Some festival-lineup additions: The Flaming Lips-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, set for September in upstate New York, has added Deerhoof, the Boredoms, and a set where No Age plays an entire Husker Du LP (with a “special guest” on lead vocals), as well as a few other acts. Meanwhile, the Pitchfork Music Festival has added a bunch of acts to the list of artists taking the stage in July, and it includes the awesome noise spectacle Ponytail, as well as the mysterious DOOM and hometown stalwarts Dianogah. Stuff to look forward to is nice, right? More »
Like a shy loner whose mom pressures her to go to the middle school dance and socialize with her classmates, I have been thrust into this year’s CMJ coverage. Of course I’m always delighted when Maura is generous and crazy enough to grant me a press pass, and Lord knows I’m not complaining about free shows all week, but let’s do some real talk: CMJ is ridiculous. Who are all these bands? Couldn’t they have just narrowed it down to a few actually good ones and put on just one or two great concerts instead of a hundred mediocre shows? Oh wait, I forgot–the point of music is to consume as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. Join me for a recap of day one’s journey into the heart of darkness: Brooklyn Vegan’s showcase at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.
By now, it’s been pretty well established that I love the Baltimore outfit Ponytail, which specializes in frenetic noise rock where every note sounds like it came from a rush of absolute euphoria. More »
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that a new song from Baltimore’s Ponytail, who should have a picture of them next to the term “sound explosion” in the big Rock Critic Dictionary, appeared on Pitchfork’s Forkcast after my RSS reader took off for the weekend on Friday. More »
Each day at CMJ we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the best (and worst) shows we happened upon. On day two, we’re shocked by the fact that we actually liked (or loved) most of the bands we saw, including our unoffical pick for the best young rock band around at the moment. This is for everyone who says all we do is complain all the time.
A Baltimore-based tipster slipped us Kamehameha, the debut album by Charm City’s Ponytail, last night, and we’re kind of hooked on its 26 minutes of top-to-bottom spazzing out; like Deerhoof, they’ve got thick, sheeny guitars that burst into flurries of top-speed riffing, but vocalist Molly… More »
