William Tyler plays Thursday at Five Star. Dustin Wong plays Thursday at The Hive at Busy Bee. Sir Richard Bishop plays Friday at Fletcher Opera Hall. Laptops might have replaced acoustic guitars as the most commonplace music-making device on college campuses, but the antiquated instrument isn’t going away. Despite being more or less unchanged for […]
Jesse Jarnow
Twitter: http://twitter.com/bourgwick
Posted inMusic
Arborea’s music echoes through the deep hollows of backwoods Maine
Arborea plays Local 506 with Animal Alphabet on Wednesday, Sept. 7, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $7. The band also performs Thursday as part of the Hopscotch panel “Present the Past: Honoring and Outstripping Influences” from 3–5 p.m. at Raleigh City Museum; admission is free. The proverbial woods inhabited by Arborea are ancient, and the […]
Posted inMusic
Megafaun’s Heretofore
Megafaun’s Heretofore might be a six-track, written-and-recorded-in-two-weeks mini-album, but it’s got a genuine single. “Carolina Days” comes so loaded with instant nostalgia, it could be a fist-pumping summer amphitheater standard, used in an advertisement by some North Carolina tourism interest or blasted from open car windows all summer long. (Some summer, somewhere, in some universe.) […]
Posted inMusic
Review of Phish: The Biography
Read more: ⇒ Our interview with Puterbaugh ⇒ Excerpts and photos Phish: The Biography By Parke Puterbaugh Da Capo Press, 318 pp. I broke up Phishaccording, at least, to the neutrally titled Phish: The Biography, a new book by Parke Puterbaugh. They arrived from the wilds of Vermont in the late 1980s as a quartet […]
Posted inMusic
Live: The Mountain Goats’ (relatively) big band
Adding drums to your two-man indie lit-folk thing recalls what Chekhov said about pistols hanging on walls: Eventually, they’d best to go off. Adding a light show, roadies, a Rhodes and a shaggy-haired, blazer-clad lead guitaristas Durham’s John Darnielle did to his expanding band The Mountain Goats during their just-concluded Life of the World to […]
Posted inMusic
Elephant 6’s The Circulatory System returns
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Talking to Will Cullen Hart is like talking to a tape collage. It is sometimes hard to sort out what is medication, what is self-medication, what is Hart, what is something else. It is even more uncomfortable to try. But […]
Posted inMusic
Megafaun’s Gather, Form & Fly
Ruggedly individualistic and highly traditional, rural and modern, intimate and grand, accessible and experimental: Gather, Form & Fly, the second LP by Raleigh transplants Megafaun, stalks and captures the wild and free sounds of American music. Over 13 patiently developed and patently diverse tracks, the trio uses brotherly harmonies, lonely hymns and folky strums to […]
Posted inNews
A Duke historian unearths a motherlode of forgotten jazz recordings
Mr. Ho is actually very pleasant when we find him, as Sam Stephenson promised, next-door and up the stairs, in a room full of wigs. There are no customers, but a group of Chinese women sits on boxes, eating lunch. The midtown traffic is far away. Mr. Ho goes to find the keys. Mid-century, this […]
Posted inMusic
A Duke historian unearths a motherlode of forgotten jazz recordings
Mr. Ho is actually very pleasant when we find him, as Sam Stephenson promised, next-door and up the stairs, in a room full of wigs. There are no customers, but a group of Chinese women sits on boxes, eating lunch. The midtown traffic is far away. Mr. Ho goes to find the keys. Mid-century, this […]
Posted inMusic
Lost in the Trees’ All Alone in an Empty House
Is it wrong to think that almost all music, at least of the vaguely ethereal variety, would sound better if played from two (or more) stereos at once, staggered slightly in time? I accidentally did this while listening to Lost in the Trees’ All Alone in an Empty House. The first take of the music […]