Worth getting up for in October: a weekend with my sister and my mom, and my extended family, in Augusta; the hot-dipped pan fried chicken from Keaton’s BBQ in Rowan County; all five of my cousins’ children, only two of whom I had met; the new Head and the Heart record; seeing Jonny Rodgers play…
Author: brandnewkindof
Photographer, baseball fan, lover of rock music, sweet tea, chili cheese hotdogs, and Matt Wieters.
two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums i listened to in september & october
And by “in September” I mean “in the last four days of September because I was behind, epically, on podcasts, all month”, but October was A++ of new listening. Also: full length reviews of Ha Ha Tonka’s Lessons, Two Cow Garage’s The Death of The Self-Preservation Society, and The Julie Ruin’s Run Fast here, and The…
concert: j roddy walston & the business @ kings
J. Roddy Walston & the Business came out last night and proceeded to absolutely tear down the walls at Kings. The new album burns up live, and the old songs are so sing-along shout-along friendly that a crowd can’t help but pump their fists and jump up and down and possibly hug strangers. I like…
album review: mipso – dark holler pop
Bands from North Carolina with upright basses and banjos and mandolins draw, fairly or unfairly, comparisons to one of two bands, at first: the Avett Brothers, or Chatham County Line. Either the Avetts’ high energy stage show, or Chatham County Line’s cluster around a single microphone and close harmonies. Music writers can’t help themselves when…
release news: the bottle rockets reissue self-titled & the brooklyn side
Somewhere betwen my discovery of Bloodshot Records in 2002 (Neko Case, though she’d just left the label; Kelly Hogan; the Waco Brothers; Rex Hobert & the Misery Boys) and my current dig through Robbie Fulks and Scott H. Biram’s extensive back catalogs, I spent a lot of time trolling used CD bins at record stores…
preview: j roddy walston & the business @ kings
J. Roddy Walston & the Business rock. Sometimes that’s a cliche, and sometimes it’s the only way to describe what a band does. This band, fronted by the volatile and captivating Walston, rocks, and rocks hard. I had the pleasure of seeing them back in September in Chicago, and they had an incredibly diverse crowd —…
request for submissions: the first album i ever bought
Since people seem interested in this, here’s a template for submitting a piece on The First Album You Ever Bought! Email the piece — 200-300 words minimum, no maximum but do try to contain yourself to not, say, 10,000 words — to asdonkar AT gmail with the subject line The First Album I Ever Bought. Include…
saxapahaw oktober fest: sarah shook + gasoline stove
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any local bands that I didn’t already know … or at least local bands who weren’t composed of people I knew from other bands with new projects. So last night’s Oktoberfest in Saxapahaw was a lovely change, because I got to see a couple of well-respected country acts…
ep review / interview: animal parts – six arms to hold you
Toronto musician Joshua Cockerill — who performs solo and with a band as Animal Parts — came onto my radar about this time last year, when he played a couple of North Carolina shows with Scots Admiral Fallow and recently-visited Erin Rae and John Isaac Davey; he writes deeply intense and personal songs, often just accompanied…
jonny rodgers @ the cave
Jonny Rodgers plays wine glasses. He does more than that, of course — he loops his own ethereal voice over itself, electric guitar, keyboards, and programmed drum-and-basslines, combined with exquisitely simple and heart-rendingly personal songwriting about love, loss, and loneliness — but if that isn’t new, it isn’t old, either. What is new is the…
