Happy Monday! Allow us to help you start your week with our Mixtape #3, featuring tracks from all our Best Song nominees in the Newbie Awards, plus tracks from last week’s live review of Saskatchewan and Vensaire at Glasslands in Brooklyn, and Katrina’s favorite track from The Babies’ new album, which she reviewed. Bonus track:
Picture a place with beautiful and haunting landscapes, marvelous mountains and foaming seas. It’s full of artists who all make music that reflects the natural beauty, expressed in honest and creative ways. Every song has an interesting story that it tells, and it all comes alive in beautiful and haunting ways, and makes you feel
Here we have the next installment of our weekly mixtape, with hits from artists we’ve covered and other fresh tracks from this past week. We covered great shows like Rubblebucket and The Helio Sequence, reviewed the new Crystal Castles album, interviewed Brooklyn band on the rise Los Encantados, profiled Singer/songwriter Lianne La Havas for our
Neon colors, LED light accessories, giant dancing robots, sing-a-longs, and crowd-surfing second line parades are some of the things you can expect at a Rubblebucket show. You can expect your face to start hurting from smiling so much, but to not care because you’re at a super fun party where you could get blasted in
Seeing The Helio Sequence live is a cathartic experience. Since they’re touring in support of what may be their most introspective and meditative album yet, Negotiations, this makes complete sense. Guitarist/vocalist Brandon Summers and Drummer/keyboardist Benjamin Weikel come off as mellow, understated folk who have a keen sense for spacious, atmospheric compositions, and who are
Since the first time I caught jangly surf-rock band Fort Lean live, about two years ago when I didn’t know anything about them up to now, they’ve really started to emerge as one of those aspiring bands in Brooklyn. Not only have they been more talked about, musically they’ve begun carving a more meaningful niche
Thursday night was a trip of the musically-induced variety, when The Fresh & Onlys and Quilt played Music Hall of Williamsburg. The Fresh & Onlys are one of those bands where it’s easy not to realize exactly how good they are until experienced live. With introspective lyrics set to heavily hazy psych pop jams, they
Saturday night was the finale for CMJ 2012, five days jam-packed (literally) with panels, shows, powwows, and late nights. It was like cramming a month into a week. The final show that I was not mad about at all was Wild Nothing, BRAIDS, and Weekend at Bowery Ballroom. In a way, this show summed up
Friday night was the Panache Showcase at Public Assembly, with their fun and eccentric roster of bands ranging from Dent May to Violent Bullshit. I ended up only seeing enough of the latter to see front man Jayson Green getting in a heckling war with a dudebro. After realizing the futility of what was becoming
Thursday night of CMJ ended up being good for sweat and beer at Knitting Factory, but it didn’t start out that way. The first musician I caught there was Daughn Gibson. who paired some dark country croonin’ with electronic beats. He was joined by a librarian-esque keyboard player, who added an extra layer of dusty