Saturday’s Bonnaroo bands faced a daunting task: To somehow follow up the already legendary Paul McCartney performance from the previous night. But with a new day comes new opportunity, and
Friday morning at Bonnaroo 2013 broke with the news that Jack Johnson, already on the farm because of his appearance with ALO, would be filling the freshly-vacated Saturday night headlining
For one weekend each year, Manchester, Tennessee becomes the musical capital of America thanks to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Before the music royalty moved in, a warm-up like
A recent wave of announcements about the 2013 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival stoked anticipation for the 12th iteration of the event, with fans and performers alike getting in the spirit. In the span of just a couple of weeks, the festival announced the last round of artist additions, the late-night shows, the lineup for the cinema tent, the festival schedule, and the “café stage” schedule, sending online message boards into frenzy. After a miserable winter and loads of bad news, American music fans are hyped for festival season and the good times within. Bonnaroo, happening June 13-16 in Manchester, TN, is going to be a Summer solstice all its own, with an international lineup of music legends, a cavalcade of important bands from nearly every genre, comedians, cinema, and vaguely controlled chaos at every turn.
Any music fan with knowledge of San Francisco’s turn-of-the-nineties “acid jazz” scene knows that Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola share a lengthy and profound musical history. From the much-loved T.J. Kirk project to several of Hunter’s own records and other one-off collaborations, the pair has met frequently in their orbits through the music industry. In October 2012, they released a duo album (Not Getting Behind Is The New Getting Ahead) and they’ve been touring behind it since. Billsborough Music Hall in Hillsborough, NC (just outside Chapel Hill) hosted Hunter and Amedola on a bustling Friday night and found the pair in a loose, jovial mood.
Listening to a They Might Be Giants album can be a bit like homework. That's probably not what the two Johns (Linnell and Flansburgh, respectively) envisioned when they started the band over thirty years ago. By now though, as the duo have released their 16th studio album, Nanobots, there's no denying that it takes some work to fully appreciate this band.
Foals have become one of the biggest bands to arise from the fruitful Oxford, England scene as of late, and their third album Holy Fire finds them carving out a sizeable international space for themselves. The album is a natural progression from the dense math-rock of their debut, Antidotes, through the spacious creations of breakthrough record Total Life Forever, and into something bigger and somehow more infectious.
Bad Religion brought their crisp, concise, relentlessly melodic punk sound into the studio for the 16th and possibly final time on True North, and it's no major knock on the veteran band that the album doesn’t sound drastically different from their first album.
Here are a few things you need to know about Matt Pond and his latest release, The Lives Inside the Lines in Your Hands. For starters, he is now just Matt Pond and not Matt Pond PA. Second, his new album is essentially a pop record by way of the singer-songwriter tactic of wearing his heart on his sleeve about relationships. Finally, it is a pleasant release, but there isn’t a ton of variety here.
The legendary Ziggy’s name now adorns a new, larger space on the outskirts of downtown, and fans flocked to see the first Umphrey’s show in the Camel City since April of 2003. It also happened to be the 10th anniversary of the band’s first show with drummer Kris Myers, so a celebratory vibe prevailed even during the band’s birthday hangover.
