LOCAL LIT: Tired of living la vida loca after pride weekend? Sick of the sun and the heat? Want to retreat back into your dark, shade-drawn house and dream of the rain? Of course not, which is why it's so hard to recommend you spend your Monday at a literary reading. Still, local author and medical expert Carol Casella has a reading tonight down at Elliott Bay Books, for her debut novel Oxygen. Casella, a......

If you've been monitoring the lives of "Awesome" lately as we have, you know these things: 1. They've been spending time in the studio with Jon Auer, recording a song called "I'm on T.V." for Puppet Entertainment Television (Strangercrombie auction winners). 2. Evan's nose has a furry new friend. 3. Evan (and his nose) and melodica player (amongst other things) John Ackermann had birthdays recently! Which brings us to tonight's show. It's a birthday party!......

Ah, those crazy Frenchies, at it again. This time, they're going to pull off a robbery. The gang that couldn't shoot straight, but with accents, The Band of Outsiders. The cute gal is Anna Karina, her boyfriends are Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, and the director is the embodiment of French cinema's nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Ah, callow youth! Squandering your time in darkened cinemas, what good will ever come of it? Invest that time......

We're as guilty as anyone else when it comes to not knowing that Nada Surf has been living a second life of sorts -- a new life, all their own, long after "Popular," the satirical high-school anthem that ruled MTV circa 1996. Nada Surf has spent the past decade recording, touring and reestablishing themselves with the North American Audience. It's a cool story, we think and not one you often hear. Band gets major label......

When your band's roster (Gonzalez on trumpet and congas; Andy Gonzalez, bass; Larry Willis, piano; Steve Berrios, drums; Joe Ford, sax/flute) has been in place since 1990, you have time to develop the musical telepathy that makes jazz jazz. And when that telepathy communicates both the bebop-and-beyond mainstream and Puerto Rican popular music (via the Bronx), you have an unusually savory mix. We first heard the Fort Apache Band on a very early (1988)......

Last summer (ah, summer!) we drove down to Portland for their annual Pickathon Roots Music Festival, where we found ourselves exposed to all manner of folkies from Portland and beyond. One of the bands that stole the weekend for us was from Indiana, of all godforsaken places. On Saturday night, Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band played a show in the barn that seriously blew our mind. Joined by Seattleite Jason Webley, they just played......

The only thing more sad and lame than a cover band is a tribute band. (Usually.) Well, even worse is a tribute band that plays the music of an another band that still exists. No, wait—a tribute band that plays songs from a one-off band’s one-off album … whose members live on. That’s truly scraping the musical barrel-bottom. Okay, okay. Worser yet is a national tour of three tribute bands that run this lamentable......

This weekend's highlight for Geoff will be a Brewer's Dinner at The Collins Pub held by Hair of the Dog Brewery from Portland. 6 courses paired with 6 beers, plus a few special releases to boot. As a Bears and now semi-Seahawks fan, he'll be hoping that Brett Favre breaks a hip during Saturday's Seahawks game at Lambeau Field. Aside from the glamorous task of replacing the gutters on his house, Jack's weekend pretty much......

We've been hitting shows on the Seattle music scene for about four years now, and if there's one thing we can say with certainty, it's that Seattle doesn't need more musicians, it needs better ones. Such may be the consolation of learning that next week, the Seattle chapter of Paul Green's School of Rock opens. If Green's now famous "school" can help create a new generation of musicians whose influences go deeper than Green Day,......

Redmond native and actual Guitar Hero Carrie Brownstein did some work on the advertising of the game Rock Band. You might have seen these commercials; four rocker-lookin types sit around and cut on each other in the jaded and weary fashion of musicians on the road. That's not her work, thank god. She was on a different team pushing a different concept. Anyway, she's got an article up at Slate today about her experiences with......

