From The Vault: The Henry Clay People - "Working Part-Time"
The fun thing to do when listening to California’s The Henry Clay People is to imagine that this is the angriest they get. This is it—the needle slapping all the way to the right side of the scale, violently red. This is their heart and muscles in the middle of a serious decision on the fight or flight situation right in front of them. This is them completely worked up over something. This is the furor. It’s at this point when we realize that their venom and ire is highly entertaining and could likely give us a golden opportunity to... read more
Found in: Featured VideosLive From SXSW: JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound (Full Set)
Watch JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound's entire performance at the Sennheiser & Paste Present the Stages on Sixth. read more
Found in: Featured VideosLive From SXSW: Crooked Fingers
Watch Crooked Fingers' entire performance at the Sennheiser & Paste Present the Stages on Sixth. read more
Found in: Featured VideosLive From Paste: DeVotchKa
DeVotchKa's live shows are spectacles to behold, showcasing an alluring dynamic that feeds off their unique blend of worldly influences and lamenting romanticism. Check out their Live from Paste session in this week's mPlayer issue. read more
Found in: Live at PasteHollow & Akimbo: The Best of What's Next
In a world of internet hype, bands testing material on the road and through rough-quality SoundCloud previews, the guys in Michigan-based Hollow & Akimbo were able to utilize something with their album that most present-day artists wouldn’t dream of: Restraint. read more
Found in: Music, FeaturesTo Rome with Love
Woody Allen’s latest is a giddy, glittering film drunk on the city of its title. To Rome with Love is a film of fountains and Vespas, of paparazzi and shower Pavarottis, young lovers and shrewd prostitutes. In his attempt to embrace Rome in one collection of stories, Allen gives us a richly textured film that is part love story, part comedy of errors, a little bit farce and a little bit tragedy.... read more
Found in: Movies, ReviewsJoe Jackson: 10 Things You May Not Have Known
In retrospect, Jackson’s bratty, nasal bark—which caught the public’s ear via his breakthrough Look Sharp! single, “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”—was certainly an unusual style, but one that perfectly embodied the jarring, iconoclastic punk/New Wave movement. read more
Found in: Music, FeaturesThe dB's: Falling Off the Sky
In terms of the grand musical historiography, a dB’s resurgence is around par with that Feelies reunion in terms of pure necessity. A mostly forgotten group of oddball innovators with two albums of slick, power-pop firepower breathlessly adored in record-clerk circles—it felt like a flashbang even at their prime. They rolled loose and liquid out of North Carolina, specializing in indelible, insect-reflex guitar hooks out of the forever-frantic Peter Holsapple. Candy-coated jams like “Black and White” still reverberate, quite possibly because they were the finest examples of pop genius that their Southeastern beatnik crew had to offer. R.E.M. ain’t got... read more
Found in: Music, ReviewsBeachwood Sparks: The Tarnished Gold
The four soft-rocking Californians of Sub Pop’s Beachwood Sparks have been credited with launching, if not quite creating, the early-aughts rise of easy-to-listen-to, easier-to-nap-to, alt-country West Coast crooner rock—the very same variety that artists like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver proceeded to popularize and then polarize. And since the release of 2002’s Make the Cowboy Roots Cry EP, they’ve mostly left it alone. But they haven’t left it behind: A decade later, The Tarnished Gold presents a comforting, if occasionally too comfortable, return to form. Ever-present are the looping choruses, lazy melodies and gentle, diluted vocals of Beachwood Sparks’ early... read more
Found in: Music, ReviewsMindy Smith: Mindy Smith
Mindy Smith’s music—at its best—is like a papercut: painful to the point of making you wince, yet somehow so compellingly bracing, you can’t stop pressing it. “Come To Jesus” is as riveting a song as anyone’s released this century, and it arrived with a little-girl voice in full throttle, grown woman breakdown/surrender. Not quite folk, left of country, sexier than Americana and shimmering with subtle dashes of jazz and Appalachia, Smith’s music has smeared genres and somehow seemed truer than purists in any of the above oeuvres. Perhaps it’s been her brutal truth and emotional rawness; maybe it’s the... read more
Found in: Music, Reviews
