The best introduction to California is to come at it from Oregon. If you enter from Arizona or Nevada, you’re just going from bleak desert to more bleak desert, and you can’t understand immediately what makes California such a dream to so many sappy, sentimental people like myself. If you drive down I-5 [...]

While “The Decider” doesn’t carry the strongest beat on the Cleveland Steamers’ forthcoming debut album (the bass and drums come in cool and Premier-esque, but the horn sounds and synths are a little light), it’s a clever track through and through. There is nothing I like more than some old-fashioned Bush-bashing, and this track lets [...]

On “Long Pork,” like many other Hustler White songs, the voices of the ladies singing act like instruments, lilting and shouting melodically. There might be brilliant lyrics here but either that isn’t really the point, or they’re encoded messages about reptilian world leaders, or (most likely) I’m just too dense to understand them. Either way [...]

After leaving the rust belt, I was feeling a bit
shaken.
www.tarajaneoneil.com
(ed: Tara Jane O’Neil cuts town again this week for the West Coast leg of her tour. First stop: Friday in San Francisco at Hotel Utah)

We had a show last night at a little coffee shop/bar in Burlington, Vermont and the show was pretty alright. A kid said we could stay at his house, so we took him up on his offer. On the way we stopeed at a party someone had invited us to. It was [...]

The 5800 block of NE 9th Avenue is a very forgiving block. There were a couple of hundred people outside a place that’s dubbed itself the Haunted House last night, talking, yelling, and, in some cases, foam sword fighting and bottle rocket launching. Yet, the residents of that friendly block were patient enough to allow [...]

Hey, it isn’t former WW Music Editor Mark Baumgarten asking the questions this time, but this interview’s worth a gander. It’s a good little piece to get your indie-nerd blood pumping for the long week ahead. There’s talk of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Have a cup of coffee.
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Decemberists at Acme
Decemberists [...]

On tour with Tom Brosseau… We played a lovely show in Cambridge last night. I was staying with my old friend/neighbor Lindsay, and things were going really well! Today our show was set for Rochester, New York, a six hour drive from Boston. We left at about noon, and I was [...]

The Golden Bears got me at last Summer’s Halleluwah Festival. I stepped into a nearly empty room, totally spent from three solid days hunched in front of a computer, to find this most adorable band on stage. I scurried around asking strangers who it was and got back a couple of “I don’t knows” and [...]