Eugene Weekly

Tuscon, Arizona, duo Sweet Ghosts took their name from a poem by Jack Gilbert: “Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death …” And listening to Sweet Ghosts’ latest release Certain Truths, it is easy to imagine “sweet ghosts on small paper boats.” The album is melancholy and acoustic with the pitch and drift of a boat on water.  Continue reading →

With all the middle-of-the-road county fair and casino appearances Pat Benatar makes, it’s hard to remember just how edgy this four-time Grammy winner once was.  In the days of leg warmers and smoke machines, Benatar jazzercised her way through a string of early MTV mega-anthems including “Love is a Battlefield,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “We Belong” and “Invincible.”  Continue reading →

Like something from your grandma’s collection of 45s, “10-gallon funnyman” Sourdough Slim harkens back to the days of the singin’, yodelin’, joke-tellin’ cowboy. You might be asking yourself: Is the world really waiting for a revival of the Burl Ives, Will Rogers and Gene Autry sound? The answer is: Probably not. But like a dusty little gem found in a secondhand shop, Slim (né Rick Crowder) shows that you didn’t know what you were missing the first time around. “My true calling as a cowboy was not on the range but, rather, on the stage,” Slim says on his website. Continue reading →

Unlike previous efforts, Mike Last feels The Stagger and Sway’s latest release, Fun and Games, is a rock ‘n’ roll record — a sound the quartet has moved toward since adding Brian Schierenbeck on lead guitar.  “Brian played our last CD-release show,” says Last, Stagger and Sway’s vocalist, rhythm guitarist and primary songwriter. “But he wasn’t on the record.” Last says Fun and Games has “a little more grit to it — a little more teeth. It’s more of a band record.”  Continue reading →

“We love Eugene,” says Ashley Edwards, vocalist and songwriter for Durango, Colorado-based Hello Dollface. “The vibrancy, the grit, the consciousness, the food.” The band’s bass player, Jesse Ogle, attended the UO, Edwards says, and this time ’round through Eugene, Hello Dollface’s “heart-quenching desert vagabond soul” will be backed up onstage by some local players: Ben Scharf, Matt Calkins and Brad Erichsen of local jazz-funk group Eleven Eyes. Continue reading →

The last bro standing from the ’90s jam band/groove-rock scene (Sublime, Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler et al.), Garrett Dutton, better known as G. Love of G. Love & Special Sauce, is way too chill to care much about superstardom. Instead, G. Love & Special Sauce continues to bring danceable, reggae- and hip-hop-inflected blues rock to the masses. G. Love’s latest, 2014’s Sugar, is more of the same.  Continue reading →

On record, San Francisco’s Geographer is somewhat blunted by an ambition to sound thoroughly “now,” to fit into whatever mold successful modern rock bands are expected to fit into in these wild and wooly days of making music.  Live, Geographer is as raw as twiddling knobs on computer equipment can be, but vocalist Michael Deni adds interest by switching between guitar and loops, while Nathan Blaz supplies keyboards and electric cello and drummer Brian Ostreicher provides a needed punch and danceable energy. Continue reading →