Growing Interview

High school gym classes across North America are responsible for sharpening the musical tastes of hundreds of bands. Take Kevin Doria, for example. He makes up one-third of Growing, a band that has traveled the long road from propulsive drone rockers in Olympia to blissed-out experimentalists in New York. “I ended up meeting these punk kids through physical education,” he explains. “The dudes who didn’t want to run, we just kept talking. I was really into metal and they thought that was lame, so I’d ask them, ‘What have you got? Give me a tape.’ You’d get everything from Pennywise and Guttermouth to the Grabbers, but also mixed up with Fugazi and Minor Threat and all this other stuff that was smart and intellectual and really good.”



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Glass Ghost - Idol Omen: Review

There’s a strange kind of jubilation in hitting rock bottom. It’s a feeling the members of the Brooklyn-based Glass Ghost, Eliot Krimsky and Mike Johnson, understand implicitly. These two have been around the block a few times, having spent a generous portion of time peddling meticulously crafted melancholic dream-funk in the underrated Flying. Here, on their debut album as Glass Ghost, Idol Omen, they take things down a notch or two, but never forget that there’s beauty and humour in the doldrums. It’s possible to laugh and cry and even want to dance as you scrape your face off the barroom floor.

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The Struggle to Stream: Spotify Delays U.S. Launch

Any music fan outside a handful of European countries has faced a familiar frustration when browsing certain websites during 2009. The streaming music website Spotify has popped up everywhere, with many sites collating playlists to help supplement articles and generally waxing lyrical about this wonderful new discovery. The only problem? All those audio wonders are unavailable unless you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France or Spain—-the set of countries where Spotify is, at the time of writing, freely available.

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Blakroc - Blakroc: Review

Rap and rock don’t always make easy bedfellows, and the combination of the two genres has mostly produced a case of ever-diminishing returns over the years. It all started so well, with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys successfully melding giant riffs with ingenious rhymes. But in 2009, the most talked-about rap/rock alliance is Lil Wayne’s Rebirth, which has been delayed and rescheduled by a record company who appear to have got cold feet over the whole idea.

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Kickstarter, Topspin and the New Transparency

We’ve been blogging about the annual CMJ Music Marathon on Culture Now for the last few weeks, which featured performances from some of the best up-and-coming artists around the world. People who flocked to the shows probably didn’t pay too much attention to how each act got there, or how much money they made from the event. The truth is, most of the artists probably lost money to appear at CMJ, and those losses only increase significantly when further demands, such as national and foreign tours, become a necessary part of the promotional grind during the early stages of a band’s career.

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Crystal Stilts, Grass Widow and The Beets at The Brooklyn Museum

The ornate Rubin Pavilion at the Brooklyn Museum wasn’t designed to host a bunch of scruffy indie rockers, but that’s exactly what it got for a special Todd-P-curated show on Saturday. A marching band, a group of choreographed flag wavers and an impressive baton twirler all performed in between sets, while museum workers flitted around and nervously eyed the Rodin sculptures roped off near the stage.

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Woods Interview

Woods aren’t just a band, they’re a thriving industry. Singer Jeremy Earl runs the semi-legendary Woodsist (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Wavves) and Fuck It Tapes labels. Guitarist Jarvis Taveniere has played with Wooden Wand, and tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane indulges in a side project named Nonhorse (“It’s like being swallowed by a vortex,” he says). Woodsist recently joined forces with the Captured Tracks label to present a celebratory two-day festival in Brooklyn, which featured performances from bands who have appeared on both labels.

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Daniel Johnston - Is and Always Was: Review

Writing about Daniel Johnston tends to fall into two categories, especially since the 2005 release of Jeff Feuerzeig’s outstanding documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. First, there’s the 'it’s great to see him doing so well' camp, who undoubtedly mean well, but can’t help coming off as slightly patronising in their approach to his actual work. Then there’s the 'it’s not as good as it used to be' camp, who miss the tape hiss and red-raw production values of Daniel’s earliest recordings, ignoring the fact that he always had Beatles-sized ambition burning brightly in his eyes. That’s not to demean those early recordings — they are every bit as stunning, moving and emotionally redolent as the reams of text written about him suggest — but it would be churlish to expect Daniel to return there, especially as the elevation in his profile has given him another crack at delivering the songs as he always imagined them in his head.

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The CMJ Music Marathon 2009: Best of the Panels

There are two sides to the annual CMJ Music Marathon, which exerts a vice-like grip on the music industry in New York in October. At night, there are fallen-down-drunk bodies strewn throughout the streets, as industry workers stumble out of venues after a selection of their bands play showcases all across the city. Free and cheap beer helps add to the madness, and corporate sponsors proliferate throughout-—it’s not unusual to see a group of people playing a demo version of Rock Band while an actual rock band plays in the same venue. Fortunately, the real-life musicians were just about winning the battle for attention at CMJ ’09.

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