Chicago – Grizfolk brought their sweet folktronica to the Windy City. The LA band was excited to be playing the Aragon for the first time in their careers and it showed! The stage and the audience buzzed with electricity throughout the set, making it clear why Grizfolk was handpicked by Bastille to open on select dates for
Los Angeles – Ben Howard fans, gather around: For those who feared the singer-songwriter couldn’t live up to his runaway 2011 debut, Every Kingdom, fear not. In fact, I Forget Where We Were, out this week on Republic in the U.S. and Island Records elsewhere, smashes through expectations. While Howard’s second album has all the wholehearted
Los Angeles – Once in a while someone is fortunate to experience a sound that truly resonates in more ways than one. Islands, the debut record out this week on Communion Records from the London-based trio Bear’s Den, is one of those records that fits that mold. Bear’s Den is a byproduct of the London
Austin – “Are you going to ACL this year?” Since 2009, my answer was always “No.” I could never remember which day I’m supposed to spend refreshing the page for ticket sales, and I could never remember to save the money for scalped/second-hand tickets. For the scatterbrained and the sweat-averse, the ACL Late Night circuit
Seattle – Two local indie bands filled Neumos with a celebratory atmosphere the other night when SISTERS and Motopony performed their hearts out to the packed venue. It’s amazing to watch a band grow over the passing of time; what’s even more amazing is when you recognize how much they’ve evolved over the course of
New York – Avi Buffalo is a four-piece indie act out of Long Beach, California, founded by Avi Zahner-Isenberg back when the singer-songwriter and guitar slinger was but 19 years old. Now 23, Avi Buffalo is about to resurface with an arsenal of fully realized alt experimentalism that’s solid enough to cement this act in
Nashville – On his first ever solo album, Folk Singer, Vol. 1, Willie Watson plays ten recycled tunes. They are stripped down and vulnerable, naked as the day they were born. He’s reviving the roots from which the modern folk movement has blossomed. At a time when traditional instruments and music have morphed beyond recognition (e.g.,
Nashville – It is always so refreshing when a band or artist picks a name that truly evokes a vision that relates entirely to the sort of music they play. When I first heard the name New Madrid, what came to mind was a mysterious, European country landscape in the early morning. Fog would be
Los Angeles – Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn have done the whole psych-genre thing already. The main music project for Chasny is Six Organs of Admittance, admittedly a psych folk group, and Donovan Quinn’s band, the Skygreen Leopards, also classifies themselves as a psych-folk project. But when put together, Chasny and Quinn have created a new
New York – “Sometimes my heart and brain conspire / to set everything on fire / Just to stop the tyranny / of that minute hand on me.” On “Golden Wake,” Mutual Benefit ringleader Jordan Lee lays out his mission statement for the indie folk collective about as plainly as we could hope for. The