KEXP's stellar lineup at Bumbershoot continues with festival heavy-hitter Michael Franti & Spearhead live on the Secret Stage. Franti has his fingers in many pots. He’s a poet, rapper, and singer-songwriter, who has been spreading positivity all over the world since 1994 with his current projec…
Our long-time musician friend, David Bazan, stopped by the KEXP studios the other day to play synth-ethereal songs off his new album, Blanco, which he so Bazanly described before the session as "basically electronic music with sadness." No surprise there! If you know anything about the man you know…
Thankfully, Failure never quite lived up to their name. Though in the 90's, they were never really allowed to sit at the cool table of grunge superstars, they found critical praise through their own inventive brand of heavy alt-rock. Record sales, unfortunately, never followed, and five years after…
Toronto rave gods Crystal Castles are known for their brutally intense live show. Alice Glass smokes nearly an entire pack of cigarettes on stage and makes some good progress on a bottle of Jack Daniels, while Ethan Kath barely looks up from his table, making sure that every pulsing bass drop shake…
When every member of a band comes from other (and sometimes more commercially successful) bands, it's usually a sign that the members are either doing it as a lark or following a true passion. In the case of Portland, OR's Black Prairie, the five bandmates seem truly to be loving what they do. Comp…
The acoustic, rainy-day ballads of Ghosts I've Met, fronted by Seattle's Sam Watts, are minimal in structure, soothing in spirit, sotto voce in tone, and come with a heavy sense of hope and fleeting moments. Having just released a new body of songs for his 2016 album, Night Repairs, Watts continues…
It's not like Conor Oberst needs much help sounding great. The Omaha, NE, native has been writing and performing with various projects, most notably with Bright Eyes, since his early teens, and he is a co-founder of not one but two independent labels: Saddle Creek and Team Love. In other words, we …
"It happens to be the most played album on the Afternoon Show this year", Kevin Cole gushed about Sun Structures, the shimmering debut by Temples. The young UK group has been touted by Brit pop luminaries no less than Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher, and though they may not yet be Top of the Pops, T…
This week, KEXP is broadcasting for the third year in a row, during Iceland Airwaves Music Festival. Starting this morning at 6AM, and running through Friday, November 1, we're bringing you five bands a day performing live at KEX Hostel in Reykjavik, including Emilíana Torrini, Moses Hightower, Pet…
Although it might shift to include Sasquatch and Governor’s Ball next year, there are essentially four music festivals that form the festival season narrative in 2013. Typically, Coachella sets the bar for the rest of the year in April, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza try and outdo it through sheer size …
For Seattle electronic music fans, Decibel Festival has spent the last 11 years working its way from mythical creature to household name. The festival has hosted some of the best electronic music in the Emerald city since 2003, and in the last couple years, has expanded into an year-round sponsor t…
Besides deliberate misspellings and prodigious capitalization in band names, we hope that one of the trends people will note about the music of 2013 is the ascendency of female voiced indie pop. CHVRCHES, HAERTS, HAIM (okay, a few bands fall into both categories!) as well as London Grammar, Lorde, …
Scott Hansen is known as ISO50 for his photography and design work. For his music, he and his band mates are known as Tycho. Closing down Saturday night at Sasquatch! Music Festival, Hansen and crew displayed how the two creative works aren’t mutually exclusive. Sharp images of distant landscapes a…
Musical lore has it that Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the iconic South African mbube group, was founded by Joseph Shabalala after having a series of dreams in which he heard their sounds. It goes unmentioned whether or not Joseph dreamt of 50 years of worldwide success as perhaps the most well-known cu…
First up on day four of KEXP's live stream from Kex Hostel at Iceland Airwaves Music Festival is Icelandic hip hop artist Sturla Atlas. The stage name for singer Sturla Atlason, Sturla Atlas makes 90's-style hip hop and RnB injected with Icelandic humor that manages to be both over-the-top and tota…
The thrill is gone. Yesterday, B.B. King passed away at age 89. Born Riley B. King in 1925 in Itta Bena, Mississippi, the legendary guitarist and songwriter became known worldwide for his distinctive voice and nimble finger picking, particularly on his constant companion, the Gibson guitar he named…
All throughout her conversation with Stevie Zoom, Mary Timony kept mentioning how Ex Hex "just came together". You'd be forgiven for thinking a band so fierce and tight could never be assembled so serendipitously, but when you've got a trio of D.C. punk lifers in the same room, there's no other pos…
Montreal natives The Luyas have been around since 2006 and have put out some really great records over the years, two of which -- Too Beautiful To Work and Animator -- were included on the long list for the 2011 and 2013 Polaris Music Prize respectively. Their sound is hard to pinpoint, using tons …
Before the Fallon performance, FKA Twigs was a pervasive mystery – a voice and an image spun together in perfect unity to create something entirely other worldly that you felt both drawn to and intimidated by. Maybe it was fear, or maybe it was just mystery, but either way, FKA Twigs was impossible…
