Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. December features loads of holiday-themed events for the tykes in footie pajamas and the adults who ply them with seasonal sweets. But beyond drunken games of Dirty Santa, what’s an indie rocker to do to get into that seasonal spirit? That’s […]
Brian Howe
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Harrison Haynes has long made art just on the outside
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Branch Gallery is a white cube in the modern style, but entering it feels like stepping into another world: Space changes, simultaneously opening and condensing. Outside, downtown Durham is a scatter of dark, weathered brick; inside, the gallery is a minimalist, […]
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Understanding America with cultural critic Greil Marcus
• Read an excerpt from Greil Marcus’ The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice With his close-cropped white hair, owlish black eyeglasses, and smart dark coat, Greil Marcus cut a sharp profile against the softly lit contours of the Wilson Library Manuscripts Department. It was an apt setting for a conversation […]
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Three unhappy women, in Haven Kimmel’s latest novel
The Used World By Haven Kimmel Free Press, 320 pp. Haven Kimmel lives in Durham, but her heart remains in the rural Indiana of her upbringing. It was the stage for her pair of hit memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch, and for her two prior novels, The Solace […]
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Matthew Dear opens up the electronic audience
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. In 2007, music fans who participate in the commercial construct known as “indie rock” listen to everything from Amerie to Luomo, M.I.A. to Young Jeezy. What was once a personal ideology is now a marketed genre that doesn’t preclude one from […]
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DeYarmond Edison, Bon Iver, Megafaun and one twisted story
New York bands can operate in a bubble, but smaller musical enclaves like our own must connect within and without to thrive. The Triangle has a history of forming intimate musical connections with other regions: Consider the ties to Florida since a constellation of Gainesville and Jacksonville musicians centered around Fin Fang Foom moved here […]
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ProgDay, now 13, busts the purist stereotypes
“Punk” is impossible to define unambiguously. The same can’t be said for “progressive rock.” The genre aspires to the complexity of classical music or jazz, and it operates according to fairly rigid standards: It eschews verse-chorus-bridge structures, includes non-rock instrumentation, uses complex meters, and de-emphasizes traditional chord progressions and scales in favor of more florid, […]
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In Chest Pains, older punks with cardio conditions finally find each other
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Musician and writer Greg Barbera has a rugby player’s low center of gravity and gruff confidence. He’s a real smart-ass, too, his sandpaper voice a square match for a perpetual facial scruff. Like his Chest Pains band mate Tim Ristau, a […]
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elin o’Hara slavick charts history’s nightmares in Bomb After Bomb
Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography By elin o’Hara slavick Charta, 112 pp. Since it seems safe to assume that a majority of the Independent‘s readership, like myself, has never faced an aerial bombardment, I invite you to join me in attempting to imagine the moment. A dark speck makes a surgical incision across the […]
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At Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution, taste wasn’t the issue
Projekt Revolution Walnut Creek Amphitheatre Monday, Aug. 13, 2007 It’s easy to understand how nü-metal came about: On its deathbed, grunge mated with its mainstream successors and spawned an unlikely hybrid with characteristics of both. Emo’s journey from obscure mid-’80s hardcore offshoot to world-conquering force is more mysterious. Still, the youth-culture appeal of music that […]
