Slabtown is more than a bar. The name not only denotes a region—Industrial Northwest Portland—it embodies a history: In the 1880s, rich folks used “Slabtown” to refer derogatorily to working-class residents who had to use slabs of cheap wood from local sawmills to fuel their fireplaces.
But the bar itself has a rich history, as well: [...]

I’m not going to say a thing about this video–created by Alec Cohen and Uli Beutter–except that it’s for a remix Copy did of Fleshtone’s “GFM” and it won top honors in last year’s PISS (Portland International Short Short) festival.
Oh yeah, and Copy resurrects a buck from the dead with his keytar. Enjoy.

Also, Copy’s [...]

[HARDCORE] The moderately paced, relatively laid-back punk of Coldbringer is not what you would expect from two former members of From Ashes Rise. It’s not necessarily a bad surprise: I just thought I might have had the record on the wrong speed (even though it was already on 45) when vocalist John Wilkerson—who did some [...]

[post-everything] For reasons unknown, Grails has slid into the elusive (and, fortunately, shrinking) group of local musicians known informally as the “Portland Export Club”: These artists enjoy massive renown outside PDX and embark on far-reaching tours, but they live and practice here in relative obscurity—which is precisely why you’re reading this some six months after [...]

[HONEST MUSIC] We live in disingenuous times. From our cowboy president on down to the support-our-troops “country” anthems that clutter the FM dial (the proceeds of which march nobly into the pockets of their down-home millionaire performers), ours is a country full of apple-pie hucksters who wouldn’t know America if it punched them in the [...]

[POWER POP] “We forced him back into music by getting him to play drums for us,” explains Nice Boys guitarist Gabe Lageson at a downtown coffee shop. He’s telling the story of how now lead singer/guitarist—and lone surviving member of the Exploding Hearts—Terry Six joined the informal group that eventually became the Nice Boys. Lageson [...]

So, after a week of throwing lines out to try to contact last week’s recipient of the Band Name of the Week title: I, Retard; I haven’t come up with a lick of info about this presumably-Isaac-Asimov-inspired project (which plays the Towne Lounge tonight). Of course, the project is probably also inspired in part by [...]

In 2004, before the impossibly infectious Paper Television was even a spark in their eye, The Blow released the inaugural album of the Slender Means Society/States Rights Records‘ Pregnancy Series, Poor Aim: Love Songs. It was also the first record with Jona Bechtolt contributing: the series is conceptualized around artistic ‘fucking,’ or other odd scenes [...]

This amalgamation of transplants–A Weather’s members are from Maine, Vermont, California, Idaho, Maryland and Utah–sounds far less disparate than you might think (not that geographically means that much). And their big-cozy-sweater (with a few loose treads) sound fits right in with its spawned-from-local-incense label, Team Love (you know, the label started by that Bright Eyes [...]