BORIS @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 5/14/12 The fact that you could hear Atsuo Mizuno’s drums or his hype-man shouts at all is a testament to whoever was running sound last night at the Bluebird. With two full Sunn stacks powering Takeshi Ohtani’s guitar and a full stack and a half…
Maria Bamford has long been a comedian of choice for those who enjoy offbeat humor grounded in absurdist, sharply observed character sketches. Over the last decade and a half, Bamford has raised her public profile with appearances on the Comedians of Comedy Tour, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!…
Prince became a household name after the release of his third album, 1982’s 1999. Over the years, his perfectly realized blend of rock, pop, funk and jazz has proved equally popular with audiences and critics. Throughout the ’80s, Prince released hit records that broke genre barriers, not just in terms…
With her menagerie of voices and characters and keen insight into human psychology, comedian Maria Bamford has been a darling of fans of smart, eccentric humor since the early 1990s. Bamford began her career while in college, and her cartoonish portrayals of secretarial and temporary work, as well as glimpses…
There was a time in the ’80s when certain films had a gritty realism infused with a dreamlike, introspective quality — William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, even Brian De Palma’s Body Double. That sense of disembodied hyper-reality, in which you’re…
Jim James is probably best known as the frontman of My Morning Jacket, a band that crossed over from the underground to the mainstream by virtue of its haunting yet richly melodic and expansive songs. The success of MMJ has given James the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded artists such…
The Dillinger Escape Plan came out of the hardcore scene of Morris Plains, New Jersey, in 1997. Former members of Arcane — including Dillinger’s remaining original member, guitarist Ben Weinman — got together and wrote songs with a savagely mathematical precision, adding a more adventurous sonic spirit than what was…
Prince became a household name after the release of his third album, 1982’s 1999. Over the years, his perfectly realized blend of rock, pop, funk and jazz has proved equally popular with audiences and critics. Throughout the ’80s, Prince released hit records that broke genre barriers, not just in terms…
In recent years, while way too many bands were opting for a more stripped-down form of rock and roll via the garage/surf route in an attempt to make music from a more pure and primal place, Negative Degree (due at the hi-dive on Sunday, May 12) was embracing hardcore. And…
Yngwie Malmsteen is a guitar god known for his supremely technical fretwork. The virtuosic guitarist burst into the world of international music in 1984 with Rising Force. At the age of seven, Malmsteen says, he saw a documentary about the death of Jimi Hendrix and was so taken by Hendrix’s…
Seris is a mathy metal band with a footing in technical death metal that has found a way to blend all of that into something far more accessible than either would suggest. There is a groove and fluidity underlying the band’s sound that gives the heaviness a paradoxical kind of…
CRYSTAL CASTLES @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 5/2/13 Last night’s Crystal Castles show at the Gothic was not one for epileptics, with all the rapid flashing, seizure-inducing colored lights. The vivid visualizations kept pace with the accelerating tempos and deftly matched the dynamism and mood of the music itself. The blossoming…
SERIS @ HERMAN’S HIDEAWAY | SAT, 5/4/13 Seris plays technical metal without trying to splice in another genre of music willy nilly. Melati Olivia is the kind of singer that isn’t just strong but versatile. The rhythm section of Robert Jepsen and Cody Goodman pound out rhythms in precise sequence,…
Dreadnought manages to meld fairly disparate sonic elements into a coherent whole. Inspired by the image and power of capital ships, in the era before aircraft made battleships and their ilk obsolete, Dreadnought (due at the Marquis Theater on Friday, May 3) creates music that, though heavy and dark, has…
The title of its latest album notwithstanding, School Knights has never put out anything even remotely lethargic. Here, intricately textured guitar work practically effervesces throughout, with bright melodies that rush by in an energizing breeze — a lot like Deerhunter, if that band’s songs were played at double time. Even…
Maybe “New American Weird” just means that you play constantly evolving music rooted in folk and take it to interesting, cosmic places without consciously trying to go psychedelic. If that’s the case, then Devendra Banhart is exactly that. Never fitting easily into any genre straitjacket, his catalogue can easily confound,…
This Toronto trio emerged in 2008 and did what more bands in this day and age should: It developed its music and overall aesthetic, then turned the results into songs that the band actually seems excited to play. Sure, the noise-rock roots from the ’80s and ’90s are there, and…
RODRIGUEZ @ 1STBANK CENTER | 4/30/13 When Rodriguez played “Sugar Man,” the song that inspired the title of the movie that brought him very much back into the public consciousness, there was something mythical about the song. The performance matched the mystique. On stage, Rodriguez is gracious, gentle and humble…
GASLIGHT ANTHEM @ OGDEN THEATRE |4/29/12 Gaslight Anthem performed last night with a fluidity and emotional power worthy of peers like Hot Rod Circuit or Hot Water Music or perhaps even the E Street Band. Gaslight is clearly informed by punk, as edges of the band’s guitar sound recalled Hüsker…
A. Tom Collins, the five-piece band fronted by Aaron Collins, has a sound that’s equal parts ragtime, honky tonk blues and tin pan alley. The outfit, which has smartly left its rough edges intact, is driven by Collins’s piano and impassioned vocals, and while the act may teeter on the…
“In the Waves,” the opening track on the new Shady Elders EP, has a lonely, almost wistful breeziness, with crystalline guitar tones cutting a simple figure while another guitar sound flutters and swells around them. “Schoolmate,” meanwhile, features ethereal guitar work with notes that ring out and melodies that recall…
With a name that translates roughly to “stranglehold” in Norwegian, this sextet has spent the last six years cultivating a sound that feels like a mixture of black metal and the Stooges, Cave In and Converge. Fittingly, the frontman of that last act, Kurt Ballou, produced Kvelertak’s latest album, 2013’s…
