Portland’s “one and only synth-punk band” is calling it quits.
For months, the Rectangles’ mix of bleak synthesizers and lit-up suicide guitars has made them a popular choice in Portland’s constantly shifting, and always varied, new wave scene. However, news of the break-up became official when a statement credited to keyboardist Courtney Crusher was published on [...]

This is a hard album to choose a track from because there isn’t really a single representative song. The number after this one reminds me of TV on the Radio. And a few minutes later there’s a silly-sounding punk song about bicycling.
But there’s a sense that Junkface is having a good time through the [...]

The mighty beast of NoPo gentrification marches on?
Perhaps you remember Wax, the little yellow block of cheap breakfast and all-ages hiphop near the crossing of N Interstate and N Killingsworth. It was a proper little community-minded joint, giving kids in the neighborhood a place to kick it beyond parks and porches. It was a [...]

You know when you start a band (and I know you have) and the guitarist always starts out by playing the “Crazy Train” riff over and over again? First you laugh and then you humor your guitarist’s obsession and then you say “stop!” Well, the ladies in Swan Island did not say “stop,” in fact [...]

Hooray! My favorite local band is getting back together! This from the Colin Grigson NerdSpace local punk news machine:
-PLAN R is officially getting back together. Yeah, I know, kinda lame since we only had our last show ever not that long ago. The long and short of it is we broke up because Willie quit. [...]

Smoke’s debut album, Bleed, officially “dropped” yesterday (I’m still deciding whether I’ll regularly use the word drop) and the Oldominion emcee is a little more than half way through his tour in support of the post-hip-hop epic. The tour has seen Smoke up and down the west coast with Sandpeople offshoots Debaser, as well as [...]

“The Northwest doesn’t have too many bands that we really like,” explains David Hoffmann, the softspoken guitarist, songwriter and all-around point man for Portland’s punk-rock sweethearts, the SLiP iTs. Softspoken…and wasted. And at 7 pm on a Saturday evening, so is the rest of the band hanging in the bar: bassist Teri Lea Graves and [...]

[PSYCH-POP] It’s tough to wrangle with Please Step Out of the Vehicle’s Sleeping Right and the Best in Homeopathic Magic, which seems designed to befuddle right from its very name. Throw in PSOOTV frontman Travis Pants’ back-to-nature lyrical approach and the most unlikely horn section in town, and one discovers that this album—and band—just don’t [...]

[SINGERS-SONGWRITERS] I arrive at McKinley’s bungalow, staggering distance from the Space Room and other upper-Hawthorne watering holes, to find the three ladies of Dirty Martini perched on countertops, sipping cocktails, awaiting homemade pizza from the oven and giggling up a storm. As I’m handed a drink, the band members’ lifestyle duties are spelled out: McKinley [...]