Seattle’s Leeni Ramadan (aka the glitter-gloom pop singer, Prom Queen) has established herself as a singular-voiced, bouffant-boasting player in the Emerald City music scene. If the ultimate goal of any creative person is to establish an immediately recognizable style, Ramadan has done that already…
If there's one rule about horror movies, it's that you always leave enough of a loose end for a sequel, regardless of whether or not it ever happens. Sure enough, that's exactly what the master of horror and suspense cinema John Carpenter did on his first solo LP outing. Lost Themes, an album compr…
While he may not have enjoyed the widespread attention that Kendrick Lamar received last year for his fantastic To Pimp A Butterfly, rising Oakland rapper Vince Staples deserves just as much credit for pushing the culture in new directions with his own 2015 LP, Summertime '06. Staples' first full-l…
Opening this year’s live broadcast from Kex Hostel at Iceland Airwaves Music Festival is Icelandic experimental electro-pop band East of My Youth. Formed just last year, East of My Youth created a lot of buzz with their first single “Lemonstars” at the end of last summer, and have since been on a s…
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix cannot catch a break. With his work as Liturgy, he has crafted some of the most vivacious, jarring metal records we've heard in recent years. Take 2011's Aesthetica as an example. The record operates between quiet and loud like little else on the market. Its use of black metal t…
On May 11-13, Upstream Music Fest + Summit will descend upon Pioneer Square with over 300 local and national acts. Back in February, the first wave of artists whet our appetites with names like Flying Lotus, AlunaGeorge, Shabazz Palaces, Beat Connection and Snarky Puppy. Now it's finally here — the…
Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by DJ Kevin Cole, host of Drive Time on KEXP, is "Flaws" by Les Amazones d'Afrique, from the 2024 album Musow Danse on Real World Records.
Now that they've played a number of shows on their much-publicized reunion trek, it's fair to judge whether or not the Outkast festival tour is merely a opportunistic cash grab or an enthusiastic celebration of the Atlanta duo's massive legacy (during which they will inevitably get real paid). At f…
Tegan and Sara have been writing beautiful, heart-breaking music for quite a few years now. Different fans swear by them for different reasons, but a common thread runs through them all: Tegan and Sara evoke the dynamic emotion of real relationship better than nearly any other band. Ever. Fans used…
Dusty Henry and Martin Douglas dive into the three albums by the Portland band Wipers, the band with the most entries on Kurt's list (unless you count "anything by Kleenex").
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Nada Surf have made a career out of finding their place in the world. When they were just kids, they wrote the teenage guide to popularity, navigating a close proximity between love and lust and insecurity. When they grew up and into real relationship, they found the inside of love, discovering tha…
Love him or hate him, you truly cannot say that Mac DeMarco isn't consistent. The indie rock songwriter is barely three years into his public career and he is already at the point of selling out the Neptune Theatre with ease, garnering a massive fanbase both young and old, and rocking every night w…
After four days and eighteen sessions, there was no real way to sum up KEXP's time at SXSW 2013, but Ozomatli's multi-cultural, multi-genre, and multi-lingual set came pretty damn close to summing up the wide variety of artists that stopped by Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop that week. Playing one of fiv…
It's real. After teasing fans on and off for the better part of 22 or so years, guitarist/vocalist Kevin Shields has delivered the third full-length My Bloody Valentine album, m b v. (Take a deep breath.) Since its release on Saturday night (which resulted in the cancellation of the evening plans o…
