Jan St. Werner always seems to use his Lithops moniker as a conceptual clearing house, fleshing out new ideas on record as he hashes out the ever-shifting sounds of his much beloved, much scrutinized project Mouse on Mars. St. Werner's best Lithops ...
The catch-all "post-punk" is a term wielded like a sword when a scalpel is required. That's partly because post-punk carts around the mismatched baggage of history and revisionism. Take, for example, by ¡Forward, Russia!; a curious mélange of studied ...
As Earlimart frontman Aaron Espinoza discovered a few years back, sometimes heroes can become mentors-- even friends. A chance encounter with Elliott Smith in Portland turned into a long-term relationship that would help steer Earlimart's development ...
French rock and pop, when not being dismissed outright, are often discussed only in terms of English-language antecedents. Johnny Hallyday brings to mind Elvis, for example, and the chameleonic, hedonistic Serge Gainsbourg is sometimes compared to ...
Preciousness seems particularly well-embedded in the consciousness of the practitioners of the New Weird Americana. The crumbled monolith of the Elephant 6 collective still keeps its watchful eye trained on the utopic pop of the Beach Boys; the more ...
Common sense dictates never to trust techno that's aimed as much for the pub as it is for the club, and thus we are to be skeptical of Nicolas Sfintescu and Ezechiel Pailhès, the absurdist duo behind Nôze. Their first couple of records, while leaning ...
It's difficult to write a review on a record like Memory Drawings, the second studio full-length from the Drift-- not because the music is especially enigmatic, but because it stubbornly, almost grouchily, avoids exposition. On one hand, the Drift is ...
By now, readers are familiar with Julian Cope's 1995 book Krautrocksampler, which helped rekindle appreciation of post-war German psychedelia. Thing is, most of us have never had a chance to read it, as it's looooooong out of print (Amazon's best price ...
For those of you curious about the name, I'll spare you the suspense: listening to Experimental Dental School is indeed kind of like pulling teeth. That's not a 25-word dismissal, however: XDS revel in the difficult, the turgid, the painful. They've ...
Paul Dickow ascribes to a sort of morality of the non-committal. He keeps busy with a number of bands and collaborations within the Portland music scene, whether it's drumming for punk band Emergency, working with improvisational trio Nudge, or ...
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