Toro y Moi started as the solo project of Chaz Bundick, who took his solo musical endeavors to greater and greater heights of sophistication on a series of releases with the encouragement of his friend from school, Ernest Greene of Washed Out. Live, Bundick has likewise progressed from his early…
The ebullient melodies that informed the music of Ian Gassman’s old band Night Owl can be heard throughout Confluence’s new EP. But instead of reflecting that group’s more upbeat Elvis Costello vibe, these songs have an expansiveness of spirit reminiscent of recent pop bands such as Surfer Blood and the…
Marcel Everett (aka XXYYXX) may have just turned seventeen this past October, but his most recent effort, a self-titled album he released last year, is already his second. Often when we hear about teenage artists, it’s related to some kind of manufactured pop or punk. In the current era, though,…
With the recent release of the latest Toro Y Moi album, Anything in Return, Chaz Bundick should be able to transcend the chillwave label that’s been assigned to him by countless critics. Like his friend and mutual mentor Ernest Green of Washed Out, Bundick started his project as an entirely…
Many yawn-worthy bands have been inspired over the years by hard rock and metal from the ’70s and ’80s. But rest assured, there’s nothing boring about The Blackouts (due on Friday, February 22, at Jugg’z Saloon). Oh, sure, the group dishes out plenty of covers. But that’s what you do…
The Ruby Suns are the brainchild of Ryan McPhun, whose New Zealander ancestry led him to the land of his father before he joined his first band. Before that, he had played along to Nirvana in his parents’ garage. That experience, coupled with what he learned as a member of…
Kaoru Ishibashi (aka Kishi Bashi) came straight out of Berklee with a degree in film scoring and went right into performing, first with Barnum’s Kaleidoscape and then with his own group, Jupiter One. Along the way, he had stints with Regina Spektor and Sondre Lerche, and he was also a…
NEUROSIS @ SUMMIT MUSIC HALL | 2/16/13 Experiencing the rare and punishing set from Neurosis at the Summit Music Hall evoked the sensation of being in front of an oncoming freight train. But then the music itself was so powerful and felt like so many things that it was almost…
Rowboat started out as the more acoustic and folk-oriented solo project of Sam McNitt, then the singer and lyricist of Blue Million Miles. With that band, McNitt learned to transform acoustic songs into heady, often aggressive space rock, but his words always seemed to come from a place of refined…
OM @ LARIMER LOUNGE |2/13/12 It was impossible not to be moved last night by the music of OM, as the visceral, low-end sounds moved through your body and the music hit you and washed around you like a physical force. The mixture of those chthonic tones, with the clatter…
On “Disappear 1,” which opens Rowboat’s Of Disappearing, Sam McNitt displays a keen gift for articulating the paradoxical delicacy and intensity of certain emotions. The crushing sense of loss conveyed in that song is both comforting and unnerving: It’s as though the feelings being addressed were too overwhelming to endure…
Doro Pesch was the charismatic frontwoman of the ’80s German metal band Warlock. With power and confidence that were rare at the time, Pesch, the first woman to front a band at the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival, possessed a stirring, sometimes animalistic wail. Warlock split in 1987, two years…
One of the few heavy bands with a genre-transcending appeal, Oakland’s Neurosis forged an impressive sonic evolution across several decades. Starting out as a political crust/hardcore band in 1985, by the time of its 1992 album — the epochal Souls at Zero — Neurosis was on the path to creating…
You could be excused for expecting an outfit named Warhawk to be a metal band. But while these guys clearly share influences with many metal merchants — you’ll hear a bit of Black Sabbath’s edgy darkness and more than a dash of Pentagram’s gritty boogie — they sound more like…
I don’t lie in my music,” says Danny Vincennie. “I don’t exaggerate shit, and if it didn’t happen to me, you’re not going to hear about it.” Vincennie, who has been performing under the moniker Extra Kool since going solo after the 2006 split of his long-running Optik Fusion Embrace…
THE WHO @ PEPSI CENTER |2/12/13 Pete Townshend’s first windmill of the night last night at the Pepsi Center came during “The Real Me.” Seeing the famous windup in person is an entirely different experience from merely listening to Townshend’s fretwork on the recordings, which is exciting and energetic in…
Founded in 1985 by a group of teenage friends who had been part of the Bay Area hardcore scene, Neurosis was never just a conventional band. Dabbling in heady ideas and archetypes of the human imagination, Neurosis is one of the most influential metal bands of the last two decades,…
OM first formed when Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius got together a handful of years after their old band Sleep parted ways in the late ’90s. The idea was to create a project that used rhythms to convey meaning in a fashion akin to Tibetan devotional music or Gregorian chants…
Known for a diverse music scene, Memphis, Tennessee has become known for its punk and garage rock scene, thanks to acts like the Oblivions, the Reatards and the bands championed by Goner Records. Ex-Cult came out of that punk world but ended up making the kind of rock and roll…
The Vaccines formed in London in 2010, when Justin Young shelved his solo project, Jay Jay Pistolet, and got together with some friends who had also played gigs with him under his old moniker. The new band came out of punk, and its songs have an undeniably raw energy despite…
VELVET ACID CHRIST @ CASSELMAN’S BAR AND VENUE | 2/9/13 At one point or another during Velvet Acid Christ’s set, Bryan Erickson became winded, and he joked about how it was the altitude. He then said it was probably that he was out of shape because of too much eating,…
THE PHOTO ATLAS @ HI-DIVE | 2/8/13 The wide-ranging sounds of “Memory Like a Sinking Ship” was one of the high points of this set from the Photo Atlas. The way the band’s usual wiry energy was threaded together with colorful, incandescent moody passages and hanging melodies around confessional, self-effacing…
