I stood in the balcony to watch the XX play a show in 2010. The British band’s debut record had come out the previous year, and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were falling …
October 10, 2012
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Stories by William Crain
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Dr. Dog: Bad Band Name with Good Things Going for Them
The guys in Dr. Dog aren’t going to set any fashion trends. They aren’t particularly charismatic. They don’t have a sound that fits into a trendy cubbyhole. They don’t have a terribly interesting backstory. They …
October 3, 2012
Communist Daughter
Communist Daughter’s “Not the Kid” rumbles along on a rolling rhythm. There is a part of the song in which singer-songwriter Johnny Solomon breathes loudly, like he’s running to get away from the rest of …
September 26, 2012
Amanda Palmer — queen of Kickstarter
Like a lot of musicians these days, former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer decided recently to skip the whole record-company rigmarole and fund her next record through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. She started out with a …
September 19, 2012
Moonface Beams Heartbreaking Bravery
Moonface started out as a lo-fi solo project by Spencer Krug in what little time off he had from his other bands, Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Swan Lake (among others). To show how seriously …
September 12, 2012
Terry Malts' Retro Shake
A friend of mine says Terry Malts sound like the perfect combination of the Ramones and Jesus and Mary Chain: simple, irresistibly catchy rock ’n’ roll songs full of guitar feedback. Most of the bands …
September 5, 2012
Not Those United States, These United States
In an election year, each candidate argues that his or her vision of America is the real one and that the other candidate’s is not. But there are 300 million of us, and there are …
August 29, 2012
Three Mile Pilot
I often hear Three Mile Pilot described as influential, but it’s hard to say what that means. Since their ’90s heyday as a pillar of San Diego’s indie-rock reputation, nothing has sounded quite like the …
August 22, 2012
Tartufi's Future Is Going to Blow Our Minds
“You won’t believe all that sound is coming from two people!” People always say that about rock duos — and there are a lot of rock duos these days. But the truth is, you usually …
August 15, 2012
Jessica Lea Mayfield
If you hadn’t heard her music, you would be forgiven for thinking that Jessica Lea Mayfield makes traditional singer-songwriter music, but you would be wrong. Mayfield began her music career at age 8, playing in …
August 8, 2012
The Evolution of Avi Buffalo
“What’s in it for someone with nothing to do? What’s in it for me?” asks Avigdnor Zahner-Isenberg in the debut single of his band Avi Buffalo. Indeed, Avi Buffalo was apparently born out of times …
August 1, 2012
Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles
Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles started out their career playing for spare change on the University of Minnesota campus, and — in a move that is exceedingly rare among college-campus buskers — they soon …
July 25, 2012
The Intelligence
The Intelligence’s new Everybody’s Got It Easy But Me begins with “I Like L.A.” and, in a way, the song tells the story of the band. Lars Finberg’s sardonic lyrics and nicotine-stained voice seem to …
July 18, 2012
Bart Davenport is retro-active
In Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, music critic Simon Reynolds writes, “When I look back at the development of pop and rock during my lifetime...what perplexes me is the slow but steady …
July 11, 2012
Caught up in the Happiness of Mates of State
Sometime in 2001, I was at a party in San Francisco when someone introduced me to Jason Hammel, one-half of the keyboards-drums duo Mates of State, which had recently moved to the Bay Area and …
July 4, 2012
2:54: Former Vulgarians
London sisters Hannah and Colette Thurlow used to play together in a punk band called the Vulgarians, but when they decided they wanted to pursue a more restrained sound, they thought of the Melvins — …
June 20, 2012
Céu Can Make Starbucks Interesting
My friend Dan recommended that I check out the Brazilian singer Céu, but he was a little embarrassed about it. “She’s kind of a Starbucks artist,” he said. I knew what he meant: to call …
June 13, 2012
How Do You Do? Mayer Hawthorne
If you’re going to do ’60s- and ’70s-style soul in 2012, you’d better be good. More than that, you need to sing soul like you mean it. For that reason, I was not won over …
June 6, 2012
Mogwai Is Too Good for Background Music
Grad school meant hours and hours of reading by myself. Music kept me company, but it had to be a certain kind of music. Lyrics would distract me from my studies, so almost anything with …
May 30, 2012
Yacht: A Band, a Business, a Belief System
Yacht is sometimes spelled like the boat, sometimes all in capital letters, sometimes as Y.A.C.H.T., and sometimes with a triangle in place of the “A.” And Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans invariably describe their venture …
May 23, 2012
Spiritualized: Best When It Breaks Down
When the Spiritualized song “Hey Jane” began streaming online a few months ago, a friend of mine said it was really good...and then it went off the rails. I told him I thought it didn’t …
May 16, 2012
Circa-1981 Hardcore with OFF!
