[Find the Mercury's 25th Anniversary Issue (in print) near you by using this handy-dandy map, and read all of our anniversary stories here.—eds.]

Portland has gone through myriad musical peaks and valleys since the founding of the Mercury in the year of our lord, 2000. Bands, venues, festivals, labels, and record stores have come and gone in the last 25 years, though what has remained a constant is Portland’s intense DIY music spirit. It’s an energy that waxes with the likes of AminĂ©, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Dead Moon, Gossip, Grouper, Macintosh Plus, Michael Hurley, and the Thermals receiving acclaim outside of Portland, but wanes due to unwelcome things like Portlandia, a population boom (due in no small part to Portlandia), skyrocketing rent, poor government stewardship, the pandemic, etc. 

Thankfully for us all, the music editors at the Mercury have been there through thick and thin. I remember pouring over Ezra Ace Caraeff and Ned Lannanmann pieces when I first moved to town trying to find the best bands, the best venues
 anywhere where one could see good live music and drink copious amounts of booze. Though those drinking days are over (for me), I would never take back seeing Pierced Arrows at the Know, or Scout Niblett at Valentine’s, or Guantanamo Baywatch at East End. 

Thanks to all of the past Mercury music editors, a lot of us were exposed to music we’d never have heard otherwise. And because we still love them, we asked the whole gaggle if they had any interest in writing an album review for a record that dropped during their tenure. We got a few takers, here’s what they whipped up:

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (2000 - 2004)

Peril & Panic by The Intima 

The Intima was, lowkey, Portland’s (and Olympia’s) best band of the early 2000s—all beautiful guitar whorls and percussive violin—a tight melange of post-punk chaos that encapsulated the dissonance of the post-WTO, post-9/11 Iraq War era. They were also prescient: Peril & Panic was a warning about the climate emergency to come, three years before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth tried to wake up the US public to the fact that fossil-fuel dependence will soon burn all living species to a crisp. This was an era in Portland in which activists were setting fire to Humvees and chaining themselves to trees; in which many in the Pacific Northwest were woken up to the atrocities in Gaza after Olympia resident and peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed there by an IDF bulldozer; in which the best shows were in random basements and backyards and art spaces that probably weren’t up to fire code, because everyone was really focused on making music a community, not a commodity. The Intima embodied the spirit of grassroots activism, DIY punk, fierce intellect, and pure rage that was animating Portland at that moment. It sounded apocalyptic because it felt like it, too.

I saw the Intima play maybe a jillion times in so many basements, totally transfixed by their intensity and beauty, but Peril & Panic sounded muddy and never really captured that feeling—until a recent remastering and reissue on Post-Present Medium, a now-crucial LA label first created in 2001 to release a 7” by the Intima. This music deserved this treatment, each instrument clear and shambolically precise the way I remember them—a band whose discordant guitars could have spiraled off into chaos if not for the super-tight rhythm section of bassist Themba Lewis and drummer Alex Neerman. And after two decades I can finally understand vocalist/guitarist Andrew Neerman’s lyrics? So thank you for that. “From exile / we visit / a well packaged attraction / air-conditioned detachment,” he sings as if wailing into a bleak and empty night, on “From Exile”—one of their best songs and a signature of their Y2K shows.

Across the album, Nora Danielson’s warm harmonies remind us that amid the band’s tornado impulses, this is music rooted in profound humanness. Great fucking album. 

 

Ezra Ace Caraeff (2007 - 2011)

Descending Shadows by Pierced Arrows

I think about death a lot.

My apologies, I feel like some clarification is needed here: I think about death as much as anyone else, I suppose. But being of that age where I am firmly bookended with both the endless life of a young child and caretaking for an elderly parent who I am slowly losing to the unforgiving grasp of dementia, the spectre of death never seems to linger too far.

Fred Cole died in 2017. If you are reading this, specifically this, you are already well aware of his legacy in Portland music. Or perhaps, you just know Dead Moon as a logo on the most omnipresent T-shirt in our town. Both are perfectly acceptable.

Fifteen years ago this paper dispatched me deep into Clackamas to sit at a kitchen table with Cole and his wife Toody, the pair behind Dead Moon (the band and the shirt) and, at the time, their offshoot Pierced Arrows. The latter of which is the criminally underrated final chapter of their longtime love affair with both punk rock, and each other. We talked about what ended up being their final album, the excellent Descending Shadows, but mostly we talked about life. And death. And they showed me the sweetest pictures of their grandkids. I expected the very bedrock of punk rock, but what I got was a gentle conversation at a kitchen table. Plus, if memory serves, there were cookies.

Last year, I took my then 9-year-old to see Waxahatchee at Pioneer Courthouse Square. Toody Cole opened. Her solo shows are a rare treat in the wake of her husband’s passing, but there she was, singing songs for a crowd that seemed casually unaware of what was happening at that moment. And after Cole’s set, my daughter summoned me to the merchandise tent, where I assumed she’d want some sort of Waxatchee trinket to take home. With the firmest resolve of a child skillfully extracting souvenirs from a parent, her steadfast demand was for a T-shirt.

