There’s a lot of music festivals to choose from this summer. PDX Pop Now! just wrapped up last week, Pickathon is this weekend, and both MFNW and Bumbershoot loom in the near future. Still, if you don’t want to shell out the cash to hang out with a bunch of folk-pickers at Pendarvis Farm, local [...]

Oh, meet our new intern Jenny! She asked to do a live review of the Micachu and the Shapes show last week, but wound up doing so much more. —Ed.
The lo-fi, oft-discordant sound of Micachu and the Shapes isn’t instantly accessible. Abstaining from the current pop obsessions and support mechanisms of spacey synths or swooning [...]

On AU’s excellent 2008 album, Verbs, almost every song featured a cascade of noises—voices, yelps, woodwinds, guest singers, galloping drums. Band founder Luke Wyland is found of big, bold arrangements, so he did the best thing imaginable: invite all his friends over to revel in the hugeness of his music. The only problem, then, was [...]

You’ve seen Theo Ellsworth’s art. He’s been at galleries (and, occasionally, coffee shops) throughout town. Maybe you saw his zines, or the book he collected them in. It’s cool stuff: beautiful sharp textures covering the complicated machinery of creatures both organic and mechanical. Ellsworth’s work is a natural fit for posters and album art, and [...]

You see this picture in the left hand corner? That’s the cover of Ah Holly Fam’ly’s debut full-length, Reservoir, which is due out on October 13 courtesy of local good guys Lucky Madison. I’ve had the album for about a week now, and I hate to get too preachy so far in advance of the [...]

Last Thursday, two of the hottest indie bands around—New York’s the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and San Francisco’s Girls—played to a packed all-ages crowd at Backspace. It was right before the start of Sunpocolypse 2K9 (or my preferred term “Helter Swelter”), so nothing got too sweaty, but both bands still brought it. Pains [...]

If you’ve been reading LocalCut at all the past six months, then you probably know that I have a little bit of a crush on Church. The local quartet is probably the one band during my tenure at WW that I’ve absolutely fallen in love with. From the first time I heard its Gold EP, [...]

Do you believe in the occult? Do you believe in your dreams coming true? Do you believe that your magic is real? In YACHT’s new video for the summer anthem “Psychic City (Voodoo City),” taken from its just released record See Mystery Lights, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans grab the black vs. white theme [...]

Alejandro Escovedo

BORN:San Antonio, Texas, 1951
SOUNDS LIKE:A border-town Ryan Adams, or Bruce Springsteen with a sweeter voice and fewer sax solos.
LATEST RELEASE: An Introduction, a collection of songs from Escovedo’s first two solo records, as well as 2002’s By the Hand of the Father, a concept album based on his play about the plight of [...]