Frank Yang It's less accurate to say that Mark Eitzel was/is/ever shall be the frontman for American Music Club than it is to simply say Mark Eitzel is American Music Club. Over both of the band's incarnations - their original run from 1982 to 1994 and the reunion from 2004 to 2009 - Eitzel released solo records whose songbooks intersected liberally with AMC but roamed more musically, most curiously on The Ugly American , which saw him arranging old songs for traditional Greek instruments, and Candy Ass , which saw [...]
On Friday, A Place To Bury Strangers (APTBS) and Cymbals Eat Guitars shared a head-splitting bill at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg. For noise-rock fans, the lineup made strange sense: both bands can reasonably be described as tribute acts, and both demonstrate how that’s not necessarily a bad thing. APTBS - the sort of band acronyms were invented for - culls generously from the corridors of British goth and shoegaze, welding the screech of the Jesus and Mary Chain with the mope of Bauhaus. Cymbals, by contrast, take their cues from the eight-track squalls of early ‘90s indie-rock - think Pavement, Built to [...]
Frank Yang With most club-level festivals, some intense venue-hopping is par for the course and in a city with a downtown as spread out as Toronto, the logistics of getting from point A to point B in the allotted time can be an art form all its own. Unless you do things as I did on the Thursday night of NXNE and basically plant yourself at one intersection and let the bands come to you. This wasn't an arbitrary decision, mind. Dundas-Ossington has gone from borderland outpost to hot spot in the past [...]
Frank Yang Cosmic questions: What makes an artist put a respectable if underappreciated solo career on hold in order to play drums for a band that's sold hundreds of thousands of records and gone platinum in the UK? And what makes that same artist leave that band in order to not resurrect their former solo career but start a completely new one? Okay, the first one is kind of a no-brainer but the second one is more of a puzzle, one that Baltimore-born, Los Angeles-based Josh Tillman is uniquely positioned to answer. He was plugging [...]
Big HassleThe Joy Formidable With A Place To Bury Strangers and ExitmusicFine Line, MinneapolisMarch 19, 2012It seems inconceivable that a young band like the Joy Formidable would already have two l
A rather frustrating phenomenon that exists for enthusiastic concertgoers who follow up-and-coming artists is the long, long wait that precedes a band's "official" rise to stardom. This term is placed in quotes, because the true mark of becoming a major player in the live music scene is being the headlining act of the tour you've [...]
Frank Yang When you've been through town as an opener as many times as Sharon Van Etten has - four times in just over a year with Rain Machine , Great Lake Swimmers , Megafaun and Junip - I think the hope is that you'll have garnered enough of your own fans that when you make your headlining debut, as she did at The Drake Underground on Tuesday night, some people come out. I ended up running a bit late and thus missed Picastro's opening [...]
Silver Lake venue Spaceland is small. If you wonder how small, its capacity is only 260. And though it is awesome when a band I like plays this small place, it generally keeps me from seeing many shows there because it is just not big enough to accommodate most established bands. So when I heard A Place To Bury Strangers was playing there, I was worried that this band had fallen off or something, just because I figured they could play a venue three times bigger. Regardless of why they chose Spaceland as the site for their last [...]
The amps were turned up high and the lights were turned down low at the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday night, as some feedbacky, shoegazery throwback bands were on the bill. The Big Pink showed up with half of the band missing, A Place to Bury Strangers ended their set in blood, and hardly [...]
Frank Yang Different bands have different attitudes towards the in-store set. Some treat them like opportunities to strip down and get intimate with their audience (okay, that sounded much dirtier than intended but you get the meaning), others don't seem so comfortable with the setting and obviously want to get their sets done as quickly as possible. Montreal's Malajube , in town a day before their show tonight at the Horseshoe, treated their Wednesday night in-store at Sonic Boom like any other show - by plugging in and turning up. Way up. [...]
Frank Yang I'm going to have to stop using my line about any British band being able to fill a venue in notoriously Anglophilic Toronto... this past Wednesday night at the El Mocambo, The Rumble Strips were not only able to draw just a couple dozen people, they couldn't even get their support act to show up. Okay, in the case of tourmates Birdmonster , it was less the Rumble Strips' fault than the border guards who wouldn't let the San Francisco outfit into the country (I think this is at least the [...]
Monolith Music Festival at Denver's Red Rock's Amphitheatre was unbeatable with its gorgeous scenery and great line up. Below you will find a continuation of Saturday's festivities on Sept. 13. Be sure to come back and check out what I thought of the following day and if you missed it, here is what I thought [...]
Chromewaves
Consequence Of Sound
City Pages - Gimme Noise
Spinning Platters
PopWreck(oning)
Numbers: 25 or 6 to 4
Boards of Canada – Reach For The Dead
L D R U – The Tropics
