The Entroporium

Ah, the good old days of music TV before all the sleazy videos. Just a band lip-syncing and bringing their special brand of love to the fanbase… These clips are probably the weirdest, most abrasive performances ever on Top 40-type programs. Today this would be TRL — the performance finished, Carson Daly dashes onstage to [...]

With the crowd standing in riveted silence all night — which in itself was pretty amazing given the number of underage folks in the room — I may have been the only person in the room who was faintly disappointed (and only faintly, I should emphasize, before I go into my big semi-diatribe). The band struggled with some of the intricate songs – “Come On Feel The Illinoise!” was introduced by Sufjan as “the hard one” – and the mix was terrible, the bass and drums way too high and the ornamental percussion too low.

Two different friends went to see Beck at the Civic Auditorium on Tuesday, and neither of them left as happy customers. “Too contrived,” hissed Darin. Both agreed that the sound sucked. (Somewhere Bill Graham rolls around in his grave knowing that that horrible concrete pit bears his name.) Perhaps Darin & Veronica would have been [...]

In the dark days before MP3 blogs and the internets, it was a lot harder to come by music news out of the mainstream. Now put yourself back in 1981 and 14 years old. Even for a kid working in a record store, there were very few outlets to find out what the latest on [...]

Noto & Sakamoto’s latest release, Insen, extends Vrioon by widening its compositional and aural possibilities beyond tone-poems to tighter pieces with a more traditional sense of drama and song. The Raster-Noton site describes Insen as a souvenir of a summer spent at a Berlin studio, and indeed Insen’s tracks do seem more bounded by time, memory and place than do Vrioon‘s.

Got any room on the bandwagon for me? Up until four days ago, today was to be the official release date for Sufjan Stevens’ new opus, Come On Feel The Illinoise! It’s been moved off again for another month because of issues related to copyright – a touch ironic for an artist whose success will [...]

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Let’s think about this for a second. It’s a lonely hearts club. For war widows and widowers. The Beatles are standing over an open grave. Despite its triumphal sound, its more mournful and depressing than anything else. Is this really an appropriate opener for a concert benefitting Africa’s impoverished? [...]