By Matthew Shelter Photos by Matthew Shelter English folk trio The Staves unveiled their delicate harmonies and dry British wit to a full house at Café 939 on Boylston Street last Monday night. The three sisters – Emily, decease Jessica and Milly Stavely-Taylor – hail from Watford, find England and have garnered quite a bit […]
By Matthew Shelter Photos by Matthew Shelter More than two years after her last appearance in our fair town, Lissie Maurus, who goes by the single-word stage name Lissie, was back in the city playing to a sold-out Brighton Music Hall crowd on a recent Wednesday night. Lissie is working on a new album, due […]
On stage—the Milling Gowns, Boston’s premier gloompop band. Somewhat unsurprisingly, watching the band is more of a meditative activity than an upbeat one. The lead singer, who sounds something like a cross between Ian Curtis and James Morrison, acts like a black hole, sucking the energy out of the room. Well, at least until after the second song when someone yells “fuck yeah,” and it begins to dawn on me that gloom pop might be awesome.
That whole ironic hipster thing is pretty much over.
For a while there it was pretty bad. We cared so much about not caring, or looking like we didn’t care. To care was to be vulnerable, to betray weakness, to risk ridicule – to risk being the next Rebecca Black. We all saw what reward the Internet had in store…
Governors Ball has entered the ring of jumbo-sized festivals that feature decked-out lineups and sky high ticket prices. These gatherings have reached a certain level of both anticipatory and cynical expectations, and this year’s Governors Ball seemed to encompass both ends of the spectrum…
By Ben Stas Photos by Graham Zinger Fresh off the April release of his 70-minute folk-rock epic Wakin on a Pretty Daze, patient Kurt Vile and his Violators stopped by The Sinclair for a sold-out show on the 17th. Vile made waves in 2011 with the much-acclaimed Smoke Ring for My Halo, and those waves […]
By Ben Stas Photos by Ben Stas Four Tet likely ranks among today’s least flashy performers of electronic music. In an era where most electronic shows are as much concerned with spectacle as sound, drugs a Four Tet performance still offers little in the way of visuals beyond one man and his table of gadgetry. That […]
If your body isn’t sore the day after a JEFF the Brotherhood concert, salve then you’re doing something wrong–this is doubly so if they hold a two-night residency at Great Scott. The Nashville duo of brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall did this on a few stops along their most recent cross-country trek, price playing a […]
By Ben Stas Photos by Ben Stas Converse brought their Rubber Tracks Live concert series to Boston recently for a stacked show featuring acts both local and national. Headlined by psychedelic synth-pop Brooklynites Yeasayer, viagra sale the show also brought Real Estate side project Ducktails and local crews Camden and Bodega Girls to the sold-out […]
By Neil Patch Photos by Daniel Schiffer While rain ultimately defeated Prospect Park’s Great Googa Mooga in its second year of existence, and it successfully demonstrated a model of how to combine a neighborhood community festival with wider regional (and perhaps national) attention. Googa Mooga bills itself as an “amusement park of food, salve drink […]