For anyone who’s sauntered into a dark local club to see some rock band over the last couple of decades, you’ve probably walked past Cy Rawls. He’s always been that unflinching guy who had the gusto to make it to two, maybe three shows in a night, often in different corners of the Triangle, or […]
Chris Toenes
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Music for fuel: It’s harder than ever to jam econo
It’s harder than ever to jam econo. Mike Watt of The Minutemen coined that phrase”We jam econo”in the ’80s to mean rocking, especially on the road, in the most efficient, thrifty way possible. But as the numbers at gas pumps continue to rise without signs of improvement, several local bands and their national counterparts are […]
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Jenks Miller’s Approaching the Invisible Mountain
Chapel Hill musician Jenks Miller immerses himself in relatively straightforward local bands: He’s the drummer for pop trio Un Deux Trois and noise-rock outfit In the Year of the Pig, and he plays guitar in occasional country-ish rig Mount Moriah. But Miller made several national ripples last year with a dense guitar drone record, Impale […]
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Double Negative and Tooth bleed catharsis
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Using the mosh pit as a ritualistic rendezvous ground and the headbang as a physical rite of passage, both hardcore and heavy metal share an affinity for basic therapy: Get shit off your chest, and do it loudly. Amid a […]
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Shirlette Ammons’ new collections of poetry and music get personal
The successful songwriter can earn quick cash and credibility by releasing a book that compiles song lyrics. With proper line breaks and an elegant, poem-per-page layout, hooks and verses become poetry proper. Still, the written presentation is an afterthought for most. Shirlette Ammonsa Durham multimedia artist who will simultaneously release a book of her poetry […]
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X’s “We’re Desperate”
Editor’s note: The band’s record contract prevents us offering a stream or download of “We’re Desperate.” Still, you can’t beat the video footage below with a stick. “Every other week I need a new address,” begins X’s signature battle cry of hard life in the land of plenty, “We’re Desperate.” As X emerged from the […]
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Processing Signal Southeast Electronic Music Festival
Organizing a music festival can seem like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, only to have it plummet back down once it’s somewhere near the top. That uphill battle is familiar to organizers of Chapel Hill’s Signal Southeast Electronic Music Festival, which presents its third year of performances, workshops and parties this weekend. Three […]
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Bold Betty Davis
When Betty Davis was making blues-gone-heavy funk records in the mid-’70s, unaware club owners often thought she and her band of cousins were going to play jazz. Davis, after all, married Miles Davis in 1968. The marriage was short, but it was an intensely creative time for them both. But after Betty and Miles split, […]
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Quintron and Miss Pussycat
When a now-familiar deluge of images hit the news after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans, the city’s surrealism was redefined, particularly in the Ninth Ward. Long before the storm started pushing toward the Gulf Coast, though, Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat had carved out their own divot of hyper-reality in that New Orleans neighborhood. Like […]
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Dom Casual
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Dom Casual may be named after a typeface, but their eclectic tastesGolden Age rock sounds like rockabilly, surf instrumentals and the Brit Invasionalways gave their name another context. Maybe you pictured some conniving hipster villain with curled moustache, wringing his hands […]
