RAD! is Portland’s Boy Friday—doing everything from promoting concerts for friends to spinning electro at every dance party worth going to—including Rotture’s Juicy. He does everything under the sun, and it’s hard to believe he could find the time to answers these questions, but he juggled it in, executing the task with grace and style, [...]

Man, winter is rough. The cold, the wet, the gloom. If your house is somewhat warm or dry, you can enjoy a winter day. If it isn’t—as many houses aren’t—you’re miserable inside because it’s cold and damp, and the only respite from the tyranny of winter is that it’s not raining inside. Post-rock seems [...]

We were there for the filming, and now here it is in a digestible format—yes, the Thermals’ “Returning to the Fold” video has finally premiered!
One comment on YouTube mentions how the video has a ’90s feel—agreed. The green screen is a bit more obvious than I expected, but oh the cohesiveness! There’s a [...]

As always, a big thanks to everyone who made it out this past Sunday night for the fourteenth edition of LocalCut’s Portland Lounge Series, featuring Kele Goodwin, Andy Combs and Leigh Marble.
It was a cold one (the night, not the show), and the Towne Lounge was suffering some heating problems, to boot. But those [...]

The latest big thing in video games (other than Super Mario Galaxy) is Rock Band—a crazy mix of Karaoke Revolution and Guitar Hero where you get to play real songs and “Simon Says” your way through them on guitar, bass, drums or on the microphone.
The game was developed by Harmonix, the team that made the [...]

Good god, this song is beautiful.
The ever-humble and shy-in-a-good-way Kele Goodwin offers up wise, softly sung words: “We love and we lie/ But you were right/ We will survive.” Everyone’s favorite local folkstress, Laura Gibson, adds aching, haunting backup vocals. And Bright Red Paper/Portland Cello Project’s Douglas Jenkins bows and bends his particular brand of [...]

LynnAnn Hyde remembers the low-slung ceilings, little cocktail tables and oppressively dark ambience—punctured by tiny strings of Christmas lights (year round, it seemed)—of the storied, now-defunct Rabbit Hole. “It definitely looked like Al Capone’s vault,” the harmonica-blowin’ roots musician says.
Though it’s been almost a decade since she last played there, Hyde recalls all the tricks [...]

Alan Singley is bummed. Or at least that’s what the local songwriter—one of my favorites—told me in a recent email. Naturally, I was concerned. But I was also excited to hear his sad new material, as I’ve always gravitated toward Singley’s more introspective songs (he ranges in topic from cats to absent fathers, in sound [...]

[OTHERWORLDLY FOLK] Loch Lomond and the Builders and the Butchers might seem an odd couple. The former plays idyllic, expansive chamber folk, the latter stripped-down punk-blues. But these seemingly disparate groups share two commonalities: Both have dark sides, and both could be from alternate universes. The Builders and the Butchers play rock ‘n’ roll [...]