Wovenhand and Git Some at The Marquis 1/15/11

WOVENHAND With Git Some 01.15.11 | Marquis Theater On the cusp of its tour with Wovenhand, Git Some seemed in high form to win over at least a few people in the audience on Saturday night at the Marquis Theater. Less chaotic than earlier incarnations of the band, one thing…

Liz Phair on Exile, Funstyle and being a studio geek

In the early ’90s, Liz Phair (due at the Bluebird Theater this Tuesday) started releasing tapes she called Girly Sound. These early tapes revealed a wide-ranging and playful musical creativity and helped to establish Phair in the underground music scene in Chicago. Somehow these tapes made it into the hands…

Liz Phair talks about her haters

After releasing a short run of independently released cassettes titled Girly Sound in the early ’90s, Liz Phair quickly garnered critical acclaim for her offbeat sense of humor and knack for quirky, inventive pop songs. On the strength of those releases, Phair signed to Matador Records, which released her debut…

School Knights

There seems to be a big influx of reverby, neo-garage rock everywhere lately. School Knights fares better than many bands because its youthful exuberance is not a pose. It’s obvious from these four songs that this duo has listened to more than its fair share of No Age and Siltbreeze…

Darwin Deez

Darwin Smith, like certain prominent musicians on the indie circuit of recent years, once attended Wesleyan University. Either there’s an alien virus on campus that imparts a knack for an inventively catchy pop song, or it’s pure coincidence. As part of the band Darwin Deez, Smith and his Deez-surnamed compatriots…

Zoo Animal

Based in Minneapolis, Zoo Animal has sometimes been identified as a Christian band, but you’re not going to get vapid Songs 4 Worship fare or the sort of thing that gets featured at a Cornerstone festival from this act. Instead, Holly Newsom’s plaintive vocals and the group’s introspective, minimalist pop…

Critic’s Choice: The May Kit, January 16 at the hi-dive

Clearly there are some nods to Nick Drake in the way that the May Kit’s Max Winne puts a song together. It’s there in his ability to conjure images of flights of fantasy — the kind that strike you during your workday in a moment of reprieve from the prosaic…

Constellations

These two singles represent a further shift from even the boundary-pushing material heard on 2007’s Necrogeister. “Bicycle Tropics” sounds like a Can tune pulled apart to its basic components and reworked into an IDM pop song. “Savage Orb,” meanwhile, seemingly dispenses with all connection to conventional rock instrumentation. A chillingly…

Jeff Tweedy

Thin White Rope and Green on Red may have been some of the early artists in what became known as “alt-country,” but Uncle Tupelo took that style to much greater prominence. Along with his friend Jay Farrar, Tweedy led that band for seven years before the former left to form…

Cowboy Mouth

Since its inception in 1990, New Orleans-based Cowboy Mouth — named after Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s play about misfits musing on the foibles of the American Dream — has produced the kind of eclectic sound that defines most of the music coming out of that town. The group delivers…

Ashes of Ruin, January 8 at Cervantes’ Other Side

When you hear death metal or any of its offshoots, you either appreciate its technical precision or you hate it. Ashes of Ruin (due this Saturday, January 8, at Cervantes’ Other Side) combines elements of that kind of metal with more melodic guitar leads, yet the rhythms are no less…

Warlock Pinchers at the Gothic, 12/31/10

WARLOCK PINCHERS with Il Cattivo 12.31.10 | Gothic Theater Around 9 p.m., the safety videos started up and it looked and sounded like something straight out of Wonder Showzen. Puppets and people in a gorilla and a robot costume interacted as they would on a warped, faux kids’ show: surrealistic,…

Low at Larimer Lounge, 12/18/10

LOW With Charlie Parr 12.18.10 | Larimer Lounge Fellow Minnesotan Charlie Parr opened the show and brought a classic blues and folk sensibility to his performance. It was a pretty minimalistic, stripped down set-up but if you paid attention to what Parr was doing on guitar, it was intricate, but…

Low’s Alan Sparhawk on Joy Division and radio

Since its inception in 1993, Low (due at the Larimer Lounge this Saturday, December 18) from Duluth, Minnesota, has created a body of work characterized by a fragile intensity. Although often lumped in under the banner of “slowcore” with a group of bands of similar sonic leanings, like Red House…

Chris Westin on getting death threats for his music

Chris Westin has become something of a fixture on the DIY scene in Denver since 2008, when he moved here from Oklahoma City and met nervesandgel’s Johnny Wohlfahrt while the two were working at the same restaurant. Westin had experienced the underground world before, but it was recording on Wohlfahrt’s…

Modern Witch

“5low” sounds like what it must be like to wander around a sprawling mansion in the dark, guided only by the muffled voice of your would-be murderer three rooms away. If someone made a movie about a benevolent occult group trying to conquer the world through the use of remote…

Low

When Low formed in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1993, no one could have guessed it would become one of the most respected underground bands of the next two decades. In an era when most acts traded in sheer volume, Low focused instead on raw emotional honesty expressed with a quiet and…