Monday, September 27, 2010

Lou Reed & Garland Jeffreys



photos by Matt Shapiro


Thursday, September 23, 2010

Garland Jeffreys feature / Wall Street Journal

It's been a while since New York has had a chance to enjoy the music of Garland Jeffreys, a favorite son who was a regular presence here in the 1970s and '80s. The once-prolific songwriter hasn't released a record in more than a decade, and rarely performs in his home city, though he has played a number of European tours. Now, with a new album on the way, Mr. Jeffreys is set to perform Saturday at the Highline Ballroom with his band, the Coney Island Playboys. Appearances at benefit shows aside, it'll be his first New York show in three years.
(more at wsj.com)

Tickets for Saturday still available here.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Magma reviews / Rolling Stone & BrooklynVegan

Since its inception in 1969, the French progressive-rock ensemble Magma have made a curiously heavy music: a dark complex momentum in which the drums — played by leader-composer Christian Vander — are the forward instrument, often flanked by heavily fuzzed bass guitar and the hard watery ring of a Fender Rhodes piano, with an operatic chorale narrating, in a made-up language, extended fictions about the people and wars on the planet Kobaïa. Magma's rigorous, eccentric execution of Vander's continuing fantasia may be the least likely survivor of rock's Euro-prog peak in the early and late ‘70s. (more at rollingstone.com)

more photos and setlist on brooklynvegan.com

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Omar Rodriguez Lopez / MTV Iggy review...

The crowd that turned out for the sold-out Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group show at The Highline Ballroom in lower Manhattan was the kind that musicians dream about. Once Mexico City’s Le Butcherettes finished their opening set of starkly rudimentary garage rock, the dense crowd that had assembled crushed slowly ever closer to the stage and waited intently.
(continue at mtviggy.com)

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Download Escort's new single at villagevoice.com

So NYC disco non-revivalists Escort -- recall their Muppet-assisted clip for 2007's "All Through the Night" -- have returned with their own tense, swaggering version of "Cocaine Blues," putting their own spin on the long-mutating track by "making the groove harder, adding more hooks, fleshing out the production with horns and strings, and putting an aggressive vocal that gives the song immediacy," as member Eugene Cho explained to Nick Sylvester this week at thirteen.org, explaining both what's retro about their sound and what isn't. (No "bombs" in their set, for one thing.) The 12-inch is coming soon, but the free radio edit will certainly tide you over in the meantime. (download and more at villagevoice.com)

Tickets for September 24th available here.