1. Hot 8 Brass Band With an array of horns and a squadron of lockstep percussion, The Hot 8 Brass Band rejuvenates the folk music of their native New Orleans. Indeed, the members of the band grew up admiring the second-line statesmen of their city, sneaking around to catch sets by the likes of the […]
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
One of Paul McCartney’s kids plays Durham this week, so which modern musicians would spawn the worst future stars?
James McCartney with Alyssa Graham Thursday, May 30 Casbah 9 p.m., $15 Is there a more noticeable gift and curse in the entertainment industry than your celebrity parent’s last name? A handle like Lennon, Dylan or Coppola often affords someone instant access to credibility. But its implied assumptions of greatness are open invitations for hate: […]
Posted inMusic
The week in music: May 22-29, 2013
1. Integrity Perhaps Dwid Hellion, the sole constant member of long-running metal and hardcore confounders Integrity, is a perfectly amicable fellow. I’ve never met him. But when Hellion steps behind a microphone, he sounds like the meanest motherfucker on the planet. No matter how intricate his backing unit’s mix of punk rock pummel, death metal […]
Posted inMusic
The unlikely and intersecting successes of The Old Ceremony and Haw River Ballroom
View this article as a PDF. Django Haskins and Heather LaGarde laugh when they talk about the geneses of the institutions they respectively created. Nine years after launching The Old Ceremony, for instance, Haskins sounds genuinely surprised that the same core of musicians have stuck with him, in spite of the band’s original plan to […]
Posted inMusic
Herding jazz cats: How D-Town Brass manages 15 members
D-Town Brass with Dom Casual The Pinhook Saturday, May 18 10 p.m., $8 It doesn’t take long for keyboardist Andy Magowan to name the 15 members of D-Town Brass, the horns-and-rhythms troupe he launched five years ago simply because he wanted to flesh out the sound on a single song. But he does struggle with […]
Posted inMusic
The Darkness and the woes of revivalist one-hit wonders
The Darkness with Free Energy Lincoln Theatre Friday, May 10, 9 p.m. $22-$25 A decade ago, the British glam-rock wastrels The Darkness lodged the flagrant and falsetto refrain of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” into the minds of a few million listeners on multiple continents. Good for them: They went platinum several times, […]
Posted inMusic
The week in music: May 8-15, 2013
1. James Blake The assumed ascendance of James Blake never quite happened. Sure, these days the British producer and crooner plays large clubs, and in early April, he released his second LP, Overgrown, on a major label. But before he issued his self-titled debut in early 2011, it seemed that Blake was the decade’s next […]
Posted inMusic
The week in music: May 1-8, 2013
1. Bob Dylan Last year’s Tempest might have been Bob Dylan’s best-received album in a decade, but what’s new and what’s old hardly matters when the songwriter takes the stage these days. His performances are bound to attract detractors, as he sings somewhere between a murmur and a slur. But with a whipsmart band at […]
Posted inMusic
The Southern baptism of Hiss Golden Messenger
The sun was at least an hour away from the horizon when Michael Taylor sent me a text message on a recent Tuesday morning. Taylor makes what’s most readily described as folk-rock under the name Hiss Golden Messenger, and I wanted to ask him some questions about his new record, Haw. We had previously decided […]
Posted inMusic
From a near-disastrous Kickstarter campaign, Pet-Tich-Eye’s Ashlie White learns a lesson
Pet-Tich-Eye release show 9 p.m., $8-$10 Pet-Tich-Eye gallery 6 p.m., free Saturday, April 20 Motorco Music Hall In a few hours, Ashlie White will drive from Durham to Virginia, where she’ll pack 500 pieces of vinyl into her car. Tomorrow, she’ll wake up early, stuff almost 120 of those albums into cardboard mailers and ship […]
