We've got issues.
The Elena Leona Project (ELP) is sizzle, spice and everything nice. Like the lovechild of Lauren Hill and Etta James, this band is funky. ELP started in Eugene and has been performing at local venues for a few years. The band has undergone several makeovers (switching out some band members here and there) since the beginning, but Elena Leona (lead vocals) says, “This feels like the right group.” Continue reading
Last week I called up my 69-year-old white mum in Minnesota with a special request: Listen to Die Antwoord’s new mixtape Suck On This and let me interview you about it. Die Antwoord would probably top the list of music you shouldn’t listen to with your mother, or vice versa, but, like a boss, my mum accepted the challenge. Continue reading
Beall Hall is a great place to hear chamber music and especially to hear very small ensembles: The room is so lively and sensitive it's like sitting inside a giant musical ins Continue reading
If people go to concerts to be witness to something, they go to music festivals to be part of something. Or to get duped into thinking they’re part of something. Or something. Here’s exactly how I feel about this year’s Sasquatch festival at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington: it was fun, and I’m never going back. Friday, May 27 Continue reading
Few things are as staid and predictable as the lone-athlete sports film. Since the sleeper success of Rocky in 1976, such movies have become increasingly formulaic potboilers in which we dutifully witness, as though through a fisheye lens, the algorithmic progress of an underdog as he confronts endless obstacles on the way to inevitable triumph. Cue ovation. Continue reading
If toe-tapping and swingin’ beats with eerie, Romanian undertones are your thing, check out Hot Damn Scandal. The band is a combination of thrift-store hats, old-timey folk and Southern blues — washboard and saw included. In 2008, the founders loosely came together in an alternative drum circle at the Rainbow Gathering. After a few members came and went, six ramblin’ folks officially became Hot Damn Scandal. Now, whiskey and heartbreak seem to fuel Hot Damn’s good ol’ drunk-in-love Southern sound. Continue reading
A brand new Eugene band, Ghost Tour, debuts Saturday, July 2, at Hi-Fi Music Hall’s Lounge. Ghost Tour features several familiar faces for Eugene music fans, such as Olive DelSol (Bohemian Dub Orchestra) on keyboards and vocals, and Michael Steinkirchner (Caitlin Jemma & The Goodness) on lead guitar. Continue reading
When the Oregon Bach Festival commissioned what turned out to be his European Requiem back in 2012, James MacMillan couldn’t have known how prophetic that title might have turned out to be. The 57-year-old Scottish composer’s big choral orchestral work premieres July 2 at the Hult Center — just more than a week after his compatriots voted to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union, a move that might in turn provoke MacMillan’s homeland to seek independence from the U.K. Continue reading
I have two sisters, much younger than me, the offspring of my father’s second marriage. I love them both dearly, but when they were little girls and I was in my 20s, they drove me batshit crazy — especially with their fanatical devotion to all things Disney. Both of them possess gorgeous singing voices, always have, and traipsing around the house they would suddenly stop, raise their arms with operatic urgency and begin belting out some saccharine ballad from The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. If I hear about Ariel one more time, so help me … Continue reading
The Oregon Country Fair poster is as much of an institution as the Fair itself. Around May each year, the OCF poster committee reveals the winning design and, like a harbinger of summer, it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, pinned to bulletin boards and taped to storefronts around the region. Artist Ila Rose had submitted work to the committee in the past, to no avail. This year, she nabbed the commission — in a year that, according to the poster committee, had a record-breaking number of submissions. Continue reading