When Jamie Lidell sent members of his backing band into the crowd during his Saturday evening Lollapalooza set, he couldn’t have known that it would serve as a metaphor for his 55 minutes on stage. If he did, and he still allowed his mates to leave him solo on the MySpace stage for almost half […]
When a local radio personality walked onto Lollapalooza’s AT&T stage Saturday to introduce The Ting Tings, the responding cheers weren’t from a crowd that loved the British duo’s danceable rock ‘n’ roll. Instead, the roar was from a couple thousand people hoping to enjoy the much buzzed-about 12:45 p.m. gig … and it was from […]
There are career-defining performances, and then there are career-altering ones. The Beatles weren’t defined by “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, but it certainly set the course for the rest of the band’s career. The Who’s path wasn’t so much redirected by a 1979 concert in which almost a dozen people were trampled to death […]
When visual artist Scott Masson started Office in 2001, he meant for it to use corporate themes such as costumes and props throughout the band’s performances … not for it to parallel homogenized, lifeless, assembly line, conglomerate slog. Yet that’s exactly what he had when his Chicago ensemble took the PlayStation 3 stage Sunday afternoon […]
Even high school kids need somewhere to go during the summer, right? Not all of them work seasonal jobs, saving up for much-needed future keg money. A good chunk of them sit alone in their basements scrawling love poems into notebooks and shouting (or maybe crying) in the shower every night. But every now and […]
Make sure you’ve got at least two days-worth of stubble before hitting up a Battles gig. All the chin stroking that goes on at these math-rockers’ shows often requires the perfect follicle count. A freshly-shaven face is certain to chafe sometime between songs from last year’s Mirrored and 2006’s EP C / B EP. But […]
Some bands just need to play outside, either because their booming tunes are too big for tiny clubs or because they just have too many people to cram onto a dimly lit stage. Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s are a bit of both. Sure the group’s swooping, baroque pop structures lend themselves well […]
Parents, don’t let your baby girls grow up to be Louis XIV fans. Actually, by the time they mature into adult womenhood, the glam-rock California foursome probably won’t be interested anymore. Nope, these guys like easy women, partying, and partying with easy women. In case it’s still not clear: Louis XIV likes to fuck. A […]
Soul never goes out of style. Souls, on the other hand, are so last century. And while spiritualism might be as passé as heroin, it’s never uncool to belt out smooth R&B over groovy rhythms. Enter Jamie Lidell, a funky 35-year-old Englishman with a healthy appreciation for Stevie Wonder and cabaret-style getups. Supporting this year’s […]
Toronto’s Holy Fuck is an appropriately named blend of perverted psycho-drama ideals and elaborate electronic fusion that sends seemingly every noise in their twisted world through their wires. The massive onslaught of fuzzy, angular noise oozes a sense of debauchery, but the look-what-I-found perception of their found sound is hardly accidental. Live, the ensemble makes […]