Yo La Tengo plays Cat’s Cradle Wednesday, Jan. 23, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $22–$25. If ever an indie rock band deserved proper canonization, it would be Yo La Tengo. For nearly three decades, the New Jersey trio has built a somewhat peerless résumé, releasing album after album to near-unwavering critical acclaim, and with songs […]
Marc Masters
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The strange story and sound behind Supreme Dicks’ new box set
Breathing and Not Breathing is out now on Jagjaguwar. Lots of bands talk about taking risks, but how many go so far as to court failure? Supreme Dicks do. They’ve never officially said so, but their music teeters always at the edge of collapse. Between their moody folk, sprawling noise and drifting melodies, anything could […]
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Guitarist Glenn Jones studies his hero but doesn’t mimic him
Glenn Jones plays Nightlight Thursday, Oct. 27, at 9:30 p.m. with Black Twig Pickers and Ezekiel Graves. Tickets are $8. If you have to get some distance from your influences to avoid mimicking them, Glenn Jones has certainly made life hard for himself. The Boston-based guitarist is an authority on his main artistic hero, the […]
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Jenks Miller and Nicholas Szczepanik’s American Gothic
The cover of American Gothic offers yet another take on Grant Wood’s classic, oft-parodied painting of the same name. This time, in place of the old couple standing proudly with a pitchfork, we get a Halloween-ready kid in flannel shirt and skeleton mask, brandishing a plastic axe. But I have to wonder if Jenks Miller […]
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The Fresh & Onlys’ different rock
The Fresh & Onlys play Local 506, Oct. 31, at 9:30 p.m. with Royal Baths. Tickets are $8–$10. “Sorry, hold onI’m getting panhandled trying to pay my parking meter.” Shayde Sartin, bassist for San Francisco quartet The Fresh & Onlys, is calling from Haight-Ashbury, the legendary epicenter of the 1967 hippie-led “Summer of Love.” His […]
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SXSW2010 Day 4: Blast Off [Marc Masters]
Did we mention how cold it was? All everyone at SXSW Day 4 could talk about was an actual wave of chill, and you couldn’t really blame us for complainingthe 40 degree temperatures and skin-cutting wind would’ve been odd for January in Austin, and were downright cruel for March 20th. Given that and the natural […]
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SXSW10 Day 3: Moving Day [Marc Masters]
On the PGA Tour (yes, I follow the PGA Tour), the third day of a four-day tournament is commonly known as “moving day”the day when you’d better move up the leaderboard or spend the final round just trying to stay out of last place. Day 3 of SXSW felt a bit like that for me. […]
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SXSW10 Day 2: Camping Out [Marc Masters]
The eternal dilemma at SXSW is how long to stick around at any single venue. There’s at least five bands, sometimes more than 10, playing in every possible location. So the temptation is to dart all over Austin catching snippets of everything. That strategy works well at night, when more of the shows take place […]
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SXSW10, Day 1: Disorientation [Marc Masters]
The first day at SXSW is mostly about (dis)orientationyou spend much of your time figuring out where you are, figuring out where everything else is, and figuring out how to get to it all while slamming into thousands of people who are doing the same. Even more disorienting is seeing bands perform in the middle […]
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As Horseback, Chapel Hill’s Jenks Miller looks to avoid easy definitions and answers
Read our review of the album You’d have to be a prankster to name the first song on your first album “Finale,” right? Maybe not. When a dense, radiant guitar drone with that name opens Horseback’s 2007 debut, Impale Golden Hornand keeps going for 17 minutesit doesn’t seem to be any sort of joke. The […]