Results tagged “music”

                

Warped Tour is a rite of summer for kids between the ages of 12-20 who like their guitars with three chords. This past Tuesday, when thousands of teens descended upon the Comcast Center in Mansfield to celebrate their favorite summer event, they did so in cooperation with New England's rite of the summer of '09: rain. Yet mother nature couldn't deter the fifty odd bands from performing on seven stages strewn about the wet grounds, making the 15 year old event a real test of endurance for people of all ages.

           

Cymbals Eat Guitars may be one of those bands you just "don't get" until you see them live. Like so many fuzz-infected groups coming out of New York, it's often hard to tell who's another Sonic Youth-meets-Dinosaur Jr. knock off and who's got a unique voice based off of a few sonically-impaired tracks posted on MySpace. It's a challenge so many musicians struggle with today, and with the renaissance of feedback-encased garage rock the stakes are especially high. For many, the case of Cymbals Eat Guitars is still on "to be determined" status, but for those who caught the band members at Great Scott last night saw them deliver.

Wednesday night was the same as any old New England spring evening—except in Johnny D's in Davis Square. There, Justin Townes Earle shared the warmth of the south and the twang of the past with an enthusiastic crowd, playing a long set of down-home straight-country tunes. Earle was technically by himself on stage with just his guitar for accompaniment, but his songs—including several covers—evoked plenty of heroes from country music history, such that he was never really alone. Saying "Any folk singer'll tell you that—we like to borrow," Earle proved it with tributes to Woody Guthrie and Manse Lipscomb, to which the crowd responded enthusiastically.

                

Expectations are a killer when it comes to concerts. You read about some band on a blog and next thing you know you've dropped half your life savings and are expecting to see something akin to the Beatles jamming with Miles Davis while Jam Master Jay mixes it up with Mozart. Obviously, hype is not the easiest of temptresses. Fortunately, Dan Deacon has never met an expectation he couldn't smash.

                

Agganis Arena was packed last Friday as 20- and 30-somethings with Bud Lights or Harpoon IPAs in hand found their places in the venue. All were eagerly anticipating a performance by the New Zealand musical duo Flight of the Conchords, who perform live as a band and also have a hit TV show about trying to make it performing live as a band. Meta!

          

Coming from North Adams, western Mass.'s wilderness outpost of contemporary art, the Books delivered their thoughtful concepts to the ICA on Friday night* via a Postal Service of gentle electronica and indie (soft) rock boy vocals. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong also brought several closets' worth of tightly-edited found footage to match their pop musique concrète. A mood of inexplicable optimism pervaded, in the split-screen video of animals stampeding forth into an avant-garde National Geographic documentary, in the birdsong stitched together into makeshift jazz, and the virtuosic solos built from archived laughter.

The first ever Rockus Collegiate Battle of the Bands goes down at the Paradise on Tuesday, April 14. Co-sponsored by Rolling Stone (ever heard of it?) and Veritas Records, the skirmish pits local scholarly bands against each other in an epic cage match of rock.

          

Under the pale moon for so many years

         

Before U2 and their army of fans annexed Davis Square, a quieter sect made its pilgrimage to the Somerville Theatre. Just thawed from a five-year hibernation and scarcely sighted in North America, Tindersticks played songs from last year's The Hungry Saw and a smattering of older material, hungrily lapped up by Saturday evening's crowd. (At one point, we're pretty sure we heard audience members shushing each other like cartoon librarians.)

Forgive Bostonist for the botanical metaphors, but where a rose once thrived, a nettle shall grow among a bush of thorns.

Tonight at 8:15 pm, $10, all ages

We’d always thought the CEOs of music corporations would look something like Cerberus, the three-headed dog: devouring artists, drinking up their creative talent, and vomiting mass-appeal. At Berklee last Friday, though, Terry McBride appeared as something slightly more than the complete opposite. McBride is the CEO and co-founder of the Nettwerk music group, the company responsible for breaking Coldplay and managing the Lilith Fair. But also for allowing hip-hop-phenom K-OS to release artist and fan mixes of his new album, and tour under a “pay-as-you-leave” model similar to how Radiohead released In Rainbows.

We weren't as sad as we had planned to be. Shuffling out the Berklee Performance Center and into the wintry mix on Sunday night, Bostonist felt weirdly hopeful after taking in an evening of Antony & the Johnsons' confectionary woes (and a few minutes of Beyoncé's infatuation).

