Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. To borrow a cue from Walt Whitman and, from time to time, look up “in perfect silence at the stars” is to be reminded of nature’s grand expanse, its mysteries, its beauty. This assumes, of course, that the stars aren’t […]
Bryan C. Reed
Bio: Bryan Reed lives in Raleigh, where he nerds out about punk rock and comic books. He's written about music for INDY Week since 2008.Twitter: http://twitter.com/BryanCReed
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Caltrop’s not exactly a metal band
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. ⇒ Read our review of Caltrop’s World Class It rained yesterday. The Hillsborough air is thicker than usual. The mosquitoes are out early. The five of us face the road in a cluster of old chairs on the front porch […]
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Daylight Dies’ Lost to the Living
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. With Lost to the Living, Raleigh’s Daylight Dies offers a nine-track blackout of sweeping introspective melancholy. But this loneliness is so lovely: “Against the sky stands our cathedral/ A picture of our isolation/ In the dark we must build an […]
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Black Skies’ Hexagon
At the moment, several Southern metal bands offer some of the most dynamic, nuanced and fresh approaches the genre has enjoyed in some time: While Miami’s Torche (above) lifts pop from murky depths, Savannah’s Baroness winds sinuous lines between drone, sludge, thrash and blues. Like Bocephus possessed, Wilmington’s Weedeater crackles, staggers and sneers, while Atlanta’s […]
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King Khan & the Shrines’ “I Wanna Be A Girl”
Listen up! or stream it below. If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. “I Wanna Be A Girl” is a delightfully absurd and disarmingly nuanced approach to rock’s flirtations with androgyny. As it admires femininity from a decidedly male perspective, it flies its title like a banner. Khan is […]
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Chapel Hill’s Milemarker plays its first show in two years
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Heather McEntire knew Milemarker before she knew its members. Nearly a decade ago, she bought the Chapel Hill band’s records while she was a college student in Wilmington, where her own band, Bellafea, got its start. McEntire admired the band’s […]
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DuoFest: local bands find freedom and challenge in duo form
Freedom, like love and hate, doesn’t mean so much anymore. It’s been stripped of its conceptual gravity, cavalierly used to describe how cars handle, to characterize rollover minutes in cell phone plans and to rally those who love the word to war. But for the two-person bands playing DuoFest this weekend in Durham, freedomspecifically, the […]
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Polvo mixes old, new
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. More: Audio Slide Show Interview with Polvo As the four members of Polvo took to the Cat’s Cradle stage for the first time in a decade Saturday night, the clock at stage leftglowing a piercing blue against the dark venueread […]
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New Polvo age
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. More: Audio Slide Show Live Review As Polvo’s anticipated Cat’s Cradle show approached on Saturday, the sun hanging heavily over the late afternoon horizon, guitarist Dave Brylawski and bassist Steve Popson took a break after soundcheck to talk about changing […]
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The Pneurotics
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. The Pneurotics, a Chapel Hill trio with Durham ties, plays primarily on jagged riffs and rough-hewn vocals. But on debut LP Forty, the band creates an unlikely sort of harmony, the sort that comes from self-assuredness and a solid foundation […]
