The Pagans didn’t disappoint, as it was not some manufactured rock made for a band desperate for a come back, but rather the real deal, the old sweaty, messy, gutsy punk rock deal, as tough as Mike’s vocals were raspy, and as tight as you would expect it to be from a great band
During she show, she came up with new arrangements, modulated her vocals, slowed down each syllable, giving me lumps in the throat and chills on the spine. Wearing a vintage low-necked black dress, perched on high heels, she looks like an apparition, and I am not just playing around a metaphor inspired by her first name, the first rows only have eyes for her: it was a love fest there
Why haven’t I heard of Kevin Morby before? He has a strong voice and some outstanding songs, some are as breezy as a Dylan-esqe dream.
Will I support Warped? Hell yes I will. They need a mom on board but now when I attend it’s with the jaded eye of a skeptic, what will they do next to sour my romanticized version of the event? I can’t even imagine but I have faith in Kevin Lyman and his band of masterminds to not make this Disneyworld
FKA Twigs – Terminal 5 – December 8th, 2014 – A ferociously gifted yet oddly mutated soul girl raised on UK trip hop and MIA, gave a dazzling performance for the ages in support of her brilliant debut album and left us all in awe.
Let’s give Bruce Springsteen this much at least: given the opportunity to release his inner Bono, to go to that place where low culture reaches high, he didn’t falter.
Dylan has fought against our expectations and it has lead him, as a live performer I mean, down some dead end streets and back alleys. But at 73 years old he can manage our expectations and if you care and if you want to care and if it matters, you can leave your baggage behind and enjoy a vibrant important artist performing living, breathing pop music.
“Cold Roses” was glorious country folk, “Dear Chicago” blues pop, “The Door” as great as anything in his repertoire, “Lucky Now” a case made for Ashes And Fire… the set less had momentum and more was steadily perfect with horrendous interruptions
David takes to the audience like he takes to people in the real world, he makes you at ease, ready to be part of his family and then he levels you with the intensity of his playing. It is as though he sees no reason why artistry must be self-important. At Rockwood he shared his stage so generously while remaining the focal point.
The majority of Ketchum’s material exists in a bell curve where everything sounds good, it’s well crafted folk influenced country music and Ketchum still has a strong voice, but there’s no emotional glue to his work. The music wafts by you, very little sticks
At Live@365, she took the band out for a spin and found them capable of sounding like everything from traditional Arabic music, to trip hop, to lo fi electronica, all held together by Ethel’s superb voice, a great instrument which sounds Arabic in Arabic and European in English and French
Williams might not be the frontperson to pull out a set by pure willpower, but she has been doing it long enough to know how to construct a set and she constructed this one so cleverly it freed her all the way. At the Beacon Theatre Williams performed a very good two hours of Americana
The Janks are an unsigned band, and at a time when most bands try to re-invent new and old genres while taking themselves very seriously, the Janks deliver some straightforward southern rock, packed into a sweat-drenched show. Why should anyone even resist?
He was performing as the Andrew Duhon Trio at the Hotel Café on Friday night in Los Angeles, and his powerful and warm voice immediately conquered the place and the audience. He is a guy with a strong presence, although not overwhelming, and his acoustic sound captivated me
As there were a lot of people with guitars on stage, moving around all the time, or constantly exchanging their roles behind guitars drums and lap steel, the result looked like an orchestrated chaos
Hitchcock tells abstract stories of love and death and comets and flares and you have no idea what hes on about and you’re transported into a hazy world that’s just plain lovely and comforting despite being so fucking disturbing. I attribute this to his vocals.
“At its core I believe the issue is really about what a great country we have that a song like this can be performed in a setting like Concert for Valor.’
It reminds me conceptually of the Joni Mitchell who wrote “California”. she is sexual but no nonsense, on stage she exudes a sensuality lithe and slithery and wet without being exploitative of herself. It’s a neat trick and will take her far.
The young girl on my left may have contributed a lot to my future tinnitus with all these heartfelt screamed ‘I love you Julian’, and her boyfriend got to participate too!
I have never seen him perform any better or any worse than he did Thursday night, he is just about perfection and think of this for a minute: Stevie forgot the words to “Village Ghetto Land” and the importance of that is, since Stevie is blind he has no prompter, no sheet music, nothing
Which leads me to Capital FM –it used to be the old Clash stomping ground and now is an indie Z-100, affiliated with ten other stations nationwide and they have stolen our Taylor and a pretty cool list of other stars for a two day Jingle Bell Ball
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about her singing, the woman has terrific pipes, I’m complaining about the stodgy playing, about the slow pacing, about the bereft of Pretender friendly material. I’m complaining about the lack of razzamatazz and the lack of badass.
a real liberation in this music, a sort of middle-age I-couldn’t-care-less-of-what-you-think,… despite her health problems, Hanna seemed to feel better than ever, and she exulted charm and confidence, throwing a dance party, alternatively bringing some splash of punk, 80s electro-new Wave, with her girlie voice in the middle, bringing memories of her 20-year musical career
The delivery was so fluid and was running like the easiest thing these men have ever done, Josh was balancing with his guitar, swinging so smoothly, managing to use his best falsetto over heavy music, mixing danceable rhythms with testosterone-charged metal action.