Last night, Minneapolis hip-hop head Stefon Alexander, otherwise known as P.O.S., graced the stage at Harper's Ferry in support of his latest album, Never Better. Unfortunately, the set was far too late for Bostonist's bedtime (hey, it was a work night), forcing Bostonist to replace what was no doubt a compelling performance for the awkward gaffes and moments that made up this year's Academy Awards telecast. Luckily, Bostonist managed to corral Alexander into answering a handful of questions via the Interweb.

The closest we came to a big Grammy award this year may have been Berklee grad John Mayer, who pulled in Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Say" from Continuum and Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for "Gravity" from Where the Light Is: Live in Los Angeles. If we're counting Boston collegiates, we could include Bruce Springsteen's Best Rock Song win for "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," since his son's at BC and all. Inexplicably popular UK artists Coldplay, Duffy, and Adele raked in several awards, as did Frenchmen Daft Punk. How did the association ever pass over NKOTB?

Imagine this: your blog posts mysteriously disappear. You didn't delete them, and your ISP or blog host didn't tell you they deleted them. Who could be the culprit?

Tonight, 9pm, $9

Maybe you don't want to think about anything with the word "blizzard" in it right now. We understand. Unless you've already got a flight scheduled, though, you're going to be looking at this snow for a while. But it will be warm inside Cambridge's Lizard Lounge tonight, and we expect it will get downright hot when the Blizzard of '78 takes the stage to show off their new album, Book of Lies.

      

Spanish Sirens: Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole & Excerpts from Carmen

Hot Stove, Cool Music

Or... sorta the opposite of that. There is only one Boston group on the current list of SXSW Showcasing Bands, compared to 10 bands from New York (including Brooklyn) and 10 from Austin. This probably reflects more on the general trend of Bands Must Be From Brooklyn Or Austin Or No One Will Like Them than on the Boston music scene, and hundreds of bands will be added to the festival before March. Still, it might've been nice to see a few more area folks on the bill by now.

Some selections from tourfilter to help you get your groove on this weekend. Extra cool shows starred.

2008 wasn't the biggest year ever for Boston music. Our biggest success might have been our oldest, as the New Kids on the Block got back together for a (misogynistic?) record and tour; we called their performance "a polished show infused with moments of giddiness—a lovefest between four guys from Dorchester, one JP product and a screaming hometown crowd." Apollo Sunshine, whose August live show felt like "stumbling upon a drum circle in the field of a music festival," made a couple of best-of lists, as did the Hold Steady, fronted by BC grad Craig Finn. "Bostonians of the Week" Broken River Prophet released an exciting new album that we really dug. Local singer Jess Tardy's work was featured on the TV show Lipstick Jungle. But for the most part, 2008 was just not a Boston-heavy music year.

           

"Virtue" was the theme of last Wednesday's Opera Boston Underground show, and its seven varieties were interpreted with varying degrees of precision by seven young singers. Baritone Graham Wright took a direct route to Courage, "Mut" from Schubert's Winterreise, and Julia Mintzer personified at least three or four virtues all at once, waiting for her husband to return from the Crusades in Henri Duparc's "Au pays ou se fait la guerre." There was lonely tower, a white moon, cooing birds in a willow, but the results of Mintzer's brooding, seductive mezzo were more immediate and vivid than all that. We neglected our Great Pumpkin Ale and allowed our artichoke dip to cool.

Do you feel so anxious or fearful of Thanksgiving with family that you know you'll be near your wit's end by Wednesday? It might be helpful (or perhaps even cathartic) to hear a whole lot of "crazed sounds created by the rejects, rebels and assorted losers of rock n' roll" come this Wednesday at 2pm. That is when you can hear Gorilla Got Me on WMBR. For extra angst, look into WMBR's archives, which offers episodes of Gorilla Got Me from weeks past.

7 p.m.

William Fitzsimmons is the Zach Galifianakis of folk: bearded, funny, fierce.

It takes some old dudes to make the Middle East shut up.

9pm tonight

With major labels struggling in the age of digital music, independent artists have found creative ways to get their music heard. Television has emerged as a great way to bring music to the masses, with songs featured on iTunes commercials and shows like giving artists massive exposure, and sites like AdTunes tracking song clips.