When the MTV announced its “Re-Animate the Decemberists” challenge, asking the band’s fans to create a background for their green-screen video- they were taking a cue from Comedy Central’s faux-right-wing commentator, Stephen Colbert. His Star Wars-style green screen challenge resulted in some crazy awesome footage of the glasses-and-light saber adorned host zapping aliens and hacking […]

[POST-HARDCORE] Accidents happen, and sometimes they’re bands. Ferocious Eagle is one such accident, the result of a perfectly cute and unlikely run-in on a Greyhound bus from Eugene to Portland. Granted, skinny white dudes with guitars connect on that same bus twice a day, but few of those connections result in bands worth more than […]

[SILLY RAP] What kind of hip-hop crew are the Buttery Lords? Well, they drop two Neil Diamond references on their re-issued debut, Buttered for Her Pleasure. The comedic rap outfit also weaves Trotsky, Howard Zinn, Pauly Shore and local bar Beulahland into its rhymes, along with plenty of bygone pop-culture references and clever lines: ‘I’m […]

[ROCK] From Pond to the Decemberists, expertly recorded smart-guy fare has long been a PDX music specialty. But a good argument can be made that our city’s greatest and most enduring audio export happens to be a 20-year-old garage band from Clackamas, a band that’s had records rejected from pressing plants due to poor sound […]

I spent close to five hours this past Saturday watching complete strangers play video games. And it was fun. The event was bar/venue the Red Room’s first Guitar Hero tournament, and it brought out a slew of eager video-shredders and their respective posses of drunkenly encouraging friends.
Guitar Hero is an increasingly popular video game that […]

A word or two of advice to bands planning fall tours: Never, ever book Thanksgiving into your itinerary. We have been learning this lesson the hard way over the past week as show after show has boasted attendance in the mid to high teens. I swear, every single night, somebody has come up to […]

I doubt I need to explain the poignancy of a quadriplegic man singing the words “Touch Me Someplace I Can Feel,” but the amazing thing about this song is that its words would be poignant coming from anyone. Undeniably sad, this rough version of the track from cartoonist/poet/musician John Callahan’s debut, Purple Winos in the […]

 Enhanced Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup

I had lived in Portland for over a year before I discovered the band I had been looking for all along. I’d heard about the Bobsled—a group dance that went down at their shows—and I checked out Plan R at the Paris Theater on a Wednesday night in 2004, where I witnessed one of the […]

 Enhanced Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup

“…there’s gonna be about 50 people there, so bring a blanket if you have one because we’re going to be dining Bohemian-style. Oh, and there’s a turkey shoot too.”
“A turkey shoot?”
“Yeah, but all that’s covered in the pageant…”
See, the thing about Zach and Noelle Archibald of Show Me the Pink is that there’s really no […]

Arriving less than a week after drummer Rachel Blumberg’s former group, The Decemberists, sold out a cavernous hall north of the city, Blumberg’s new vehicle, Norfolk & Western, attracted a respectable sampling of the indie faithful to Subterranean–a mid-sized, mis-named (rising three stories above street level) venue midst Chicagoland hipster central. There didn’t seem to […]