Like a lot of young punkers, Red Vs. Black drummer Sam Tallent and bassist Clay Dehaan were infected with the bug when they connected with early hardcore bands. But unlike many of their peers, Tallent and Dehaan don’t treat their music like a cultural accessory to cast off in early…
WINDOWS With Temples and Epileptinomicon Ash From Sweat House | February 26, 2011 The flier for this show said, in no uncertain terms, “NO COPS” and, as it turns out, none did appear to show up at the house where the event was being held. It was mostly an intimate…
SWANS With Wooden Wand 02.22.11 | Summit Music Hall Last night, James Jackson Toth, aka Wooden Wand, was joined by two other guitar players — Brian Lowery and William Tyler. And although there were three guitars and the guys were playing through Orange amps, they did not produce a huge…
Emerging from the no-wave scene in the New York underground in 1982, Swans became known for music that was forbidding, terrifyingly intense in its execution and lyrically uncompromising in its depiction of the darker side of human existence. Although an influence on industrial music and much of post-punk thereafter, Swans…
After starting Abe Vigoda in high school, Michael Vidal and Juan Velazquez took their fledgling project and unintentionally helped spawn the so-called “tropical punk-rock” genre. The band’s joyous live shows and reverb-drenched guitar sound — which is part surf rock, part psychedelic and part noisy punk, among other things —…
“Boo” starts this odd collection of ambient tracks from David Britton with what sounds like mechanical cicadas in the distance under the strains of a ukulele treated with an effect to sharpen its tone while trying to find a melody. Each song is an exercise in drones both ambient and…
With vocals that sound like an evil, croaking frog over a torrent of percussion and an assault of guitars, and with a bass that has dynamics not unlike nests of churning mutant wasps, Immortal helped to define the sound and aesthetics of Norwegian black metal from its earliest days. While…
You could be excused for thinking every metal band out of L.A. did its time on the Sunset Strip. Thankfully, Elitist is too young for all that nonsense and isn’t really made from the same stuff anyway. Sounding like a true alloy of crust punk, hardcore and death metal, Elitist…
Miracleman started life as the British Captain Marvel in the 1950s. But he got a makeover in the early 1980s when he benefited from the brilliantly dark imagination of Alan Moore. Later, Neil Gaiman picked up where Moore left off and imbued the series with his own genius for the…
Yeah, the guys in Smith Westerns (due tonight at the Larimer Lounge) are young, and their attitude on stage and in interviews seems to be filled to the brim with youthful exuberance with a touch of bravado. But none of that would matter if this Chicago band didn’t write fundamentally…
As a rare drummer and frontwoman, Dee Dee Penny (aka Kristin Gundred) was part of experimental pop band Grand Ole Party. Once that band split, Gundred took it upon herself to learn how to write songs on an instrument well outside her comfort zone. When that experiment seemed to work…
BLACK LAMB With Audio Dream Sister 02.19.11 | Bender’s Tavern It’s anyone’s guess — well, except for those close to the band — when Audio Dream Sister last went on stage. Seems like it’s been at least a few years. As the second to last band of Pit Fest II…
Jazz fusion can be a dicey proposition these days if you focus more on the jamming than the songwriting. But Supercollider has avoided all of that, coming up with something more akin to Weather Report or Head Hunters-era Herbie Hancock; throw in a bit of the livelier end of Dave…
MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO 02.15.11 | Summit Music Hall It would be easy for any electronic artist to be incredibly boring live no matter the quality of the material. With this in mind, Jack Dangers and Benjamin Stokes of Meat Beat Manifesto make up for any possible visual shortcomings with one…
BEST COAST With Waaves and No Joy 02.14.11 | Fox Theatre Opening the show with “Ghost Blonde,” No Joy provided the perfect blend of noisy garage rock and dream pop. The title track to the group’s debut full-length is one of its best songs and a strong introduction to the…
Few bands have had as wide-ranging and unlikely an influence as Swans. Starting in 1982 with an early incarnation that included Thurston Moore, the band created music that was like the perfect evocation of anguish and desperate release, with brutally pounding rhythms and seething, atonal sounds to accompany singer Michael…
Considering its disparate parts — spastic, nearly chaotic song dynamics with angular but wild guitar antics, asymmetrical drumming, a bass that locks in with its eccentric rhythms, and a singer who can’t really carry a tune in any conventional sense — Deerhoof shouldn’t work. And yet the act manages to…
Going by the moniker “Dee Dee” these days, Kristin Gundred once fronted experimental pop band Grand Ole Party. After that band split in 2009, Dee Dee formed Dum Dum Girls and dispensed with the post-punk of her former band in favor of the kind of singing and songwriting that allows…
If Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds had been born in the ’80s or ’90s, they probably would have written their songs entirely in private and recorded them on their computers before unleashing them on the public. The music of Nick Jones (performing under the Thrifty Astronaut moniker this Thursday, February…
Sounding like the unexpected but inevitable pairing of Phil Spector-produced wall-of-noise pop and the free-spirited sonic experimentation of early shoegaze bands like Telescopes, Medicine and My Bloody Valentine, Montreal’s No Joy came to the attention of fans and critics alike on the strength of its debut seven-inch, “No Summer/No Joy,”…
There is a cinematic feel to every track on this release. “1993” suggests the dream sequences in Brazil in which Jonathan Pryce’s character is a triumphant winged champion in armor, while “Mega Fortress” sounds like what might happen if an old computer tried to emulate the sound of rain falling…
Electronic music of any experimental stripe has always been filed under the heading of “techno” and sometimes blurred together with “industrial.” Meat Beat Manifesto was — and still is — considered by many to be part of the wave of industrial music that was affiliated with the Wax Trax imprint…