Above is a six-minute sampling of Melbourne-based noise quartet The Drones and their not-easily-classified dirty blues/swamp rock sound. Wikipedia makes a valiant effort, in describing the band as "The Birthday Party kick the shit out of Neil Young in Hendrix's garage." That's a start. There's a helluva lot more sound and fury where that came from, specifically when they open for used-to-be-local Band of Horses on their two-night stand at the Showbox next week......

Melbourne-based quartet The Drones are a little bit country, a little bit blues, and a lotta bit rock 'n' roll. And check it out, they've got one of the most eclectic list of influences we've ever seen: Van Morrison or Dylan or Suicide or Bad Brains or Nina Simone or Black Flag or the Scientists or Ornette Coleman or Thelonius Monk or (australian)X or Townes Van Zandt or John Lee Hooker or Karen Dalton......

After kittens yawning and cross-species friendship, dear sweet Jens Lekman may be the most precious thing found in all of nature. The Gothenberg Swede makes orchestral pop songs in the vein of Morrissey or the Magnetic Fields without even being gay (just European). To promote Night Falls Over Kortedala, one of the best reviewed albums of the year, Jens has been touring around the States with his almost-all-girl backing band: For the 10/23-11/10 leg......

If you’re gonna make an album with orchestral arrangements care of living legend composer Van Dyke Parks, you’re gonna have to go all out to perform it right. That’s why the first half of super English major/elven queen Joanna Newsom’s grandiose show last night at Benaroya Hall featured the accompaniment of local 29-piece chamber orchestra the Northwest Sinfonia to cover her last full-length, the epic five-song masterpiece Ys ("ees"). It’s not hard to recreate......

Katelyn Hackett attends local hiphop shows. She will write about them for Seattlest. Another gleeful, sharp, and passionate local hiphop show came and went Sunday night at Neumos, and chances are high that you weren't there. Chances are high, actually, that you didn't even know it was happening. Seattlest heard about the show through our perusal of trusty MySpace bulletins; if we weren't already such devoted fans we could have easily spent the evening with......

In a few seasons, Seattle indie stalwart Sub Pop will shed its adolescent husk and turn 20. Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the dudes who put Soundgarden and Nirvana in bins before major label reps stormed Seattle, will, according to this bio, celebrate "as conspicuously as they can manage." As well they should. They were the fuse to said bands’ (and others’) genre-birthing TNT, after all. And though maybe not as globally revered since the......

he 1960 Huskies, who will be honored en masse Saturday when the Dawgs play #1 USC, lost only one game and beat #1 Minnesota in the Rose Bowl, the only time the UW's beaten a #1 team. Husky historian W. Thomas Porter recently finished a book about that 1960 team, A Football Band of Brothers: Forging the University of Washington's First National Championship. It's quite a tale--Husky coach Jim Owens, who'd coached under legendary taskmaster......

Well, shit. This weekend has been kind of a bust for shows Seattlest was supposed to see. Friday night, we were supposed to go see Hillstomp at Conor Byrne. We thought we had seen them, and we thought they rocked our socks. Apparently, we saw Miss Mamie Lavona the Exotic Mulatta and Her White Boy Band. Last night, we drove on over to West Seattle to the Skylark to check out Mishka Shubaly. This one......

The Tallboys are only Seattle's finest old-timey group, and the Flat Mountain Girls are coming up to represent Portland. Get on out and help the former celebrate the release of their fabulous new CD, Rubber Dolly. The album is packed with pretty much everything you'd expect from the band: kicking fiddle tunes, tight banjo solos, sad and fun songs with which you can sing along, and a good dose of clogging. The Tallboys, with......

Big Sonics fan Dave Dederer of the Presidents expresses a rather Emmett Watson-esque opinion in an interview with ESPN's True Hoop. Asked what he thinks would be a fair arena deal for the Sonics, Dederer says:Our major sports franchises need the city and county much more than we need them. Frankly, my fantasy is that the Sonics, Seahawks and Mariners all move away and we're left with Husky football and a AAA baseball club.......

