Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. ⇒ Read also: Our feature story on Ben Folds Five’s return to Chapel Hill MySpace, which is presenting Ben Folds Five’s one-off reunion performance of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner as part of its new “Front to Back” series, […]
Spencer Griffith
Bio: Spencer Griffith lives in Raleigh, where he teaches school and writes about bands.
Posted inMusic
Nathan Oliver’s Nathan Oliver
If you were judging the band by its handle, you may assume Chapel Hill’s Nathan Oliver is another run-of-the-mill singer-songwriter fresh out of school. And, though Nathan Oliver is indeed fronted by a Nathan (with the last name White), he comes flanked live and on tape by Mark Lebetkin and a cast of characters long […]
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Titus Andronicus
Glen Rock, N.J.’s Titus Andronicus may call itself a shoegaze band, but its nervous vocals, pounding rhythm section and big guitars charge way too hard for that tag. Think of having the time of your life with Bright Eyes, or listening to five hyperactive Jersey boys decide they were way too smart to be in […]
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Alina Simones Half My Kingdom
Listen up! or stream it below. If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. With the roar of an electric guitar, Half My Kingdom begins Alina Simones Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware . A skronky trumpet soon enters, playing off the guitar to create a swing over shuffling […]
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Sunfold and Annuals
Kenny Florence and Adam Baker lead one troupe of musicians as two bandsSunfold and Annuals, respectively. In Annuals, Baker, 22, harnesses the sextet’s sound into a fury of colors, pushing up his elliptical lyrics and big, complex melodies with keyboards, noise and guitars. In Sunfold, which was called Sedona when the band attended high school […]
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Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself talks Motörhead, mortality and Immortalizer
While relaxing in Greece last October after finishing a run of European dates with Fu Manchu, Valient Thorr frontman Valient Himself rushed back to the United States after his diabetic father entered the final stages of renal kidney failure. Over the last two decades, Himself’s Earth father (the band, of course, is from Venus) had […]
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Annuals and Sunfold
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. While its members attended high school in Raleigh, Sedona gave way to a side project called Annuals. Both bands largely shared the same lineup, except where Kenny Florence fronted Sedona, Annuals played the songs of Adam Baker as Florence reverted […]
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American Aquarium’s The Bible & The Bottle/ Bones
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Without shame, Raleigh’s American Aquarium wears its influences on its record sleeves: Designed by ex-Whiskeytown drummer Skillet Gilmore, the liner notes for the band’s second album, The Bible & the Bottle, thank alt.country compatriots Lucero and Cory Branan. Several tracks […]
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How does Inflowential stack up in mtvU’s new contest?
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Raleigh hip-hop crew Inflowential recently nabbed one of three first-place spots in mtvU’s Palm Centro at AT&T Battle of the Bands contest. Pitted against We Are Only Fiction and The Lives of Famous Men, Inflow now competes for a grand prize […]
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Oso Optimo
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. “I’m never acting my age/ Some things never change,” George Hage sings on “This Bottle of Mine,” the sixth track from Oso Optimo’s debut, The Great American Short Stories. On Stories, Hage and his bandmatesMike Schroeder on drums and Larry Dempsey […]
