Cedric Watson There’s a reason Cedric Watson calls his band Bijou Creole: He wants to free zydeco music from its current straitjacket that permits nothing but a 2/4 stomp by returning to an earlier version of South Louisiana black music known as Creole (or “la la” or “zodico”). The Houston native and Lafayette resident...
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Last May, the Chapel Hill band Birds and Arrows made an instant fan out of me with a show at the Metro Gallery, previewing material from the great album Starmaker that was released a few months later. So when the husband and wife duo of Pete and Andrea Connolly returned to Baltimore for a...
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LCD Soundsystem, rocking out LCD Soundsystem deserved its headlining slot at the Virgin Mobile Free Fest Saturday, for it’s one of the most exciting rock’n'roll bands in the world right now. I know, I know: some would dispute that it’s really rock’n'roll and even more would dispute that it’s even a band. After all,...
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Sleigh Bells It’s pretty impressive, and FreeFest free tickets have been gone for a long time. We got late notice about this show so it’s not in today’s print edition, but Sleigh Bells performs Sunday, Sept. 26, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are $12....
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Superchunk While most of its 1990s indie-rock contemporaries have since broken up and, in many cases, gotten back together for lucrative reunion tours, Chapel Hill, N.C.’s Superchunk never really split or went away, still gigging here and there and trickling out the occasional new song. But its excellent new album, Majesty Shredding, is the...
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Ralph Alessi Ralph Alessi is an avant-gardist who’s not afraid of beauty. As the jazz trumpeter led his This Against That quintet at Towson University Thursday, he was willing to go anywhere the music led him, including the one area jazz radicals often shy away from: passages of gorgeous harmony. Alessi, a tall, slender...
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True Vine Here’s a new mix from soon-to-be ex-Baltimorean Dave Nada on Dissonance radio in Washington D.C.–Diplo-style world-dance stuff, judging by the tracklist. Barn Aid, a benefit festival of quality local talent such as Wye Oak and the Celebration side-project Birdland, has been moved from Springfield Farms in Sparks to the Golden West, and...
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Dustin Wong Sometime in the very early morning of Saturday, Aug. 21, DJ Rice–of one-man band Teenage Souls and one of the nicest humans around–was attacked after leaving the Copycat building. He was found sometime later off Loch Raven Boulevard with multiple but nonfatal skull fractures and spent eight days in the ICU. The...
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