Arts
In the third-grade, the students in my class were instructed to get each and every classmate a Valentine's Day card - usually something with Batman and Robin or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it, along with a little pun. Nothing too intense. After all of the cards were distributed
Music
The first time I saw Poppet, it was a complete surprise. All I knew about her was that the wonderful Tender Forever had chosen to share a stage with her at The New Frontier Lounge, and that was enough of a seal of approval for me. I headed down to
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Poppet, AKA Molly Raney, is a hard act to do any justice in describing. Just one woman, a keyboard and a looping pedal, yet it amounts to so much more than the sum of its parts. Clad in a spandex green onesie, Raney commands the stage with inventive melodies and
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I've written several times before about People Under the Sun, but here's the deal for the uninitiated: beyond being reliably catchy providers of psychedelic synth-rock, People Under the Sun are perhaps the Tacoma music scene's most committed aesthetes. Not content to simply call it a day at paying homage to
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When Levels make music, they do not fuck around. With compositions tight as a drum and volume knobs dialed in to "internal-organ-jostling," Levels approach a purity of alt-rock purpose that nears elegance. Even with the guitar onslaught, Levels never come close to anthemic. Sounding something like the fuzzy baby of
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In case you've been rightly avoiding entertainment news over the past month, LaBeouf has been embroiled in a controversy that began with him completely plagiarizing a Daniel Clowes comic called Justin M. Damiano for a short film he directed. Predictably, LaBeouf was immediately found out once he put the film
Music
In the fall of 2012, I was given a tour through the cavernous insides of the old Tacoma Post Office building downtown. You know the one: weathered and storied, hunkered down on A Street, still with a functioning Post Office on the main floor, but with several other floors that
Music
The past few years have been exciting ones for certain graduates of the Tacoma School of the Arts: members of a SOTA music collective called Dear Records. Alumni of Dear Records include Brad Oberhofer (of Oberhofer, you know?), Molly Hamilton (of Pitchfork-approved Widowspeak), Colin Scott Reynolds (I Low, Watermelon Sugar,
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The past few years have been exciting ones for certain graduates of the Tacoma School of the Arts: members of a SOTA music collective called Dear Records. Alumni of Dear Records include Brad Oberhofer (of Oberhofer, you know?), Molly Hamilton (of Pitchfork-approved Widowspeak), Colin Scott Reynolds (I Low, Watermelon Sugar,
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San Francisco trio Balms do shoegaze right. Their songs are positively drenched with murk - the sort of cloudy texture that'd make you just a little more buoyant if you found yourself swimming in the stuff. The vocals trail off and bleed into one another, punctuated by the occasional angular
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Last November, La Luz were driving along in their tour van when they hit a patch of black ice that sent them skidding into a concrete block. While waiting for AAA to come, a semi-truck came barreling into their van. It was a terrifying and destructive blip in the middle
Music
From the outside, nothing much seems to have changed about the world famous Bob's Java Jive. Still a dingy kettle nestled on South Tacoma Way, still the place where junkie William Hurt and junkier Keanu Reeves were hired to kill a man in I Love You To Death (seriously, go
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On a recent re-watching of the great Band documentary, The Last Waltz, I was once again struck by the sheer awkwardness of that final performance. As all of the film's guest stars come back on to perform "I Shall Be Released" together, what they end up creating is a gangly
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Few things tend to evoke more viscerally polarized reactions in music lovers than this series of words: "they're like a progressive jazz-fusion band." At that point, you absolutely know whether you're in or out. All of those obnoxious people who claim to be into "all kinds of music" - throw
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Bob's Java Jive hasn't always had the easiest time existing as a worthwhile place to go and see music. In the past few years, shows had begun to dwindle - so much so that, as a music columnist, I would give up for months at paying attention to the Jive's
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The life and career of folk singer Judy Collins is almost too storied to get into without resorting to bullet points: her rise through the ranks of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early '60s; her discovering of Leonard Cohen (which led to her making the