Friday night, as planned, we drove up to Bellingham for the 6th Annual Subdued Stringband Jamboree--something we've never experienced before, and about which we were somewhat excited. Having spent last weekend revelling in the Americana down in Portland, maybe our expectations were a little high. To be fair, the Jamboree itself wasn't bad. By the time we cut through the traffic and filled our bellies, we managed to see three artists, and two of......

Remember the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the album that made the band—and the word "grunge"—a household name? A naked baby, swimming blithely in pristine water, reaches for a dollar bill—a dollar bill that's on a large fish hook. The image is memorable for its ironic, dangerous, clear message. Courtney Love didn't catch the meaning. Director AJ Schnack does. Love reportedly made $50 million selling 25% of Nirvana's song catalog in 2006. More recently, she......

Fate, karma, kismet -- call it what you will but the week before A Fine Frenzy came to town a friend in Switzerland sent us a YouTube video of her song "Rangers." We listened, found the album, and two days later noticed she was coming to town that Sunday. Here is the video, just so you can follow along: (And here is YouTube's A Fine Frenzy catalog.) What we didn't know at the time was......

While you are now officially unable to see Hootie and the Blowfish this weekend in Roslyn, WA (get well soon, Hoots), next week offers a great show at the High Dive. And it's on a Wednesday night, so you don't have to contend with the mongrel hordes and/or white-capped frat boys that inhabit the Fremont environs every weekend. Magic Bullets formed in San Francisco a couple years ago, and the sextet's first album a......

MUSICAL REVIEW: Tonight Seattlest Matt is checking out what was the longest-running musical review in the history of Broadway, Smokey Joe's Café. A hit-list from the '50s and '60s of songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, it opens tonight and runs through June 17th. We can almost hear the K-TEL announcer: Featuring 40 of the greatest songs ever recorded, including such hits as "On Broadway," "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock," "Stand By Me," "Spanish Harlem,"......

Apparently, there's some other annual festival this weekend besides Sasquatch. That's right, Memorial Day also hearkens the return of Folklife, Seattle's hippiest fest, held every year at Seattle Center. Local singer-songwriter/friend of Seattlest Ali Marcus will be playing the festival (Sunday, 4pm at Cafe Impromptu in McCaw Hall), so we turned to her for an expert opinion on what's worth your time this weekend, besides hackysack and drum circle. Seattlest Kim's already given you......

Yes, we're Folklife enthusiasts. Where else can you get a funnel cake, a hip-hop spitfest, a latin dance party, and a contest for liars, all in one place? We quoted Prince in the headline because we wouldn't be surprised if he showed up at Folklife this year. There is so much shit going on this weekend, and you don't have to drive all the way to the silly Gorge and pay through your nose......

Seattlest, it must be admitted, is not always ahead of the zeitgeist. We (or at least this author) only ever got around to reading Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life in like 2004. Thus hyped for the good old days of the real underground, we were inspired to go see Dinosaur Jr. a couple months later when, reunited, they stopped by the Showbox. Now, we must admit to never having really listened......

THEATER: Hey, don't tell anyone, because this could really upset the natural order of things in town, but SPF:1 - No Protection is dangerously close to a fringe theater festival. Performing tonight are Keith Hitchcock, Mary Purdy, Jonah Von Spreecken all of Seattle. 7:30pm // Theater Off Jackson // $15 MOVIE: Fanboys have already crowned this CGI behemoth the greatest thing ever to play on a hundred billion screens this week. Is it too cliche......

There' a constant ebb and flow when it comes to the music we love. Sometimes it seems like there's just nothing interesting out there. Nothing to light us up when we listen at home, in our car or on the bus, eyes closed. And then sometimes we find ourselves hauling fist-fulls of new music to the counter of our favorite record store. This week we've been all about Aqueduct's Or Give Me Death, Jesse Sykes......