Blog: The Giant Panther

#25 Chad VanGaalen - Skelliconnection Some people are just artists no matter what the medium. It's not something you can learn your way into. You are born into it. Much like Chad VanGaalen's sketches and animations, his music warbles with a twisted sense of reality, often teeter-tottering between innocence and mischievous. It's when the two come crashing together in the middle that the real magic happens. Most of his recordings were done in a home studio, and the introspective nature of this bleeds through in [...]

I'd planned to review Joanna Newsom's new album Ys today, but I don't have the brainpower at the moment. You've probably never heard of King Biscuit Time, but I'd be willing to bet from the very first track, you'll recognize the sound. King Biscuit Time is the side project of Steve Mason, lead singer of the now defunct Beta Band. Plain and simple, if you like Beta Band, you'll like King Biscuit Time. Black Gold offers some intimate moments from Mason, and overall sounds slightly more condensed than most Beta [...]

I haven't posted in a while. I'm feeling uninspired, and haven't really heard anything new lately to get me kicked into gear. Anybody out there have anything inspiring to share? Anytime I try to grab something from a blog, I end up with a weird recording of some guy saying "We're sorry, this website has been extremely busy." I take it EZ-Archive has now officially tanked. Rather than write-up something just for the sake of it being new, I'm going to talk about 2005's excellent Superwolf , in my opinion the best thing Will [...]

Head over to Kwaya Na Kisser and grab the M. Ward set from KRCW's Morning Becomes Eclectic . Looks like he's off to Europe for a few months, so if you missed the chance to see it live, at least you can hear it. By the way, what is a Kwaya Na Kisser? I saw M. Ward last month, review here.

What better way to kick off a fall tour then to start in front of 200 college students, at a University you can't even pronounce, in a location you believe to be somewhere near Boston. That University was Brandeis, and the location was Waltham, MA. Broken Social Scene, the best indie band in Canada (or probably anywhere else in my opinion), pronounced it "Brandees", "Braandeece", and finally settled on "Brown Dice". They took full advantage of this opportunity to work the kinks out of their act. It almost had the vibe of a dress rehearsal. [...]

I was supposed to do a write-up for Filter's tourzine on the Silversun Pickups/Viva Voce show at the Middle East last Sunday. I ended up getting really sick this weekend, and couldn't get my ass out of bed to get to the show. Luckily, Ashley was there, and wrote about it here . Head on over to Noise For Toaster for the Friday show at BU. I'm bummed I didn't make this show...