promo photos: the fooligans

Spent Sunday afternoon with the Fooligans, goofing around and doing their promo photos. Full set is here. If you’re a local band who needs promo photos, I’ll cut you a price deal if you book me in the next two weeks: asdonkar AT gmail. I have two days in May and four in June open.

jesca hoop @ west end wine bar

Yep Roc’s Jesca Hoop played a quietly delicate set to a small crowd at the West End Wine Bar; an off-night from touring with the Punch Brothers, she writes intricate and shimmering songs in the vein of Sharon Van Etten and plays them with an electric kick like Carrie Brownstein. She had her voice reigned…

worth getting up for in april

Worth getting up for in April: Delta Spirit, Alabama Shakes, Hoots & Hellmouth, the Lumineers, Deep Dark Woods live; my new tattoo all healed up; paid photo jobs, unpaid photo jobs, and photo jobs paid in beer and dope; vintage pick-up trucks at twilight; not paying my undergrad loan (because it’s paid off); crossing things…

the deep dark woods @ local 506

I haven’t written about Levon Helm’s death, in part because every time I tried, I got all weepy, but mostly because I knew I had this show on the books, and I can’t think of a more appropriate band than the Deep Dark Woods to tie back to Levon. Because the Deep Dark Woods sound…

the lumineers @ local 506

I wrote about this show for Speakers in Code, so you can read about my feelings there and look at more photos of the Lumineers and excellent openers Kopecky Family Band here. (Or here, where the full set is.)

college baseball: ecu @ unc

Four. My personal definition of schadenfreude is crushing the hopes of ECU baseball fans who drove a hundred miles to watch a game into a million pieces with a 10th inning walk-off single. It also involves eight and a third shutout innings from a future first rounder. Kent Emmanuel was smokin’ last night, and a…

across tundras @ the cave

Continued my metal education by dragging Louis to see Nashville’s self-described psych rockers Across Tundras and local sludge rockers Bitter Resolve. I really dug on Bitter Resolve’s set, and can no longer say as a whole that I dislike metal. I still find metal fairly inexplicable, because I would never say, hey, I want to…

two sentence reviews of new albums i listened to in april

I swear I listened to more than this, but apparently I didn’t write about them. I’ll do better in May. Anyway: boom, new albums, including two from my beloved This Is American Music. Carolina Chocolate Drops — Leaving Eden: Triangle GRAMMY winners follow up 2010’s spectacular Genuine Negro Jig with this one, which is a…

shakori hills grassroots festival spring 2012

Muchas gracias to Grant and the Bottom String (although to be fair, Grant pretty much is the Bottom String) for once again allowing me to scoot into the hippie zydeco-jam-band-roots-rock paradise that is Shakori Hills without paying for my ticket; I was out Thursday and Saturday (Sunday’s monsoon precluded my desire to stand in a…