Results tagged “punkrock”

"There's more people here than live in Chambersburg," marveled The Shackeltons' lead singer Mark Redding, who seemed to be hungry for the crown of the hardest working man in show business. He rolled on the floor, tripped over monitors, swung from speaker-support chains, waved branches, threw flowers, dumped a pot of water on his head, jumped into the Bumbershoot crowd, ran offstage to hug someone, stood on a suitcase, fell off it, answered a prop phone, blew kisses, walked into the audience, and kept up a surreal stream-of-consciousness commentary in which the people of Seattle figured largely as fish killers. The Shackeltons marry punk rock with heart-on-sleeve protestations of love's power to make us all feel alive. If Redding is an exemplar, there's no arguing the point.

prepared.

We hear the insults. Bloggers are no-names. We are malcontents. We live in our parents' basements, practicing onanism like Tiger Woods practices putting. Well we have news for you, blogger-haters. Laugh no more, because a man who has the earned respect of many for his political activism and musical genius is joining our growing club. Krist Novoselic has started a blog. This hero of the 1990s, a man who had the courage to throw his...

In January of this year, the Weekly's Brian J. Barr described local trio the Cave Singers as "an updated version of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Not the graduate-student, learned interpretations of folk music circa 1962, but folk music approached by way of punk rock. It's sparse, melodic, and simultaneously creepy and alluring, like the widow mourning graveside in Johnny Cash's 'Long Black Veil'." That was enough to get Matador Records interested, who signed the band in May and released their debut album Invitation Songs last month.

Seattlest spent this weekend visiting friends in Spokane. We know, we know. "Why, in God's name would you go to Spokane?" Trust us, we've heard it before.

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."

--Gaysuit isn't just what Seattlest puts on for a night on the town anymore. It's also a less than creative slug at the Times.

The first time we saw Kultur Shock, they were opening for Gogol Bordello at Neumo's, and we have to admit, we'd never heard of them. It was an all-ages show, so we were drinking our fill in the Bad Juju lounge next door, until the insane sounds of the band dragged us away from our beers. Quickly we came to regret missing the first half of their set.

Only Crime @ Studio Seven

As the world holds it's breath, teetering precariously on the cusp of the Super Bowl (well, at least in America), the wheels of the -ists keep on turning.

We wanted to get behind the direct action against Mars Hill because we too believe that Mark Driscoll is a woman-hating weirdo and it annoys us that he has such a huge congregation that seems to consider itself so punk rock. We kind of doubt that that they're particularly ill-informed on the issue of their pastor's attitudes towards women (uh, doesn't he speak directly to them every week?), but there's a chance that there are some hipsters in that crowd that legitimately don't know what's going on (always a safe assumption of hipsters) and if we can help get some people together to raise awareness of the brand of Christianity that's being practiced at Mars Hill, great.

Tuesday 17th

White Gold took to the stage and went right into it, playing their high energy dance punk to a low energy audience of not much more than fifty, most of which stayed seated in the blocked off bar area. Crowd banter was NOT going to work for them, with silence as the only response to calls for claps or the jokingly posed, "Anyone have a shaker?" The annoyance was obvious from the lead singer, who treated the show like a practice session, playing with very little passion, following the previous query with a monotone, "I want to die. Anyone have a noose?" We have to admit it has to be hard for a band that thrives on feedback from the crowd to perform to an empty house, but really, there's no reason to take out your frustrations on the people that did show up. That's just bad P.R.. Seattlest thinks White Gold could be a very fun band to see in a packed space and we'll give them another chance, but based on Sunday alone, we'd have to write them off as well...whiny bitches. (Later, the band gave away free copies of their CD as consolation. Nice move, but a more motivated performance would have been better.)

The Big Digits performance in front of an intimate gathering of elite strangers in the basement of somebody's house in the central district last February was one of the weirdest, most intense shows we've seen this year (TD Sidell really puts the "aerobics" in "punk rock aerobics"), and their "rap battle" with arch foes Cancer Rising last year is also impossible to forget, no matter how much KUBE 93 we expose ourselves to. Tonight's spectacle at the High Dive (9:30pm; $6) will hopefully live up to these inflated expectations. Trust Seattlest as we insist this is the most important live music option for you this weekend and go forth with your hopes raised.

Day one's been largely covered, so here Seattlest will just fill in some gaps, bullet-style, so we can try to catch the tail end of Dengue Fever's set.

Celebrate Ben Franklin's 300th birthday with the Bikini Bandits and Phillyist! (NSFW). Speaking of Mr. Franklin, send in a picture of Ben (or Ed Rendell) with a red tongue and win a free t-shirt. And they might have the next YearlyKos in Philly.

The Infernal Noise Brigade marched into the sunset for the final time recently, a fact which saddens us all. Something good has passed. The upside is that the former members of the INB are now free to pursue other projects and today WorldChanging gives us a look into what those might be. According to WorldChanging some of the Brigade are headed to the Midwest to particpate in the Miss Rockaway Armada.

In all the annals of music, it's hard to imagine anymore specific a genre than "gypsy punk." But that's just the sort of cabaret-esque insanity that Gogol Bordello brings to their shows.

The Boston-area rap duo Big Digits will make their triumphant return to our side of the hood Saturday, nearly one year after their victorious "rap battle in Seattle" (Get it? It rhymes...) whereby their west coast rivals Cancer Rising "got served" a rap-tastic smackdown that shamed Larry Mizell into hiding. But seriously: The show Big Digits put on last May at the Lo_Fi was one of the year's best performances, particularly for the insane, indescribable dance moves of former Punk Rock Aerobics genius T.D. Sidell (see photo above), endowed with a God like kinetic energy power that would make Bruce Lee look like Richard Simmons if Lee wasn't already dead.

Sure, sure you're all punk rock and hope that the troops will pull out of Iraq. Well, we say good for you, but you're not nearly as punk rock as Barbra Streisand. That's right--Babs' new song, Stranger in a Strange Land is a lovely anti-war number you might want to check out. Despite the fact that the war in Iraq has not been going to0 well, few mass-appeal musicians have released any actual protest songs, so wear your 'Prince of Tides' shirt with pride cause 'Yentl' is taking on the man.