Blog: All Our Noise // We Are Live

During her final tour for her latest album, Interstellar , Frankie and her band performed an excellent set for us in the District. This would be one of her last performances for a while before heading back home for an extended period. Interstellar' s big, synth-pop sound, presented a distinct evolution from her debut album, Frankie Rose & the Outs , and from some of the other projects she's been involved in, like Dum Dums , Vivians, or Crystal Stilts. But as for what's next, that is still up in the air. [...]

The first video off of Companion 's self-titled debut hit the web this week, with some love from Stereogum which hosted the premiere.  The video was directed by Alec Sutherland , who has helmed clips for lead singer Pepi Ginsberg on her solo venture, as well as by Maybach Music's Stalley . The album doesn't officially hit the street until February, but you can cop the single at iTunes right now . Pepi's strong vocals and storytelling style have drawn comparisons to Neko Case and Catpower, and she carries some of [...]

Back in 2010, the Austin based duo Yellow Fever released their self-titled debut, a collection of shambling pop tunes culled over the years from singles & EPs. Then after a relative silence for a time the band re-emerged this year with a follow up and a name change. The two linked up with Hardly Art  to release a new full length as the newly dubbed Deep Time . This summer they took the show on the road to support said album and their tour brought them to one of our favorite venues, Comet [...]

Since the Dirty Three formed two decades ago, the Australian trio of Warren Ellis, Jim White and Mick Turner have managed to maintain a consistently interesting and varied sound from their minimal components. On their 2005 album,  Cinder , we saw the band step out of their normal bounds and introduce new elements to their formula, with shorter songs, more varied instrumentation, and even vocals. But it would be seven years before the band released a follow up to the album, with this year's Toward the Low Sun. We spoke to Warren Ellis recently after show at [...]

Over the last year, AON been able to bring together a number of our favorite bands for our curated events; from Volume 3  back in the spring, to our summer series at the Baron with the art punks from You Got Got, to last month's Mount Eerie show at U Street Music Hall . This week, we present the lastest installment for you, this time at Comet Ping Pong . Kicking the night off on Wednesday , will be the hushed tones of Cigarette, a band around which a lot of excitement [...]

I stumbled upon local whiz-kid Brenton Duvall recently via Hype Machine, when an errant search for Drake's "Crew Love" yielded a few dubious hits.  Full-disclosure: last year's Take Care  ranks up there in my personal archive as one of the best albums in recent memory and  "Crew Love" is a fantastic specimen of what makes the album so good – austere synths and percussion, minimalist arrangement, and atmospheric vocals that fill the space around Drake's commanding lyrics. So, hunting for a remix of the track (naturally), I was looking for a reinterpretation or re-imagining of some kind that [...]

• BrentonRules - MORE BRENTON BEATS

In May of last year, Neil Young packed up a 1956 Crown Victoria and traveled from his home in Ontario to finish the last two nights of his solo world tour at Massey Hall in Toronto. Filmmaker and collaborator Jonathan Demme came along for the ride, and documented these last two shows, which more or less revisited a classic concert performed by Young at the same venue more than 40 years ago.  That original set was recorded and released only a few years ago, though unfortunately wasn't filmed. Luckily this time around, Demme made sure that didn't happen again. [...]

Katy Goodman was mostly known as the bassist from Vivian Girls, but at this point, her own project La Sera has established a presence firmly on its own. Last year's self debut started off in a basement, recorded over a two week period with very little intention for escape beyond that setting. Luckily that plan failed, and the songs were ultimately rerecorded and released. This time around, the process was much more deliberate. This set of songs evolved over the course of a year, and Sees the Light was recorded with a full [...]

Mike Hadreas has played piano since childhood, but first started writing actual songs about 5 years back, during a self imposed detox period. In an effort to get healthy, he spent his time in isolation focusing on a set of songs that would evolve into the first Perfume Genius album, Learning . His latest effort, Put Your Back N 2 It , builds on the intimacy of the first, but as he discussed with us back in the spring , the album explores issues and themes that are a little more outward looking. [...]

In September, All Our Noise curated a showcase at U Street Music Hall, the latest in the series of AON PRESENTS shows we've put together over the course of the last year. We were pleased to host one of our favorite artists, Mount Eerie , who just this year released two great albums in Clear Moon  and Ocean's Roar . Rounding out the night was Baltimore's Secret Mountains , who we've featured as well. Through this extended Bite Sized Set, watch as Phil Elverum leads the band through a dark and moody [...]

