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When I was a boy, my father, a former music teacher, joked: “There’s nothing worth listening to beyond Bach. Bach wrote it all first.” But I was a child of pop music and, in the words of Morrissey, classical music said “nothing to me about my life.” Continue reading
When Matthew Halls steps to the podium to conduct the Oregon Bach Festival’s June 26 opening performance, it will mark the first time since its founding in 1970 that anyone other than founder Helmuth Rilling has directed the annual summer festival. That opening work, Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, commonly regarded as the first Baroque masterpiece, makes an appropriate accession because the 38-year-old British conductor’s assumption of the artistic director post signals a generational change. Continue reading
Around the 35-second mark on “It Ain’t Easy,” track 14 on Sassparilla’s recently released impressive double album Pasajero/Hullabaloo, something begins to sound very similar to a song cemented on classic rock’s Mt. Rushmore. Continue reading
Though the final entry in the beloved Harry Potter series hit bookshelves seven years ago, and the last film arrived three years ago, The Boy Who Lived continues to live on thanks to the cheeky musical genre known as Wizard Rock, a musical phenomenon which I wrote about in 2007 for EW (“Raise Your Wands: Wizard rock arrives at the library”) just before the final Potter book was released. Wizard Rock combines Potter fans’ love of music and books, so listeners are treated to songs that are based on events from the series. Continue reading
What were you doing at age 17? Well, 17-year-old Clementine Creevy of the L.A.-based band Cherry Glazerr is busy fostering an up-and-coming indie “it” girl reputation — but not before getting her homework done. The cherub-faced trio’s 2013 release Trick or Treat Dancefloor, out on Burger Records, recalls the early work of fellow female-fronted Southern California band Best Coast; think three chords soaked in reverb and rudimentary melodies alongside loose and stony percussion. Continue reading
Zimbabwe’s “afrocoustic” Bongo Love returns to Eugene June 27 at Cozmic. Since the last time the band brought the “Zim sound” to town, Bongo Love released a self-titled album and added a trap set drummer and a female vocalist to the sonic smorgasbord of djembe, mbira, marimba and “southern African guitar licks.” Continue reading
The sixth annual Degenerate Flame Off, a festival for “functional art glass from the underground,” runs June 27-29 at the Cornerstone Glass campus in the Whit. Sixteen glass artists from across the country will compete in a 10-hour “flame-off” to make the most gnarly art pipe in the categories of Most Creative, People’s Choice and Most Technical. Continue reading
A limitless cosmos of doorways and dead-ends, New York City is a dream, as much a state of mind as it is a place on the map. Adam Gwon’s 2009 musical Ordinary Days beautifully captures the chaotic flux of NYC in a nutshell, by reflecting in microcosm the city’s everyday influence on the romantic lives of two couples. Deceptively simple in form, Gwon’s love letter to Gotham is a minor masterpiece of lyricism and perk, condensing worlds of emotion into a mere 90 minutes. Continue reading
Fifteen years ago, Lukas Moodysson’s feature debut, Show Me Love (limply retitled from the evocative Fucking Åmål), gave us a beautifully honest, complicated and lovely tale about small-town teenage life and love. Moodysson’s latest, We Are the Best!, is another gloriously told tale about Swedish teens — though they can barely claim the word. Continue reading