Twin Sister Interview

Living in the city can be a blessing and a curse for any new band. On the plus side, there’s easy access to the press, venues, labels and like-minded artists. But spiraling rents and being shackled to a day job can easily sap creative urges. Twin Sister is a five-piece band made up of members who have shuttled back and forth between their hometowns in Long Island and adopted residences in Brooklyn during the group’s two-year lifespan. A few months ago, four members of the band lived in Brooklyn and one in Long Island, but now the inverse is true, with only keyboard player Dev Gupta remaining in the city.

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Twin Shadow Interview

There are many fantastical stories about artists growing up in small towns in unconventional circumstances and then fulfilling their dreams by moving to the big city. George Lewis, Jr., who records as Twin Shadow, took the path to New York five years ago after being born in the Dominican Republic and spending his childhood in a small town named Venice on the west coast of Florida. His journey later included encounters with a circus, the Baptist church, stints in Berlin and Copenhagen and the pursuit of a woman.

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Sleigh Bells Interview

Sometimes the hype machine accelerates out of all control. Take Brooklyn based two-piece Sleigh Bells, for example. Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss formed the band with a love of pop structure, hip-hop oriented grooves and a heavily overdriven guitar sound in mind, all topped off with the ballsiest female vocals you’ll hear this side of a Bikini Kill record. The band was suddenly ubiquitous after a few CMJ shows in 2009, with blogs, print media and fellow musicians striving to be affiliated with the group—all achieved without Sleigh Bells actually releasing a record.

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Effi Briest Interview

Working in the visual arts can be a lonely experience. After completing an undergraduate degree at SVA, future Effi Briest songwriter and drummer Corinne Jones toiled away as a painter. The inherent creative confinement sparked an urge to push her art in a different direction, to connect with people and filter her impulses into a collaborative force. “It was so isolating, that way of working, and I needed to do something else, have another outlet,” she recalls over drinks at Soft Spot in Williamsburg. “So I just asked a lot of friends if they wanted to get together and make some noise with me.”

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Screaming Females and JEFF the Brotherhood at Bowery Ballroom

You know you’re doing something right when fans start chanting your name before you’ve even struck a note. So it was on Saturday night when Nashville’s JEFF the Brotherhood took to the stage at the Bowery Ballroom, mid-way through a seven-band bill assembled to celebrate the mighty Don Giovanni Records.Singer Jake Orrall began the set dressed in leather and teetering on the top of a stack of amps, ending it 30 minutes later amid the sinewy limbs of sweaty stage divers and an exuberantly bludgeoned mosh pit. In between, we got bone-gnawing riffage, never-ending smiles from Jake’s brother Jamin, on drums, and a set of songs that are surely about to propel their quirky take on Neanderthal rock tropes to a wider audience. Judging from the front row here, that process is already well underway.

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JEFF the Brotherhood Interview

Jake Orrall fixes the crowd with a piercing stare from beneath his bowl haircut, brandishes his guitar in front of him like a sword and then steps into the throng like a medieval jouster about to spear an opponent. A meaty guitar riff billows out from Jake’s amp behind him while his younger brother, Jamin Orrall, pounds away at his drum kit, unable to wipe the fixed grin from his face.This is the scene at Pianos during a sweat-drenched CMJ show in October 2009, just one of many appearances at the festival by Nashville two-piece JEFF the Brotherhood. It was during this time that innumerable people were converted to the cult of JEFF, having been won over by the sunbaked ’70s rock riffage and Jake’s affinity for donning leather trousers and dangling a raccoon tail from his guitar strap.



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Midnight Masses Interview

Notions of redemption, death and resurrection run rife throughout the music of the Williamsburg-based Midnight Masses. Singer Autry Fulbright was transplanted from Los Angeles to Atlanta at a young age, subsequently spending much of his youth listening to the brittle punk of the Minutemen and X, and spreading the word of the Jehovah’s Witnesses with his mother. Somewhere between these two worlds lies Midnight Masses, the sweetly melancholic group Fulbright fronts with various friends and indie rock luminaries.

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Gang Gang Dance and DJ/Rupture at Music Hall of Williamsburg

The appearance of DJ/Rupture (AKA Jace Clayton) as a support act to Gang Gang Dance illustrated the sharp divide in the headline act’s audience. Half of the crowd was made up of tranced-out club kids who were happy to dance to a mix that includes the old (Aaliyah’s still-radiant “We Need a Resolution”) and the new (Joy Orbison’s all-encompassing “Hyph Mngo”). Meanwhile, the indie rock contingent stared blankly at the stage, feeling short-changed at having a DJ as an opening act and hoping none of the revelers spill their beer.

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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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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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