Playing while it's raining at a festival is always a gamble. Lots of people who would have otherwise wandered over out of curiosity are hiding out in every covered nook and cranny imaginable, so it was only the diehards waiting in the drizzle for The Julie Ruin's mid-afternoon set. But, to be hones…
Friday evening brought plenty of good sleep. For those at Pickathon who were sung to sweet dreams by Yo La Tengo’s intimate stripped down set the night before, or for those who danced themselves to exhaustion at Ty Segall, a few hours of rest were well appreciated. After all, there is very little o…
This year, !K7 Records celebrates a massive milestone, entering the twentieth year of their ongoing DJ-Kicks series and releasing the fiftieth entry in the series. Over its fifty entry catalogue, DJ-Kicks has carved a niche that no other electronic serial really taps into. For Fabric, it's the club…
Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a phenomenally awesome trend happening right now where dance bands are accompanying thumping tracks with a lyrical message of higher understanding and deeper self-knowing. Last fall, Cut Copy gave us Free Your Mind, a record musically inspired by rave cultu…
It's hard to think of an individual who's more of a Seattle Rock Institution than Jack Endino. Whether as a musician or producer/engineer, he's been knee-deep in this city's growing and changing music scene for about three decades. By the time he released Angle of Attack, his first solo album (whic…
It's hard being The Strokes. After setting the template for the next ten years of guitar-based rock with their 2001 debut, Is This It, it wasn't long before the NYC quintet was being outpaced by the bands they paved the way for. After some time apart, Julian Casablancas, Nikolai Fraiture, Nick Vale…
Even with a full band backing her on stage at the KEXP Gathering Space Stage on the second day of the Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, it seemed like Seattle singer songwriter Shelby Earl hardly needed a mic. Her voice rang clear, powerful, and true even when she stepped back from her mic to …
Thanks to you, KEXP has hit another milestone! This past weekend, we added one more thing to be thankful for as we surpassed half a billion views on our YouTube channel! Back when we first brought video cameras into our live room, nearly ten years ago, we couldn't have imagined the impact KEXP vide…
Most bands start by writing songs at home and recording in their basements. For David Bazan, it took nearly two decades to get there. The former Pedro the Lion bandleader and subsequent solo artist has long been a local treasure, appealing to a generation of Northwest indie kids in the 90s and 2000…
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“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…
The fact that Turn Blue, the eighth album by The Black Keys, is full of songs about being hurt by a woman shouldn't be all that surprising. Although they, sonically speaking, haven't been a dirty, traditionalist-leaning blues band in a few years now, they remain one at heart, which is why Dan Auerb…
Each Tuesday for the next two months, KEXP will present recordings we captured during the OFF Festival in Katowice, Poland. Our excursion there in the hot days of August - made possible by the festival and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute's Don’t Panic! We’re from Poland! initiative - introduced us to…
Recently, Seattle Weekly posted a piece called "A Year of Emergency". While the piece deals with the city's prevailing homelessness epidemic, the societal range to which the phrase could be extended this year is nearly infinite. Human empathy is facing a year of emergency, and for better or worse, …
If you call yourself an Arcade Fire fan and have seen the band at least once in the live setting, there's a good chance that you need absolutely no introduction to Will Butler. When Arcade Fire skyrocketed to the moon amongst the Reflektor hype of 2013, it was clear that the one facet of their musi…
I hate to break it to you, but you're gonna be heading toward Record Store Day this Saturday at a deficit. Why? Because there are too many excellent new releases coming out today that you'll want to pick up right now. First and foremost: the latest from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whose fourth album our Music…
You'll wish you could say you were there. It was just one of those shows that all in attendance knew they were blessed by some kind of angelic beings to attend, as HÆLOS played for a respectably sized, though not packed, crowd at The Sunset Tavern last week. The UK trio decided to advance their for…
Barboza, the intimate venue underneath Neumos, feels cut off from the rest of the world, with no sight or sound of the rest of the world. In some ways, it's the perfect venue for a band like Hælos, whose particular brand of UK club R&B feels wholly detached from the rest of the world, cinematic…
