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These days, we’ve traded fliers for Facebook and ’zines for blogs, but the amalgamated forces of bullshit that spawned early-’80s American hardcore remain essentially unchanged: consumerism, alienation, angst. For the past 35 years, pioneering punk band D.O.A. has confronted these forces with a steady stream of conscientious hardcore. Hailing from Vancouver, B.C., and fronted by the legendary Joey Shithead (aka Joe Keithly), D.O.A. Continue reading
“We might play a piece 30, 40, 50 — sometimes 100 times,” eighth blackbird flutist Tim Munro told me a few years ago. That dedication to rehearsal allows the Grammy-winning, Chicago-based new music sextet to memorize its pieces, which “enables us to have interactions within the group that I never thought were possible in chamber music,” the Australian Munro said, to focus not just on getting the notes but on communicating the music to the audience. Continue reading
If I wrote a book about a dark and moody country-rock musician, I might name the main character Lydia Loveless. The real Loveless assures me it’s her real name while calling from her tour bus somewhere in the Midwest. Loveless’ 2014 release Somewhere Else (out now on Bloodshot Records) is full of dark and moody country-rock, positioning the young songwriter as alt-country’s next big thing — the heir-apparent to Lucinda Williams, a young and feisty Steve Earle with a broken heart or Tammy Wynette fronting The Replacements. Continue reading
British theater is heady, chewy stuff — especially British farce, which typically excels in wit and wordplay. Consider, for instance, a playwright like Sir Tom Stoppard, who included in his masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead a scene in which the two leads play a rapid-fire “Game of Questions” that is essentially verbal Ping-Pong on speed. In general, American drama post-Tennessee Williams lacks such linguistic finery. Continue reading
Aziz Ansari is a comedian with the zeitgeist nipping at his heels. Having found fame and a devoted following first with MTV’s comedy sketch show Human Giant, and then playing the loveable trend-chaser Tom Haverford on Parks and Recreation, followed by rapid-fire releases of his comedy specials, Ansari is now tackling contemporary courtship, literally — like in a book. Romance and relationships in a tech-drunk world are at the heart of his upcoming book, Modern Romance, and tour of the same name, which comes to Eugene this Thursday, March 27. Continue reading
Whenever Hollywood, in its infinite predictability, deigns to treat the subject of advanced middle-age, it does so in such broad terms as to skirt impropriety, if not outright offense. Basically, old people in mainstream movies are played either for comic yuks, as infantilized, sexed-up geriatric assholes, or as infantilized, de-sexualized pill-popping matrons who serve as mere placeholders in some grander drama. In neither instance is age depicted as a specific human condition of adulthood, a moment in life’s journey. Continue reading
Pushing yourself to do new things, creatively, can be challenging, but as Esme Patterson — one of the vocalists in the Baroque indie folk-pop group Paper Bird — can attest, such growth and change are necessary. The band’s fourth album, 2013’s Rooms, is proof. Continue reading
Eugene Symphony brings a trio of top singers to join its chorus for the Thursday, March 20, performance of Haydn’s great oratorio, The Creation, at the Hult. After one of the most famous opening scenes in music — nothing less than what we’d now call the Big Bang — the great classical composer doesn’t need no stinkin’ sets or theatrical props, using only his most colorful music to paint scenic portraits of the events and even animals described in the Christian creation myth. Continue reading
The singing voice that comes out of Eugene musician Corwin Bolt is disarming: There are elements of Bob Dylan there, in the nasally delivery that registers passion in flat insistences and breathy hidey-holes; some Woody Guthrie, like a spike driven into a rail tie, hard-hewn and proud; a little Steve Earle, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt and not a small bit of the late Vic Chesnutt, a beautiful croak quenched by kerosene and gargled through the gravel of hard times. Continue reading
Linda Perhacs has always loved quiet. “I was taking long solitary walks as early as I can remember. I have a deep, strong love for raw, wild nature,” she tells EW over the phone from her Topanga Canyon home. “You could hardly get me in the house. I knew very early on that I would not be in the kitchen.” Continue reading