Luckily for her and those 50 somethings in the crowd there was plenty of Pretenders and they were done properly From the amazing “Kid”, to “Precious” the hits were there and its hard to hate on classics.
back for another dip after the dastardly deep album New Year’s Eve gig at Barclay’s Center, the ease with which Joel performs to an audience of 20,000 people is a lesson artistic domination through repetition. He has simply done it so many damn times by now, he can do it, that’s all.
the guys came forward and took a bow, then Gregg talked about the beginningstThen announced they were going to end it with the first song they ever played And Trouble No More became the first, and the last, song played by the Allman Brothers Band
While Gregg and Warren shared the lead on “Blind Willie McTell”, and Warren was spectacular on “Dreams” . Oteil was a signal post on a band with three drummers and if Derek has had better nights, whenever the two guitarists went after it it was lights out. But it was really Greg’s night
When the band turns up the volume, they shake and when they lower the volume the volume they shudder. The prettiness and intensity of Tommy’s voice makes up with Johnny’s look of aggrieved hostility and moodiness on stage and second guitarist Matt Mason who sings back up so well you think he could front the band
around the 14th band I’ve seen in a four day period and the third guitar rock band starring 20 something boys in three hours, it is beginning to all sound the same. If you add to that the less then brilliant acoustics at Pianos and your ears turn to jelly. On record the songs signify, at Pianos they seem to lack distinction.
There wasn’t lot of talking or messing around between songs, they gave a very muscular, almost lethal show,but Dulli nevertheless couldn’t resist to show his bad boy side at one point: ‘I saw some bitches texting during the show, it’s like me watching TV while you’re blowing me!’
When it came to the trio of hits at the end of the set, the crowd in front sang every line with “Space Age Love Song” and “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” building to the triumphant “I Ran (So Far Away.”
The sound is dreamy but sturdy, real songs which sometimes dive into jams with the piano leading. It is glorious without being enervating, and though Peter showed more energy dancing around before the show, it is the mood and the music that is taking you elsewhere
Buckwheat dressed sharply, nice crease in those pants for being on the road, smiled incessantly and almost uncomfortably, like a funeral director trying to make you feel better, and reminded the crowd about 3,000 times that we were in Texas, which I think most of us already knew
On the epic case builder “Metropolis” he sings “I don’t want to live till I’m forty, I wanna be young and dead.” That’s big time songwriting right there -that’s what we want.
I see a sinewy figure at the far end of the club on stage. She has platinum locks, eyes as blue as Robin’s egg’s, wearing black fishnets and a super cute outfit with killer boots; plugging in her guitar to get ready for the sound check
The vibe was magical, it was like watching a preacher converting people to Christianity, Doncker was converting people to the blues and you could see the kids come alive, perk up, smile, like they couldn’t believe how great it was. Like they were being changed.
Why not make it 75 minutes and throw in some hits? Especially when you are pushing an iffy album which hasn’t helped you even sell out a 1500 SRO? Why not give people what they want to hear? You wrote the suckers, sing em.
Billy played his diva side a little bit, in the sense that he took him a few extra minutes to get on stage, but the rest of the evening certainly proved he was not the aloof and snob type
What we got was fine, and any set that has Liza Colby singing her bluesy heart out and constantly rocking songs all with her shirt half undone certainly can’t be all bad. But it wasn’t what the Liza Colby Sound are capable of.
On stage at Cake Shop yesterday, Be Forest are quietly intense building up walls of strings and a terrific heavy handed drum while playing songs off their current release Earth Beat
This isn’t faint praise, it is feint praise, it is like whining that your gal Giselle Bunchen doesn’t have bigger boobs… This was a good set with a band stretching, and that’s fine, I just hope they snap back the better for it.
She’s won a ton of awards in New Zealand, opened for Lorde and cat Power, and isn’t precious at all. Yeah and on stage she seems both artistically extreme and musically valid at the same time. Very approachable? So approach her.
When I left the club, I realized I was wearing a Queens of the Stone Age shirt, and I asked myself, how could I possibly love two opposite sides of the male spectrum such as Mike Hadreas and Josh Homme?
Their name suggests indie dream pop and their home , Hollywood Florida, suggests surf and turf, but their sounds is New Yawk girl group via the Ramones with a huge dollop of feedback, reverb and a misheard chorus via My Bloody Valentine. In other words, they are awesome and a great way to kick off CMJ 2014
You cannot in good measure critique a band on a farewell journey. They’re emotionally charged, tired and seemingly on auto pilot as they work their way tying up the loose strings of their time together. A band of brothers and an army of 6, Black47 have done what they wanted to do- raise awareness, raise a fist and raise a pint, with the convictions of superheroes.
Their uplifting songs filled with multi harmonies and wide-screen melodies, which can very easily turn into joyous sing-alongs. Their computer crashed after just one song, they also lost some part of their drum set at one point but this didn’t stop them for very long. May be I hadn’t noticed before
The band took the stage with ‘Karmacoma’, a funky trip hop groove and a background of war news mixed with images of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson trials, always blending the trivial of our trash culture with the substantial, and if it was not their most familiar song, it immediately gave the tone of the show
What do you expect from the deadest of dead genre’s, Contemporary Mainstream Rock And Roll? Or a radio station that went from where rock live to where rock died?
‘We want to have left great, conceptual, beautiful, glimmering records in the world. We’re thinking super long term, like dead-term.’ I don’t think they had these deep thoughts in mind when they were playing in Amoeba, they certainly seemed to have a good time. ‘This is a love song’
