Words and Photos by Andrew Parks Summer festivals are always scatter-brained affairs, but I’m still not sure what to make of Pitchfork’s sixth annual soiree. In many ways, it felt like the first time I covered Coachella: 2005, the year Bright Eyes, a newly-reunited Black Star and a bunch of spandex-wearing grasshoppers (The Locust) brought [...]

(Photo: Sam Kieldsen) “You are seeing the classic line-up,” Robert Pollard chided playfully, “You’re not seeing the bad line-up. That’s when my brother was in the band.” And on Saturday night a classic line-up of the prolific Guided By Voices gave a blissful and uninhibited performance as part of this year’s Northside Festival.  The 35+ [...]

(chaos reigns at Deervana) On its surface, a music festival dedicated to indie rock held in Brooklyn seems, speaking generously, redundant. Because the borough boasts a great number of venues – both sanctioned and otherwise – and because it’s also become the home for creative types with an unconventional view on “office hours,” rock shows [...]

So Bonnaroo starts tomorrow, four days of baking in the sun, traipsing barefoot through fetid pools of mud and garbage, and trying to figure out if it’s way too hot out for you to eat a (surprisingly affordable) fried alligator sandwich. I’ve been to Bonnaroo before, but I stayed in a hotel and rented a [...]

(photo by Autumn de Wilde) By now, you’ve had some time to absorb the glory of Fleet Foxes second album, Helplessness Blues, and are probably more than ready to hear how the band handles its grandeur live. Well, our friends at NPR Music have just the thing — tonight at 9:30 pm EST, they’ll be [...]

(fuck you, terminal 5, until the end of time) Polly Harvey looked like a ghost on stage at New York’s Terminal 5 Tuesday night, her tiny body lost inside a billowing white gown, shock of black hair sprouting a host of haphazardly-arranged raven’s feathers, her hands, when they weren’t cradling an autoharp, positioned stiffly at [...]

(Photo: Tamara Porras) There was only one place to see economics professors, proper skinheads and Jersey’s teen punx crowd-surfing in unity on Saturday night. The Dead Milkmen show at the Warsaw was brimming with grinning fans, all of them eagerly expecting the return of punk’s prodigal satirists. This was the band’s second New York gig [...]

The performances from our SXSW Day Party continue today — here’s Grass Widow performing the excellent “Lulu’s Lips”!

Those Darlins are a quartet of Tennesseans who write rowdy, jangly, country-tinged songs about getting drunk and eating a whole chicken and staying up until “stupid late-o’clock,” with song titles like “Be Your Bro,” “Snaggle Tooth Mama” and “Fatty Needs a Fix.”

One of both the strange upsides and unfortunate downsides of South by Southwest is that it seems to take place in a vacuum — for a week straight, the world is reduced to the intersection of 6th Street and Red River in Austin, and it’s easy to pretend there is little happening outside it. Occasionally, [...]

It’s been 8 years since Godspeed You! Black Emperor descended on us with their heavy-handed brand of post-rock and, if you’ve ever seen them before, you’d be wise to take the time they’ve been on hiatus to rest up a little and maybe have a drink.  In 2003 the group announced that they would stop [...]

By the time they took the stage at Emo’s Thursday afternoon, the members of the New Hampshire band Trap Them had driven 14 hours, most of it in heavy traffic. Needless to say, they were more than a little agitated. “We’re Trap Them, and this is a shitshow,” said vocalist Ryan McKenney. “So let’s get [...]

Now well into its second decade, the days during which South By Southwest — and the bands it attracts — could count novelty as a chief draw are long over. And with blogs and social media sites having likewise moved from fad to institution, the odds that anyone would be hearing a band for the [...]

When Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) and violist Nadia Sirota first became friends, they said they should collaborate to play music by Brahms “or something.” “This is the closest we’re ever gonna get to that,” Sirota said on stage last night at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center, before she and Bartlett performed that [...]

On Saturday night, Breathe Owl Breathe left me in a puddle on the floor of Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom. I’ve been obsessing over their latest release, Magic Central, since it came out last year, but this was my first time seeing them live. Despite it being an early-evening opening set that lasted only about half an [...]

It’s not Neko Case’s style to get all gussied up for a gig; her music is lush, layered, and sometimes dramatic, and her voice is anything but modest, but half the beauty is in how effortless she makes it all seem. Last night at the Bell House in Brooklyn, she performed to a crowd of [...]

(hipstamatic obscures amateurism every time) Outside Santos Party House on Wednesday, New York City was suffering through yet another night of bitter winds, frigid temperatures and blinding sheets of snow. Inside the venue there was a different kind of storm brewing — this one not without its own sudden gusts and furious squalls. That bluster [...]

Sufjan Stevens opened his show at New York’s Beacon Theatre on Sunday night behind a scrim, playing “Seven Swans” on his banjo, wearing a pair of white wings. The stage was dark behind him, for the most part hiding the dozen-or-so members of his band (who could still be seen by the glowsticks attached to [...]

North Carolina’s Bowerbirds make honest, autumnal folk music that’s largely about love, nature and humanity — storms rearing up on their hind legs, wooden stoves burning during a cold winter, and lines like “It takes a lot of nerve to destroy this wondrous earth.” It was fitting that they not only played at Bowery Ballroom, [...]

I’m not really sure what else there is for me to say about Lost in the Trees — I’ve already professed my love for this band many, many times. Their latest record, All Alone in an Empty House is one of my favorites of the year, which is what brought me to the Bell House [...]