Rachel’s Tale of Santa Monica, CA - The Temple Bar (or “Someone Has to Have a Meltdown, Might As Well Be Me”)
There is always at least one spectacular meltdown in any given tour—at least, any tour I’ve ever been on. Usually at that crucial just-past-midway point when the sleep deprivation and cramped quarters and […]

OK so, first things first: Ya know my WW show preview for Lily Allen? As in, the lead review of the whole music listings section this week? Well, just to clarify: it wasn’t supposed to begin “When I first heard ‘Smile,’” as it does. No, it was supposed to read, “At first, when I […]

Six thirty pm. Saturday, the twenty fourth day in March 2007. Exit Portland, Oregon
Let the tour begin!
The Weinlander (our ever trusty tour van purchased by adam’s granddad in 1975 and passed down two generations before we got ‘er) has been going through a week of serious training and has been declared “tight.” We’ll take […]

After the interview was over, I was still trying to hash out some finer points of Grigson’s belief system off the record. I knew from a previous conversation that he’s not a big fan of any venue with fire in the logo, so I asked him how he felt about Dante’s, a place that’s clearly […]

Three old Portland peeps (Daisy, Angie, and Tomo) are all in Tucson now for school, studying Library Science, Horticulture, and Audiology respectively. They each brought some friends and fellow students out to our show at Plush, which went quite well. You probably shouldn’t assume that those particular academic fields are normally full of party-hardy […]

Fair warning: This week’s FFW is NOT friendly. If you respect people in the military, read on at the risk of never wanting to read this column again.
By now you’ve probably gotten wind of what, in the ten days since the anti-war protest, has generated national attention. If you’re just tuning in, a group […]

How Foureveryoung’s family ties allow it to cut the crap.
When Foureveryoung—the musical project of Loch Lomond’s Ritchie Young and his three younger brothers—first booked a show at Mississippi Studios, owner Jim Brunberg said, “I’m not gonna check this out.” He thought Foureveryoung was a Rod Stewart cover band; he was quite wrong.
Foureveryoung is the amalgamation […]

I figured that, for any newcomers, I had better start the series of Cuts of the Day featuring Colin Grigson off with the band that first introduced me to him, and in a way, a whole section of the Portland scene.
Plan R is the perfect mix of goofiness and balls. Usually their songs are half […]

[AMBIENT] I’d put Metal’s Aaron Shepherd at no more than 30 years old—which places him pretty firmly in the post-Jacques-Yves Cousteau generation. Given that alone, I love to death the fact that Metal’s three releases—The Silent World, its precursor EP, World Ocean, and 2005’s Sounds of Our Seas—are at least implicitly devoted to the cultural […]

[GARAGE ROCK] Contrary to its name, Pure Country Gold is essentially a high-energy, dirtied-up party band. Even so, the garage-rock duo has a few things to say to those willing to wade through the crunchy guitar and up-to-11 volume of the two-minute anthems on its self-titled debut. And the strongest message that emerges on Pure […]