Video Premiere: The Venus Flytraps – “Ghost on the Phone
Just when you thought Halloween couldn’t get any stranger, Cleveland band The Venus Flytraps is releasing a visual single featuring two tracks from its debut album Night of The Venus…
Review: BATTLES – “Juice B Crypts”
BATTLES’ syncopated loops may circle triumphantly around the drains of the mind but its lineup has not fared as well. Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton exited after 2007’s Mirrored, leaving the group…
Review: Tomeka Reid Quartet – “Old New”
Most of us know or associate with the cello as a staple of the classical and post-classical world, an instrument whose deeper breaths can elicit comparisons to the bowels of…
Video Premiere: Rachel Grimes – “For So Long”
Rachel Grimes is a Louisville-based musician who was a founding member of post-classical chamber ensemble Rachel’s (incidentally, not named after her) and, since the mid-2010s, has been staking a bold…
Review: Brat Curse – S/T
Brat Curse writes in earworms. That’s the only logical conclusion you can come to after listening to the Columbus, Ohio quartet’s new self-titled outing, which features hooky blasts of noisy…
Review: The Zells – “No More Heroes” EP
The Zells’ No More Heroes EP – the six-song follow-up to 2018’s excellent Failure to Slide, out today via Pittsburgh indie Crafted Sounds – starts with reverby, almost spacy guitars…
Review: Eric Bachmann – “Misinformation Age”
Only Eric Bachmann could make rage over the Trump era’s alienating 24-hour-a-day mind-fuck seem elegiac. His new, one-off single, “Misinformation Age,” out yesterday via Merge for $1 on Bandcamp and…
Concert Review: Melvins Live In Pittsburgh 10-5-19
Melvins know no years. They’re just too fucking good to be bothered with them. So, seeing the trio, now nearing its fifth (!) decade in existence, destroy a stage live…
Review: Not Your Friends – “Constructing A Mental Breakdown”
Constructing A Mental Breakdown, the ambitious burst of post-hardcore noise by Pittsburgh quartet Not Your Friends, is a vexing little document. First things first, it must be said that, when…
Profile: Composer Rachel Grimes leads listeners ‘forth’
It starts, appropriately, by rolling on the seams of piano keys. “There is something/ got ahold of me/ and it won’t let go,” the singer coos, among a forest trail…
Review: DANA – “GLowing Auras & Black Money”
The cover for Glowing Auras & Black Money, the sophomore outing from Ohio art-punk/mostly punk outfit DANA, is all wrong. The image, which features a glossy illustration of a woman’s…
Concert Review: Thom Yorke – Live In Pittsburgh, Sept. 29, 2019
There’s something, I don’t know, almost phosphorescent about Thom Yorke, the iconic Radiohead frontman who brought his new solo tour right to the doorstep of a sold-out Pittsburgh crowd Sunday…