When a band of SoCal punk veterans calls itself OFF! you know what you’re going to get, but that doesn’t mean you will be prepared for it. OFF! takes its name from a brand of …
May 9, 2012
Allo Darlin' Brings Twee Indie Pop to the Casbah
“Forget hipsters, let’s all hate on twee for a while,” read a recent headline on the website Brokelyn. The accompanying article was about Brooklyn’s “artisanal” food makers and the complicated emotions they evoke. (Sure, they …
May 2, 2012
Little Hurricane Brings Roadwork to the Casbah
When talking about San Diego’s Little Hurricane, it’s best to get the White Stripes comparison out of the way first. Little Hurricane is a duo with a guy singing and playing guitar and a woman …
April 25, 2012
The Horrors of Skying
In the glory days of rock ’n’ roll, artists changed all the time: Dylan went electric, became a Christian, and went back to his irascible, inscrutable self; Bowie became a different character every couple of …
April 18, 2012
Peter Wolf Crier, Garden of Arms
Peter Wolf Crier is a duo consisting of singer-guitarist Peter Pisano and drummer Brian Moen, and you might guess they sound like the Black Keys, the White Stripes, or other retro-minded guitar-drums duos. But Peter …
April 11, 2012
Bowerbirds Sing at the Casbah
Today’s folk-rock is typically made to sound like a product of the predigital age, but the success of bands such as Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons, and the Avett Brothers proves that the early 21st …
April 4, 2012
Wennerstrom & the Heartless Bastards
The Heartless Bastards started out as a power trio from Ohio, playing a very Midwestern kind of rock ’n’ roll. They weren’t groundbreaking, but neither were they overly reverent about their influences. They sometimes got …
March 28, 2012
Radiation City's Slow Burn
The website intothewoods.tv has a remarkable video of the band Radiation City performing their song “Babies” in someone’s living room. They’re packed in so tightly that one guy who wants to listen is standing outside, …
March 21, 2012
Go Outside with the Cults
I’ve watched the music video for the Cults’ “Go Outside” at least a half-dozen times now, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Directed by Isaiah Seret, the video is assembled largely …
March 14, 2012
Peter Case and Paul Collins, Power-Poppers for Life
In the mid-’70s, Peter Case and Paul Collins played together in a San Francisco band called the Nerves. Appropriately enough, they played melodic, guitar-based rock ’n’ roll with a nervous intensity. Before long, the style …
March 7, 2012
Ty Segall Says Goodbye Bread
The exhaustingly prolific Ty Segall has been earning a name for himself in San Francisco’s crowded lo-fi/psych/punk scene over the past few years with a string of noisy, mostly scattershot releases with an occasional glimpse …
February 29, 2012
Veronica Falls: Indie Pop Has Life
Veronica Falls is a London band whose debut single is a ghost story called “Found Love in a Graveyard.” On their first full-length release, they also feature songs titled “Misery,” “Bad Feeling,” and “Beachy Head,” …
February 22, 2012
Buck 65: Centaur?
Richard Terfry is a Canadian hip-hop artist who has performed under half a dozen names over the past 20 years, but he’s best known as Buck 65. His earlier work was the kind of thing …
February 15, 2012
You! Me! Dancing! Los Campesinos
The first time I heard the Los Campesinos song “By Your Hand,” I was shocked. I mean, this is a band with a reputation for being twee (all the members go by first names only, …
February 8, 2012
Eleanor Friedberger, Out of the Fiery Furnaces
Brother-sister act Fiery Furnaces has spent the past ten years earning a reputation as one of the most prolific and confounding acts in indie rock. Their songs, written mostly by Matthew Friedberger, pair classic-rock instrumentation …
February 1, 2012
Fujiya & Miyagi: Krautrock and Aphex Twin
Fujiya & Miyagi’s David Best doesn’t really sing, he hisses in rhythm. In LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy would alternate talking with singing. Even talk-singers such as the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and Art Brut’s Eddie …
January 25, 2012
Dashboard Confessional Unplugged: Chris Carrabba
The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica recently wrote that mainstream rock has become zombified, that even country music has shown more experimentation than rock in recent years. He raises some interesting points, but his article …
January 18, 2012
The Bloody Hollies, Yours Until the Bitter End
The garage rock bands of the ’60s weren’t meant to last. Typically, they played a bunch of shows, cut a single or two, and then the members went off to college, marriage, or Vietnam. Modern …
January 11, 2012
The Young, A Mysterious Young Band
The internet makes it easy to find new bands...maybe too easy. It’s hard to feel the thrill of discovery and connection with a new band when you can come across 50 new bands a day …
January 4, 2012