Blog: GoGoIndieRocket

One of my favorite singers of the past couple years is Cory Branan . I first saw him play at The Whig a couple summers ago, and it was without a doubt one of the best singer/songwriter shows I've ever seen. I can't even begin to explain the perfect combination of charismatic self-deprecation, songcraft, and improvisation that he puts into his act. He's come back into town a couple times since then, and each show has burned itself into my mind, especially this one night at New Brookland Tavern when my roommate at the time [...]

Get Out! is indierocket!'s guide to getting down in the Soda City. Before the Music Dies :: Nickelodeon Theatre :: Friday, 4 p.m. Skip out of work early and head to the Nick for this one — filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen take a critical look at the pop music industry in Before the Music Dies , which features interviews with the likes of Eric Clapton, Branford Marsalis, Dave Matthews, Erykah Badu and the indomitable Elvis Costello. There's also a noon showing on Saturday. [...]

Devereaux is the solo side-project from Death Becomes Even The Maiden 's W. Heyward (formerly of Bolt ). ( Full disclosure: Pat and I are both friends with Heyward. But hey, we're friends with most everyone in the local music scene. Plus, we're really freakin' professional. So there. ) Recorded earlier this week as something of a test, 'Perestroika' is the first fruit of the Devereaux vine. The track hasn't been mixed or mastered, but you can tell that it's well on its way to being quite tasty. Post-rock guitars loop over drums that sound more hip-hop influenced [...]

Hailing from the UK (Portsmith, to be exact), The Strange Death of Liberal England are a mélange of influences and sounds that I would never have thought would make for good bedfellows, but hearing them play, I immediately want to slap my forehead. ('Of course! How could it not sound brilliant?!') Lead singer Adam Woolway's voice is a breathy, sometimes cracking, tenor that lies somewhere between The Buzzcock's Pete Shelley and Hefner's Darren Hayman - very good company to keep. Then there's the band - an experimental post-rock marriage of Arcade Fire and (one of my favorites) Saxon [...]

As you can tell by the amount of Tube posts here at the IndieRocket, we like some music videos. I even go so far as to DVR Suberranean , MTV2's attempt to shove one tiny hour a week of indie rock in the worst possible time slot. As it is with most things, 90% of the videos are shrug-worthy, with a handful of good videos and a rare few brilliant offerings. Over the last year, the big trend in indie rock videos has been animated videos. Subterranean played so many that they got complaints, and deservedly so. You couldn't [...]

This happens every year. January comes and I churn out a list of my top ten (or twenty-one , as the case might be) records of the year, knowing full well that I'll discover something in the first months of the new year that, had I heard it, would've made it on the list. Well, Athens' Cinemechanica wouldn't just have made the list — they would've placed very highly. I've always said that what betrays a band most is its selection of cover songs. Well, I came across Cinemechanica — and its 2006 [...]

File this under "If You Haven't Heard It, It's New to You": Gamenight 's long-player, Simple Starts in the Mind , came out in August 2006 on The New Beat Records (based in the group's hometown of Knoxville), and we IndieRocketeers discovered it (OK, maybe just me) when the post-emo quartet was slated to play New Brookland Tavern in December. The show was cancelled, but "Cookies for Brains" and "Progression" still live on in our iPods. (Again, maybe just mine.) Gamenight deftly straddles the line between indie rock and emo, owing as much to the guitar [...]

I tell this story every time that I'm drunk and Idlewild comes up in conversation, so if you're a friend or drinking buddy of mine and have heard this a million times, just skip to the end or something. I saw Idlewild at Irving Plaza in New York back in the fall of 2002 as part of the CMJ Music Festival. 100 Broken Windows had been a big hit with my fellow WUSC djs in 2000 as well as the more recently released Remote Part , and so even though I went to the show alone, I [...]

You know, it's been awfully shoegaze-y around IndieRocket lately, and for that, I almost feel like I should apologize. The truth is that we IndieRocketeers love all kinds of music, and we certainly don't want to put any one genre above another. So if we seem partial to shoegaze stuff as of late, then just accredit it to the fact that there's some amazing stuff coming out of the genre and all its subsets as of late. And it's our blog. We can be partial if we like. So there. One such band that we're excited about as of late [...]

Pinebender 9 p.m. :: $5 The Soapbox :: 255 N. Front St. :: Wilmington, N.C. Get out, indeed! Wilmington, N.C., might be a bit far of a drive, but this sludgefeast is worth the road trip. You'll see I wrote about Pinebender in my Year in Review: Paradiso installment that the Chicago trio is [...]

we are slackers. it's true. but here's my take on 2006's best releases and what makes them so. 1. So Many Dynamos — Flashlights (Skrocki) Because they do a damn fine impression of The Dismemberment Plan — one of my all-time favorites — and anyone with the chops and nervous energy to pull that off has to be atop any of my lists. Also, I'm of the opinion that the album you listened to the most is automatically your No. 1. Listen to "Search [...]

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