Hicksville is hardly the only New York City suburb riding out the dog days of summer with free concerts featuring “big” names: Stamford, Conn., uses its satellite city’s economic base to handily outdo the Long Island town’s Spin Doctors show with a free Boyz II Men concert this Thursday. More »
Hicksville is hardly the only New York City suburb riding out the dog days of summer with free concerts featuring “big” names: Stamford, Conn., uses its satellite city’s economic base to handily outdo the Long Island town’s Spin Doctors show with a free Boyz II Men concert this Thursday. More »
Grrrl-rock standard-bearer Carrie Brownstein took to her blog to discuss a phenomena she witnessed at a Fleet Foxes show: the “strangely beautiful” phenomenon of bromance, “where mostly straight men show up to shows in small packs, high-fiving during songs, raising glasses at the band in a show of brotherly love, and shouting ‘I love you!’ toward the stage.” She asks the readers to comment with “bromantic” shows they’ve attended; while the Hold Steady seems to be the consensus pick as far as which band is inspires the most male-on-male admiration, most of the bands mentioned are linked by shared roots in ’70s rock. As a result, I’ve noticed at least two distinct types of “bromance”: for lack of a better nomenclature, I’ll call one folk/country bromance (exemplified, in Brownstein’s post, by the Fleet Foxes crowd) and the other bar-band bromance (seen among Hold Steady fans). This oft-overlooked distinction is important to understanding the phenomenon.
As longtime readers well know, Idolator has an unrivaled commitment to what’s new in indie rock, which is why I’m here today discussing a two-year-old Grizzly Bear video. I don’t much care for the much-blogged-about band, although for much of 2006 I was convinced Yellow House was a grower and I needed to give it more time to let my appreciation of the album as a whole match that of just Ed Droste’s voice. (What else could explain all the acclaim?) But I adore the above video of the band’s a cappella performance of their single “Knife” on the streets of Paris, mainly because it strips “Knife” down and reveals that it’s in actuality a really great doo-wop song.
