MGMT plays Memorial Auditorium Wednesday, Nov. 3, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $44.80. It’s easier to tell a story everyone’s heard before. Audiences follow more comfortably when the narrative is familiar, when the twist comes right after the turn. Once the province of lazy journalists, today the pastime of surface skimming and story conforming is […]
Robbie Mackey
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Radiation sweetness
The Twilight Sad plays with Japan’s Mono and Durham’s Maple Stave at Golden Belt’s Cotton Room in Durham, Friday, June 4. The 7 p.m. show costs $12. For more see, www.goldenbeltarts.com. In an interview with British glossy The Fly late last year, Andy MacFarlane, the guitarist for the Scottish band The Twilight Sad, copped to […]
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Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, or the daffodil and the diva
Taylor Swift plays RBC Center Saturday, May 1, at 7 p.m. with Gloriana and Kellie Pickler. Tickets are $25–$59.50. The parallels between Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are too tempting to ignore: Only four birthdays separate the starlets, both of whom spent the bulk of the last 10 years tumbling through the inner workings of […]
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Themselves’ “You Ain’t It”
Listen up! or stream it below. If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Rick Ross was a corrections officer. But the plaques in his Miami mansion came from kilo raps and a few imaginary penitentiary bids. The XXL-thumbers and the all-nights-on-the-blog-sites cry hypocrite, but who can fault a guy […]
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Horseback’s MILH IHVH
Jenks Miller’s past releases, under his own name and as Horseback, have mined the utterly heavy and the quietly ambient. On MILH IHVH, his latest 7″ as Horseback, he works to bend those poles until they touch. This pair of tracks”MILH,” meaning circumcision, and “IHVH” meaning God in the Hebrew analogue of acronyms, Notarikonare noisy, […]
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The Avett Brothers play for 150 people in New York on release night
The Avett Brothers Home Sweet Home, New York Tuesday, Sept. 29 In the beginning, The Avett Brothers played an endless string of secret shows, I guess. But they weren’t private. Details weren’t guarded. Anybody could come. Relatively speaking, very few did. That’s not intended to belittle the music Scott and Seth Avett and Bob Crawford […]
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Live: The Avett Brothers play for 150 people in New York on release night
The Avett Brothers Home Sweet Home, New York Tuesday, Sept. 29 In the beginning, The Avett Brothers played an endless string of secret shows, I guess. But they weren’t private. Details weren’t guarded. Anybody could come. Relatively speaking, very few did. That’s not intended to belittle the music Scott and Seth Avett and Bob Crawford […]
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How Coldplay became the first band to beat the digital deficit
Coldplay is the biggest rock band on the planet by almost every rubric: The polite English quartet’s latest recordthe misty, Brian Eno-helmed Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friendssold more than 700,000 copies in its first week as other respectable rock acts struggle to crack half that. 2008’s best seller, Viva La Vida […]
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Bowerbirds’ Upper Air
Bowerbirds are one of the most distinctive bands in the Triangle. Beth Tacular squeezes her accordion as Phil Moore coos about flora and fauna. Mark Paulson adds tasteful violin and keyboard flourishes, and the melodies slaver in slow, honey-like clumps, washing over a booming bass drum. On 2007’s Hymns For a Dark Horse, that sound […]
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Lil Wayne canceled his Raleigh date, but you’re still sweating his 2007 anyway
In 2007, New Orleans emcee Lil Wayne put out enough musicguest spots, mixtape gold and look-the-other-way studio leaksthat Vibe magazine could run a feature highlighting the top 77 tracks he released that year. No typo: 77. What’s more, Vibe actually narrowed it down a bit to arrive at that appealing figure. Think about that number […]