For the single "You Don't Get Me High Anymore," Phantogram seem pretty pissed about not getting high anymore. Watch the New York duo tear apart a house in the desert in this clip directed by Grant Singer, and filmed at the Salton Sea, a drought-afflicted saline lake in Southern California. In an i…
Our long-time musician friend, David Bazan, stopped by the KEXP studios the other day to play synth-ethereal songs off his new album, Blanco, which he so Bazanly described before the session as "basically electronic music with sadness." No surprise there! If you know anything about the man you know…
So, last night, Radiohead mysteriously disappeared from the internet... Their website is blank, and their Facebook fan page is an empty page with no avatar or banner. Over on Twitter, the main Radiohead account now reads "@radiohead hasn't tweeted yet," and frontman Thom Yorke's personal account h…
Every so often (OK, fairly regularly) I pull out a record with a name that seems vaguely familiar only to realize that I am way out of my depth. Peter Hammill has a long, storied, and critically acclaimed career that is pretty much the reason they invented things like Wikipedia and Allmusic.com. I …
Ben Harper has defined the sweet spot between reggae and American folk for over two decades now. It's hard for an artist to survive that long while maintaining relevance and staying true to the original sound that hooked listeners long ago while evolving and while shifting and growing - but after r…
It's been a great year and a half or so for writing albums about death. Most recently, Flying Lotus killed on impact with his incredible You're Dead!, but Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, isn't far behind. Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper has been whispered around the Animal Collective spheres for w…
Whether it be creating a playlist for the long haul over to the Gorge on our Music That Matters Podcast, or keeping you in the know with the inside details, over here at KEXP, we're preparing you to enjoy each and every moment at Sasquatch! Festival as best you can. Sure, there are inevitable glitc…
Okay, not "exactly" music news, but it's just been announced that none other than Stephen Colbert will take over for David Letterman as the host of CBS' The Late Show in 2015! Letterman announced his retirement earlier this month with a performance from Joseph Arthur, accompanied by R.E.M.'s Mike …
"There are so many mountains in the world, but not all of them are on the top 10 list... but if you stand on top of one, you feel like you're on the highest point on earth." This is the concept behind super-duo Minor Alps. Multi-talented musicians Matthew Caws of Nada Surf and Juliana Hatfield do j…
Across the last few years, Neko Case has been more active on her Twitter feed than in the studio. That's not a dig - Case remains a prolific and fascinating online personality - but nearly 43,000 tweets later, she (impressively) hasn't revealed much about herself on the social network beyond a hand…
If you'd been following the prolific career of Bay Area musician Ty Segall, you might have been surprised when he was announced to perform Pickathon earlier this year. But the 26-year-old Bay Area musician, whose discography is as labyrinthine as an 80's record contract, and whose most recent recor…
Listening to The Long Ryders for the first time, it's not clear to me that they should have been lumped in with the Paisley Underground bands of the '80s (covered previously in this Rain Parade post). They definitely had '60s influences, but as far as I can tell they were much more a country-rock b…
Toronto rave gods Crystal Castles are known for their brutally intense live show. Alice Glass smokes nearly an entire pack of cigarettes on stage and makes some good progress on a bottle of Jack Daniels, while Ethan Kath barely looks up from his table, making sure that every pulsing bass drop shake…
You can't help but note the stylization of their name: Elliott BROOD. The Toronto-area trio practically over emphasize their music's dark tendencies but it's with a touch of comedy that's always present in their stage shows. It's the one of the reasons KEXP DJs and listeners have loved the band for…
The KEXP road crew and I left Seattle last Sunday to head back to France for our second year filming bands at the 39th annual Trans Musicales music festival in Rennes, France. We had such an amazing time last year capturing video from 12 bands, all of which you can check out here. The spirit of Tra…
Since he broke his band up in the most grandiose way possible, James Murphy has stayed incredibly busy - maybe busier than he was when he was in LCD Soundsystem. It seems like every couple months, there's word of a new project from James, though not necessarily musical in nature. Sure, James has co…
Before the Fallon performance, FKA Twigs was a pervasive mystery – a voice and an image spun together in perfect unity to create something entirely other worldly that you felt both drawn to and intimidated by. Maybe it was fear, or maybe it was just mystery, but either way, FKA Twigs was impossible…
National Volunteer Week is an opportunity to celebrate the impact of volunteer service. .
