When a crowd is truly, ruthlessly in love with the band they are about to see, you can tell from the moment they walk in the room. You don’t see it often, but when it happens, it’s a spectacle that you wouldn’t trade the world for. Friday night’s show with Warpaint at Neumos had one of those crowds…
By taking their name from the annual festival held in Pamplona, Spain, San Fermin presents their musical philosophy outright. Like the running of the bulls, San Fermin's music bewilders, delights, and intimidates. Surprisingly, the Brookyln-based Baroque-poppers have only released one album, San Fe…
Seattle's Beat Connection seem to evolve with grace. As is the case with most young bands, they've had plenty of that evolution in the last three years. Their journey from the early house-driven days of 2010's Surf Noir to the vast, green sound of their 2012 debut LP Palace Garden and even through …
Join KEXP on August 10th and 11th at Camp Long in West Seattle for the 15th annual Arts in Nature Festival, presented by Nature Consortium! Experience music and nature in a multifaceted, interactive way this weekend with a variety of genres, installations and activities for all ages. Headlining th…
It hasn't been that long since Seattle band The Cave Singers performed songs from their excellent 2013 album, Naomi, live in the KEXP studio, so when we asked them to perform a special session as part of KEXP's VIP Club Concert series just three months later, they went back to their own studio and …
Following in the wake of their reunion-EP-of-sorts Songs for Slim, which benefited guitarist Slim Dunlap's recovery from a stroke, The Replacements have announced they will be performing together again as The Replacements for the first time since 1991's infamous "It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Roadie P…
It just might be impossible for the current rulers of glossy reverb to create something that's not beautiful - Beach House's "Forever Still" short film is amazing. Shot in and around Tornillo, TX, where they recorded Bloom, the video follows them through four songs from sunset to sunrise, surrounde…
Ah, it's time for another dip into the "Bands Levi Really Should Have Been Paying Attention to at the Time" file. I can't tell you how many Red Lorry Yellow Lorry records I flipped past in my teenaged record-store-digging days, and I'm sure I heard them on one of our fine local college radio statio…
On the show this time, it’s the spell-binding heavy-rock of All Them Witches.
First, A Tribe Called Quest released a new album after 18 years. And, now, Scottish siblings The Jesus and Mary Chain are one-upping them, so to speak, with their first LP in 19 years, out in March 2017. The news was announced by Creation Records founder and longtime manager Alan McGee, who excite…
If the gender politics of the Raunch Hands were controversial 30+ years ago (and they were, as you will see below), I'm not surprised you don't hear them much on the air these days. In fact, I can't find reference to a single Raunch Hands spin on KEXP in recent years - even on Shake the Shack, whic…
Dos, the fearsome bass duo of Mike Watt and Kira Roessler, belongs to that rarefied class of bands that I know I love without ever having knowingly heard them. Their music is played entirely on two basses, the charmingly low-key punk rock hero Mike Watt is half of the band, they seem to love what t…
It's hard to live up to a name like theirs, and harder still to shine brightly for over fifteen years, but Stars have not only lost none of their shimmering allure - they've somehow turned an amorphous Canadian collective, on par and in cahoots with Broken Social Scene, into a consistently producti…
This is one of those records where reading the DJ reviews from 1987 really makes me want to hear the album (without having to do anything so crazy as, say, buy it on iTunes or Amazon, cheapskate and preferrer-of-physical-media that I am). A lot of tantalizing phrases and references get thrown aroun…
"You don’t have to be anyone if you don’t want to / You don’t have to get a job if you don’t want to" and you definitely don't have to listen to Howler if you don't want to. But that would be a damn shame because the Minneapolis yeehaw boys have returned with their second album of infectious punky …
The Los Angeles band, Las Cafeteras, named themselves after a community space in El Sereno, L.A. where group members met one another and started to learn and play Son Jarocho music together, influenced by regional Mexican folk music. The band feminized the name to honor women, they note. Modern day…
It's always a delight when psychrock voyagers Wooden Shjips return to dock in the KEXP studios. The band have just released their fourth album, Back to Land, on Thrill Jockey Records, an album that captures the feelings of home from frontman Erik "Ripley" Johnson, who has just thrown down anchor in…
Leave it to an Australian band to save Brit Pop. Actually, they may be destroying it because reportedly Noel Gallagher is too busy listening to Jagwar Ma to get the old band back together. In truth, the young Aussies have revitalized the Madchester sound, though rather than sustain one long bacchan…
Is today really the day you can get a free Nirvana tattoo? Why, yes it is. From noon to 6PM today at Seattle's Silver Platters (and a couple of other places in the U.S.), you can get the squiggly Nirvana smiley face tattooed permanently on your body for free... well, for free if you pick up the 20t…
Seattle band Ivan & Alyosha, in the lineage of local powerhouses the Head and the Heart and the Fleet Foxes, are masters of the bright, jangly guitars, tight, soaring harmonies and steady kick-drum rhythms. But there is something distinct about them, too – the band has more joy to it than maybe…
