When I first heard Human Television’s debut, Look at Who You’re Talking To, I knew nothing about the band but the sound coming from the speakers: A deafening, hyper-distorted guitar slams in 90 seconds into opening track “I’m Moving On,” chased down by Billy Downing’s syrup-smacked voice. That subterranean bleat, subsumed in guitars and a […]
Grayson Haver Currin
Bio: Grayson Haver Currin was the music editor of INDY Week and the co-director of Hopscotch Music Festival.Twitter: http://twitter.com/currincy
Posted inMusic
Prescription
Listen! Listen to two tracks from Polysymphonic Sun, the installation’s score. If you cannot see the music player below, click here to download the free Flash Player. Almost everything in this room is still. The tables, the chairs, the bar, the bottles, the walls–it’s all at rest. David McConnell, though, can’t stop moving. He’s on […]
Posted inNews
Mason Jennings
Comparing a young Minnesotan singer-songwriter with nasal intonation to Bob Dylan is like building his crucifix and handing him nails and a hammer. If he’s as good a topical songwriter as Jesus was a carpenter, he’ll do his thing, and the public will eventually put the nails through his wrists. If he’s as smart as […]
Posted inNews
OMG, ur soo indie
In hip hop, being underground is its own merit badge. Subterranean emcees have created a cult of greatness by rapping at least half of the time about their inherent superiority to mainstream cats obsessed with balls, bullets and bills. That’s silly, of course: Obscurity doesn’t always translate into quality, and plenty of mainstream rappers can […]
Posted inMusic
The reasonable rise of horrible noise
In March, no less a gateway of cultural propriety and acceptability than The New York Times gave perhaps the most thriving music scene in its backyard long-awaited due: “Whatever name the music goes by–avant-garde, noise or just, as Mr. Giffoni prefers, extreme–it is more easily defined by what it eschews than what it encompasses: conventional […]
Posted inGuides
Take a rocker home
It’s easy to assume having kids is as un-hip as it gets. In the opening chapters of About a Boy, Nick Hornby says as much: Will (immortalized in the silver-screen version by Hugh Grant) is a dashing, independently wealthy, self-centered bachelor in his 30s. When two of his best friends ask him to take on […]
Posted inMusic
Flannel optional
Giggles and guffaws: After roaming the streets and asking people if they recognize the hit singles from the bands playing the second annual Raleigh Downtown Live series, that–giggles and guffaws–is what one comes to expect. Responses come with smiles and laughs, all answers simple variations on a concept: “I remember them from middle school”; “Wow, […]
Posted inNews
Duwayne Burnside
Duwayne Burnside plays as intensely as he talks. But, to the average person, his playing is a bit easier to understand than his Mississippi speech–or maybe not. His latest, Under Pressure,sure sounds like a Hendrix tribute. But Burnside says it isn’t. “I was goin’ for something kinda raw and hot,” says Burnside of the album. […]
Posted inNews
Growing and Thrones
Tangible links exist between Growing and Thrones, two minimal instrumental bands originally hailing from Olympia, Wash. Both bands share an aesthetic of a few people rendering a gargantuan sound: Growing’s Kevin Doria and Joe Denardo birth a kaleidoscope of tone, while ex-Melvins/Earth/High on Fire collaborator Joe Preston pummels down his own sludge trajectory with Thrones. […]
Posted inNews
Shooter Jennings
Shooter Jennings is easy to dismiss. He falls in that exclusive, often infamous club of musicians who have not yet enjoyed the success of their more famous musical parents. Lennon, Allman, Dylan: Some were on the tour bus as children with their famous parents, picking up the craft at an early age through osmosis and, […]
