Eugene Weekly

Adia Victoria has only released two songs, but the Nashville-based singer is already on the rise as a Southern Gothic queen. Rolling Stone recently named her as one of “10 New Artists You Need To Know,” and Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney) is producing her debut with bandmates Ruby Rogers, Tiffany Minton and Mason Hickman.  Although often categorized as country, Victoria is actually a Southern cynic. On her Facebook page, she describes her music genre as “back-porch-blues-swamp-cat-lady-howlin’-at-the-moon.” Continue reading →

Caroline Bauer releases her first full-length studio album, To Kneel and Kiss the Ground, Sunday, March 15, at her album release show at Sam Bond’s. Joining Bauer are Portland musicians Jeffrey Martin (who the Portland Mercury just declared “might be the best songwriter in Portland”) and Anna Tivel (formerly of Anna and the Underbelly), who also played violin on the album. EW caught up with Bauer this week for coffee and discussed raising money for the album, collaboration and her musical roots.   Continue reading →

New York rapper Michael Quattlebaum Jr., aka Mykki Blanco, is as much a performance artist as a musician.  A published poet and art school dropout, Quattlebaum’s alter ego Blanco is inspired by teenage girls and drag queens — mixing the right-now youth culture of Rihanna, the decadent gutter of the New York art world, queercore and Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna.  Continue reading →

“You’re all a bunch of phonies” has long been one of punk rock’s favorite accusations. Providing a fresh and funny take on that old gripe are the firebrands from London, Ontario — Single Mothers.  While first-gen punkers railed against flower power, Single Mothers take aim at the hipster, DIY and Etsy-crafter crowd, as well as any scene’s inevitable decline into self-parody.  Continue reading →

“I want to say that no artist has mentioned Eugene, Oregon, more in songs,” Eugene-born folk-rock artist Mat Kearney tells EW.  For example, the lyrics to “One Black Sheep,” from his latest release, begin with a reference that only Eugene fans could appreciate: “I was born a love child of the seventies/ Touched down at Sacred Heart … In the city of hippies and angel dust.”  Continue reading →

What does one do after breaking up a successful and influential band? If you’re Christopher Hall of The Dreaming, you start again, but this time as a supergroup. In the late ’90s, Hall’s previous project, Stabbing Westward, took modern-rock radio by storm with singles “Shame” and “Save Yourself” before calling it quits in 2002. Unwilling to remain idle, Hall and drummer Johnny Haro formed The Dreaming later that year.  Continue reading →

New York musician Marco Benevento recorded his 2014 release Swift about as far away from the big city as possible: Cottage Grove.  Renowned producer and musician Richard Swift (The Shins, Foxygen) lives in Cottage Grove. Swift consistently supported Benevento’s shows at local venue the Axe & Fiddle. When Benevento heard Swift’s production work on Foxygen’s We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic (also recorded in Cottage Grove), he knew he wanted to work with him. Continue reading →