Surrounding the release of their latest album back in May, Adventures in Your Own Backyard , Patrick Watson joined Andrew Bird for a few dates as openers on a short Northeastern tour. But over the summer, the band got back out on the road for a much more extensive tour, this time in the headlining spot. Patrick and his eponymous band have now claimed a personal record for most headlining dates in a year, with their tour schedule currently keeping them on the road for the remainder of 2012, save for a couple [...]

This week, the Dirty Three kicked off the North American leg of their tour in support of their latest album, Toward the Low Sun , which came out back in the winter.  On Sunday, they'll stop off here in DC at the 6th & I Historic Synagogue . Though the Australian trio has managed to maintain a consistently interesting and varied sound from minimal elements, they have had some great collaborations over the years as well, with artists such as Nick Cave, Will Oldham, and Cat Power to name a few. Let us [...]

On Saturday, May 19th, Comet Ping Pong hosted the Kid Congo Power Hour with newcomers Garbage Zone opening up the evening. Not a lot was known about the first band going into the evening, but once things kicked off the very familiar faces in the line-up tore through some familiar tunes. As they put it, "we're a tribute group. We do songs by our favorite Washington, D.C. artists." And deliver on that promise they did. But, as it turns out, this band of newcomers were actually a reunited Make Up , and were testing the waters in advance of [...]

For the last couple of years now, the Scapescape festival has given the people of Baltimore the opportunity to experience some of the best bands the city has produced, and this year was no exception. With a line up of more than 75 bands that included acts such as  Wye Oak , Celebration , and Mikrokingdom , this year's installment proved as exciting as ever. Secret Mountains helped to lead things off right with a headlining performance at the Windup Space on the opening night of the festival. The band followed up that explosive set [...]

To accompany their recently released 2012 music issue, The Believer has included a special limited edition cassette compilation, Love Songs for Lamps , curated by the inimitable Calvin Johnson . Songs were chosen from a range of artists who currently have cassette only releases, and were handpicked by Johnson. The Believer cassette release tour touched down in D.C. at the newly reopened Meeps vintage clothing store in Adams Morgan. In addition to Calvin's headlining set, featured excellent performances from Priests, Old Night, Laura Lief & APB, and Katie & the Lichen. A [...]

Brooklyn's indie-soul crew Ava Luna  kicked off the year right with a national tour in support of Twin Sister , and the release of their latest full-length, Ice Level . The tight and compact 8 track album continues on with the sort of post-punk/R&B vibe the band has been known for, and you can stream the whole record from their bandcamp site right now. Way back in 2010, we invited the band to headline our first AON Volume show, along with Gay Blades , Weekends [...]

Sarah Ruba and Adam Pavao, the husband-and-wife duo behind New Look , are the sort of stylish pair that you'd expect to see in the pages of glossy high-fashion magazines from Berlin.  So it should be no surprise that Ruba is in fact a former model and that the couple recorded much of their self-titled debut album in Berlin where they are signed to !K7  (alongside labelmates Booka Shade, Erlend Øye).  The album was put together over the course of three years, in which the band split time between Ruba's modeling gigs and production stints in their native Ontario, and [...]

San Francisco post-punk trio Grass Widow recently wrapped up a national tour in support of their third album, Internal Logic . An excellent album filled with hypnotic harmonies, as guitarist Raven Mahon, bassist Hannah Lew, and drummer Lillian Maring all share vocal duties more or less equally. With prior records put out on Captured Tracks and Kill Rock Stars , this time around, the band strikes out on their own with Internal Logic released on their own imprint, HLR . We were lucky enough to catch their early-week set [...]

Directed by multi-disciplinary artist and musician Yoshi Sodeoka , The Presets' newest music video is a wild swirl of found footage and seemingly drug-induced visions. Disorienting to say the least, the constantly shifting bands of color interwoven with increasingly disjointed scenes of well, a lot of random stuff , form a sort of wrecked collage of pixels that's been put thru a Blendtec .   Like a hallucinatory, visual quicksand,  the "subjects" of the video continually morph and collapse into one another, merging with digital artifacts that repeat and regress in a kaleidoscope of RGB and [...]

On Home , the third album from Midtown Dickens , the band explores a range of themes that inform the record's title. Friends, family, loves, youthful memories. And since the release of the record back in the spring, they've kept on the move. This week, they kick off an extensive summer long tour in support of the album, "hitting every corner of the US that they can drive to." During their last visit, we had the opportunity to spend a morning with the band. They played a couple of songs for us, "This is My [...]