Back in 2013, Noel Gallagher said he was too busy talking about Jagwar Ma to reform Oasis. That was before their first record was even released, and once their debut, Howlin, hit the airwaves, Sydney's Gabriel Winterfield and Jono Ma quickly entered the ranks of Tame Impala and Django Django. Jagwa…
Nine decades deep into the electronic music genre, and the most startling and effective instrument it uses is still the human voice. From the earliest days of sampling and vocal splicing to the revolutionary vocal manipulations of Bruce Haack and Kraftwerk up through the live vocal looping we've en…
“Everyone is dressed up, everyone to the nines”, Mike Kinsella whispers on the album’s closing track, “Someone must have found love or someone must have died”. That sentence - perhaps better than any other on the record - embodies the perfect mixture of awareness and distance that has haunted Ameri…
Johnny Jewel makes music that calls upon the venue of cinema so regularly, that when he actually creates something meant to go along with film, it almost seems more meta than the imaginary films he's themed in other projects. Likewise, the whole of the Italians Do It Better catalog exists in this s…
At the Paramount Theatre last week, Phantogram opened their set without even being on stage. After they performed two songs obscured from the audience, a screen fell shortly thereafter, revealing the New York duo behind the fourth wall to fervently shake the physical walls of the venue. Going from …
Man alive, is it a good time to be the 80s or what? We have Stranger Things still tearing up the Netflix ratings, and the show's soundtracking band S U R V I V E on a world tour behind their new album (you can catch them at Crocodile 10/12). Death Waltz and Mondo are introducing a new generation to…
When you have nearly half a century of film scores to choose from and you don the Neumos stage on a Tuesday night, which one do you play first? These are the types of questions you would ask yourself if you were master Italian composer Fabio Frizzi. Frizzi is the second four-decades-deep horror sou…
The last time Foals were in town, frontman Yannis Philipakkis jumped off the Neptune Theatre's balcony into the crowd. It was, quite frankly, as thrilling as it was dangerous. On the band's return trip to Seattle three years later, he (wisely) did not jump from the Paramount Theatre's balcony. Pers…
The second day of Macefield Music Festival invoked thunderstorms and musical fanfare as dozens of bands faced ecstatic crowds of music lovers at the KEXP Mainstage, Tractor Tavern, Conor Byrne Pub, and The Sunset. Seattle rapper Grynch threw down his approachable, lyrical west coast rhymes for an e…
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.
