[photos/review: Jon Behm]
Minneapolis Hip Hop five piece The Blend took to the stage on Friday night to support the release of their debut album, Losing the Game. I was in attendance, though several opening bands of varying quality had me taking frequent breaks to visit other West Bank bars. When it was finally The Blend’s [...]
[photos/review: Jon Behm]
There are two types of bands: those who are unabashedly ambitious, and those who pretend not to be. TV on the Radio fall into the former category: not only do they want to be the best band in the world but they want to do it on their terms, executing their vision without [...]
Birdmonster
[review: Erik Thompson]
[photos: Jon Behm]
The 7th Street Entry is a venue built specifically, it seems, for loud, sweaty rock shows. The intimacy (and, frankly, the grunginess of the place) lends itself nicely to dissonant, thunderous rock shows where you can’t help but bounce of the person next to you simply because there’s no room to [...]
[by Jon Behm]
Two years after the fantastic Springtime Can Kill You, Jolie Holland is back with a new album, The Living and the Dead, released through Anti records. Where Springtime saw Holland giving her warbling Alto carte blanche to wander it’s way through gorgeously crafted Blues and Dixieland Jazz, The Living finds her unique [...]
Military Special will play at the Kitty Cat Klub on Saturday, November the eighth with Chicago’s Bat Masterson, and the Twin Cities’ own Circle Olympix (formerly Squareshooters). For more information on the band’s music and their upcoming shows please visit their new website. Here is a Chris Heidman remix of the band’s “We’re Science,” [...]
[by Jon Behm]
It can be a little intimidating to critique an album by a band that has actually named itself after an esoteric form of criticism. The Department of Eagles purportedly take their name from obscure Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ “Institutional Critique,” (don’t ask me to explain how or why). Anyway, the band just [...]
[by Jon Behm]
Imagine if you will, if one day you heard that Tina Fey had left SNL and created a moody experimental pop album? Would you be surprised? This is essentially what happened with Juana Molina, the one-time star of hit Argentinean sketch comedy show Juana y Sus Hermanas (Hilarious if you understand Spanish). [...]
With Black Ice, AC/DC returns with a release full of typically straightforward songs about fighting, women and rock ‘n roll; the band’s fourth record since 1990 and its fifth in a row to kick off with the album’s lead single. Not being one to break out of the mold that it’s created for itself [...]
As Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has demonstrated so impressively, there’s still space on the musical landscape for an artist with simple songs and a bloody big heart. With his broad Glaswegian burr and a knack for sumptuous moments of Gallic poetry, Brendan Campbell fits neatly into this category; a young folk musician with the exceptional [...]
If there’s one thing to be said about Kevin Barnes, it’s that he has never been afraid to do exactly what he wants with his music and his art. Whether it’s the perpetual shifting of genres between albums (much less the tweaking of styles between and during songs) or occasionally performing naked, Barnes and [...]
[by Kyle "El Guante" Myhre]
I really don’t want to use the “best hip hop group you’ve never heard of” cliché, but if anyone can live up to that overused, often ridiculous statement, it’s probably Common Market. Though they have a huge following in their native Northwest (Seattle), they’ve failed to really break out in [...]
It is often difficult to gain a balanced perspective on an album after reading a single summary of the music. Bias can vary the review, as can personal taste, history and just about everything else that is unique to the person writing it. So in an effort to offer an expanded perspective on [...]
It seemed that whenever I was talking to a fan of TV on the Radio about Return to Cookie Mountain, they would always revert to “I liked (either) Young Liars (or) Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes better.” I, on the other hand, felt that the album was amazing, truly one of the year’s best [...]
[by Chris DeLine]
As Death Magnetic slowly begins, an interesting similarity arises between the introduction of “That Was Just Your Life” and that of Slayer’s “South of Heaven,” the first song from the second of the band’s albums produced by Rick Rubin. Both songs build slowly before commencing with an album’s worth of commercial thrash; [...]
[by Jon Behm]
Bob Dylan once said of Karen Dalton, “[she] had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed.” Fifteen years after Dalton’s death, this same legacy seems to have been reborn in Minneapolis’s own Lucy Michelle (just replace the word “guitar” with ukulele). Michelle, with her talented backing band The [...]
Despite years of mediocre, uneven albums, pretentious attention-grabbing schemes, rhymes full of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook and a self-righteous streak that would make Bill O’Reilly blush, Nas is still one of the greatest emcees ever. How does he pull this off?
[by Kyle "El Guante" Myhre]
Only in 2008 can an emcee pick great beats, rock over each one of them flawlessly, showcase a real personality and still be inexplicably underwhelming. Wale’s Mixtape About Nothing is textbook emceeing, as exciting for “real” hip hop heads as it can be tiring for the people looking for something [...]
[by Jon Behm]
The duo that make up The Black Ghosts have an unusual pedigree – both Simon Lord and Theo Keating’s youths sound like they were found in an HP Lovecraft story. Keating grew up in a house with mysterious occult symbols on the walls and was within spitting distance of an ancient Victorian [...]
Beck: (Official) (MySpace) (Wikipedia)
Beck “Modern Guilt” (album)
Subscribe to Culture Bully Here
Also: (Beck on the Late Show with David Letterman 2006) (Beck on SNL) (Beck “Elevator Music”)
Overpowering depth, dramatic beauty, majestic chaos - Sigur Rós is a band that can be described in many ways to many people. The Icelandic quartet has been saluted with its undeniably sharp and inventive stage shows as well as its demanding, layered albums, but what happens when a few virgin ears and a few [...]
