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Once upon a time, a few years ago, there was an all-ages club run by Brian Skiffington and Rachel Keenan called the Frameshop in a suburb of Tacoma called Midland. About a year and few neighborhood complaints later, it closed down. Across town in University Place there was an all-ages club
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Pheasant is a band of contradictions: while their music is unabashedly joyful and fun, full of driving beats and irresistible hooks, there is an undercurrent of ... something. It sounds sometimes like anger, or maybe bitterness, or depressive resignation. The Portland band lavishes their tunes with horns, sing-along choruses and
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Two ardent supporters of the analog movement are touring up the West Coast, and will find their way to Olympia Friday. Calling their tour "Analog Resurgence," Rakehell and Go Pills are traveling with their salvation show, preaching the gospel of low-tech. Musically, they could reductively be described as pop-punk or New
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In the category of "things that should be totally silly but are actually awesome," a classic entry has to be East Star All Stars 2003 opus, Dub Side of the Moon. In the tradition of dub music, Easy Star All Stars covered an entire album in the style of reggae
Music
There was an Olympia-based emo-bending indie punk band in the early '90s called Lync. After sporadic recordings on K Records, and only one full-length release, Lync disbanded, leaving frontman Sam Jayne to find another project to pour his burgeoning talent into. Jayne's new solo project, Love As Laughter, emerged in 1996
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Hailing from Bozeman, Mont., Rose Gold make uniquely difficult music to anticipate or describe. What generally starts as sort of the fuzzy, meek alt-rock songs tend to descend into howling madness without much notice. Much of this is due to lead singer and bassist Birdie Bowie. Her voice has a
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No one ever accused the Night Beats of being a lazy band, and their most recent activity has been no different. With the release of their wild-eyed music video for their song, "The Seven Poison Wonders," off of their upcoming LP, Sonic Bloom, the psych-rockers have kept themselves very busy.
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There was an Olympia-based emo-bending indie punk band in the early '90s called Lync. After sporadic recordings on K Records, and only one full-length release, Lync disbanded, leaving frontman Sam Jayne to find another project to pour his burgeoning talent into. Jayne's new solo project, Love As Laughter, emerged in 1996
Music
The older I get, the less interest I have in music taking itself so seriously, or having other people chastise me for not always taking music seriously. On occasions when I've DJ'd, I always put on a mash-up of "Rockin' Robin" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to gauge the room.
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As much as I've always enjoyed the tone of bluegrass, I've tended to think that a lot of the bands in that genre more often than not sound very similar. There's not much distinction, I've found. While The Bottlecap Boys are planted firmly in the bluegrass niche - with some
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Without slipping into needless hyperbole, I'm just going to go ahead and say that the Cutwinkles are a Tacoma institution. Formed at the Tacoma School of the Arts about a decade ago, they established themselves as a genuinely unique entity in these parts. Armed with an unhealthy preoccupation with video
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The Vancouver, B.C., band's debut album, A Foot Was As Long As... A Foot!, is packed to the brim with odd ideas and unbridled energy. The songs whip by, with none of them even approaching the two-minute mark, riding high on punk rhythms and fiery accordion. "I'm stimulated by the absurdity
Music
In his song, "Cancer," Joe Jackson ran through a laundry list of all the minute things in life that eventually will end your life, from protein and caffeine to booze and nicotine, from working too hard to working too little, from watching television to even just smiling. His tongue-in-cheek point
Music
There's a record label based in Seattle called Iron Lung Records. Formed by the two-piece powerviolence band of the same name, Iron Lung Records has a simple credo: "We know what we like and we know what we don't like." After perusing the list of artists associated with the label,
Music
I know that I've talked about this before, but it honestly bears repeating until all of the mopes in the world get their stuff together: music, at its purest and most transportive, is about fun. Fun! Now, this is not to say that this energy can't be used to access
Guides
The first thing I do, after reaching Jeff Hamel on the phone, is to congratulate him and his band, SweetKiss Momma, for being voted best band in Tacoma by readers of the Weekly Volcano. "Thanks you very much," says Hamel. "The Best of Puyallup issue is what we were hoping for,