It’s been nearly a year since that moment, but my daughter’s Dead Moon T-shirt is still her favorite. And while she’s never screamed along to “It’s O.K.” at a sweat-soaked Satyricon show, nor is she aware of the abrasive glory within Descending Shadows, I feel like the Cole’s would approve of this moment: This bookend that we’ll all, if we’re lucky, feel some day.

 

Ned Lannamann (2011 - 2015)

DRRT by Lost Lander

“You can never go home,” sings Matt Sheehy during the climax of “Afraid of Summer,” a familiar warning about the dangers of revisiting the past. It’s one of several songs from DRRT—the 2012 debut album from Sheehy’s band Lost Lander—that grapple with finding one’s place in the universe and locating the balance between past, present, and future.

When I call Sheehy to talk about the album, he just happens to be on a walk with DRRT’s producer, Brent Knopf. Back then, the two spent months turning Sheehy’s rough demos into DRRT’s expansive, art-rock panoramas, then enlisted more than a dozen musician friends to add to the canvas.

“The main thing that I remember from that time period is just how much of a paradise Portland was for artists,” says Sheehy. “And I’ve wondered if that was just the time of life that we were in, or if there was something special about the city at that time—or maybe both.”

On DRRT, the folk-inflected sound of Sheehy’s 2008’s solo album Tigerphobia is leavened by purposeful electric guitar, fuzzed-out bass, drums that traipse or thunder at the appropriate moments, and the occasional orchestral flourish, topped by Knopf’s sophisticated array of keyboards. It was easy to imagine Sheehy, a professional forester by day, conceiving the album’s reflections on mortality while roaming deep into the Northwest woods, where old-growth trees conceal ancient mysteries and constellations peer down from overhead.

“There was this idea that got latched onto with DRRT, of mixing the synthetic world with this very earthy, sort of, soul—the acoustic-guitar-in-the-forest kind of thing,” says Sheehy. That rough theme of a natural world colliding with a technical one—the CD package even folded out into a make-it-yourself planetarium, flashlight not included—came at a particular inflection point in Sheehy’s own life; his mother had recently passed away, and his engagement broke up right as the sessions were concluding. “I was like, ‘Hey Brent, can I sleep on your couch?’” says Sheehy.

DRRT was self-released in January 2012, and more than 100 live shows followed that year, with Lost Lander morphing into a band that included keyboardist/vocalist Sarah Fennell, whom Sheehy married in 2016. “I feel like I achieved a lot of dreams with this record,” says Sheehy. “I got to live these peak experiences with these people that I love very much, and it was all because things came together around this record.”

 

Nolan Parker (2025 - ???)

Unlawful Assembly by C Powers

Portland is alive right now in ways it hasn’t been for over a decade. Music gatherings like Homie Fest and Project Pabst are back after extended sabbaticals, new venues are popping up left and right, old venues including Shanghai Tunnel and Black Water are getting new leases on life (literally), and that most beautiful of Portland occurrences has slowly but surely begun again: Portland’s 5 pm Eastside band practice barrage. In the early to mid-2010’s you couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks without hearing a practicing band or a DJ pulling together a new mix. It was truly magical hearing the vocals and clarinet of Holland Andrews, FKA Like A Villain, ascending to loftier heights just a few short blocks away from Yob almost blowing stacks in search of deeper vibrations. 

Though I’ve only held the music editor position since February, there has been a grip of powerful new Portland releases in that time, both by seasoned vets and new kids on the block: Alien Boy, Bleach, Buddy Wynkoop, Casual Hex, Conspire, Crystal Quartez, Darci Phenix, Dreckig, elijah jamal asani, Herr God, House of Warmth, La Isla Electronica, Larry Peace-Love Yes, Left On Read, Machine Country, Manslaughter777, Patricia Wolf, Roseblood, Swinging, and Trans Panic to truly name only a few. 

The album that feels most attuned to this exact moment, this massive swell of Portland energy is Unlawful Assembly by C Powers. Relatively new to Portland, Cecilia “C” Powers is not only a prolific artist, she is also profoundly active in various abolition movements, tenant organizing, and the fight for Palestinian liberation. Released March 19, 2025 on New York’s Sorry Records, Unlawful Assembly is a demand for Palestinian liberation, as well as the abolition of government-funded terrorist organizations including ICE, the police, and the prison and military industrial complexes. Powers uses field-recorded samples collected from recent Portland protests emphasizing not only police brutality, but the collective power of proletariate organizing as well. The resonant samples are laid on top of EDM ranging from the Arca-esque trance of album opener “Defund and Abolish,” to the UK garage protest anthem “I Will Not Live In A Fascist State.” One can only assume that the repeated refrain of “fuck the police” on her “Lombard” track was sampled from a protest on Portland’s iconic N. Lombard Street—and that is an exceedingly beautiful thing. 

C Powers and Portland music are just getting started, see you out there!