, we work hard, but we play soft. (Why would you play hard?) And all that soft play comes in the form of winding down in front of the tube. So what are we watching […]
Posted inTBA
Holland Andrews Talks Moving to NYC and Mixing Beauty and Dissonance On Their New Album
Holland Andrews Every decision that Holland Andrews makes isn’t arrived upon lightly. The experimental artist who records and performs under the name Like A Villain arrives at them through deep intention, serious deliberation, and a dash of gut feelings. That includes everything from shaving their head (“The cutting of the hair meant a lot of […]