Now that the floodwaters have receded (mostly), and things have finally started to cool down (temporarily), we figured it was way past time to look backwards to happier days (again, mostly), namely to this past summer’s FPSF, back when we didn’t know who in the hell “Harvey” was, we weren’t all experts at ripping out drywall…
It’s been a few years, I know, but it felt like high time to get back to the sporadic Hear This Now thing we were doing for a little while there, pointing/listening to cool H-town bands we’ve been listening to lately…
I wasn’t sure how much I’d like Beast Epic, the new album by Iron & Wine, aka Sam Beam. I knew he’d softened a bit since the early days, gotten less gritty, less dark in general — and hey, I can’t fault him for that. You can only be dark and moody for so long…
“That’s funny,” my wife told me earlier this week, “I didn’t know you were an Afghan Whigs fan.” And at first, I was a little affronted. How could she not know that, after all these years? Except that, as I thought about it, I realized that I’d kind of set aside the Cincinnati band for quite a while…
Harrison Ford is an Action Bronson fan. No, seriously; granted, I’ve got no clue whether he likes Bronson’s music, but in a recent GQ interview (which you should absolutely read, by the way), the bullshit-hating, laconic actor apparently likes Fuck, That’s Delicious, Bronsons food-themed show…
John Mayer, on tour to promote his new album The Search For Everything, with newest single “Still Feel Like Your Man” on the radio right now, performed this past Sunday in The Woodlands, Texas, out at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. The multifaceted American singer songwriter, who’s best known for his Grammy Award-winning album…
It began with a screwup. On my part, mind you, nobody else’s. Before I get to that, though, there’re some things that need to be said about FPSF, aka The Festival Formerly Known As Free Press Summer Festival…
As previously mentioned, a few years ago SCR contacted Christian Kidd, frontman for The Hates and all-round Houston scene hero, about his recent memoir…
Earlier this spring, some truly devastating news broke that Christian Kidd, founder, singer, songwriter, and guitarist for The Hates, Houston’s longest-running punk band, a band that’s been around since the late ‘70s…
If I were to have to write up a list of the most absolutely intriguing bands to ever come from the Houston scene, well, it’d probably be a fairly long list, but also, Khruangbin would be up there near the top…
With FPSF 2017 less than a week away, it occurred to me that over the eight years this festival’s been alive and kicking, I’ve been fortunate enough to witness some really, truly awesome bands and musicians. So I thought it might be cool to trawl back through memories…
I’ve listened to and been a fan of the music Sergio Trevino and Haley Lynch (formerly Haley Barnes) have made in their own little realms for years now, he with roots-pop band Buxton and solo and she with delicate indie-pop outfit Dollie Barnes, rock band VODI, and solo, but until now…
Top-heavy grays find me through a patchwork of dew and concrete, waiting for the bus to school. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but anxiousness, the feeling that the weight of the world was always coming down to me, was real. Like a lot of kids (maybe?) growing up around my age, I found a special comfort in The Pixies‘ Surfer Rosa…
Opeth have divided their fans over the last few years by taking a musical approach that can barely be called metal, much less the brutal, technical death metal with which they made their name. Longtime fans seem to fall into one of two camps: some refuse to accept the new music because it’s “not Opeth”, while others think Michael Akerfeldt and company can do no wrong…
For a large chunk of my life, I would proudly declare to anybody who’d listen that I hated country music. I got downright righteous about it, honestly, for reasons that would probably only make sense to teenage wannabe music nerds with inflated senses of their own importance. And yeah, I’d imagine it was pretty freaking annoying…
One of the best things I can say about any album, and even more so for an EP, is that it felt like it went by too fast, that I wanted it to keep going. That’s where I am with Miears’ new Who Will Save You? EP; it’s alluring and lush and intense, and I just want to hear more of it, or at least the whole damn thing, over and over again….
Red Fang are a conundrum of a band, one that I love for seemingly totally diametrically opposed reasons. On the one hand, I love their over-the-top, raw, heavy-as-fuck, metal sensibilities, the kind that write songs to make you punch the roof of your beat-to-shit old car…
The Deerhunter concert was one I had been looking forward to since the last time I was able to see them in concert, which, unfortunately, was several years ago at SXSW — far too long. The evening began with Jock Gang, a band from Atlanta that I wasn’t familiar with, but their pounding noise-rock-meets-Velvet Underground sound grew on me as they played…
With their new, self-titled EP, down-low, funky/reggaeified pop trio Jerk has staked out some impressively new, (mostly) unexplored territory. The Houston-dwelling band starts off sounding like a kind of downtempo…
In an effort to get out of my comfort zone and expand my horizons (not to mention an effort to return to going to more shows, after a long break), when I received an email asking to review Syracuse, New York’s Ra Ra Riot…
I love Keeton Coffman. Until now, I’ve been unable to even start to explain why; there’s just something about the guy’s voice that works for me, pulling me along with the song. It helps that he’s got this Springsteenian delivery I dig, sure…
Things have changed a fair bit for Seattle band The Head and the Heart, these past few years. Most famously, frontman Josiah Johnson has been struggling with addiction, which means that while he wrote/co-wrote the songs on Signs of Light — particularly the title track, which closes out the album…
It’s been a long road for The Dandy Warhols. They’ve occupied a very specific niche, it seems like, over the course of their 20-plus-year career, standing at the intersection between psychedelic rock, Brit-influenced pop, and indie-rock, and despite being real-live adults these days…
I heard this too late by a month or so, it feels like; here in Houston, despite it still being too goddamn hot to willingly spend significant time outdoors, summer’s finally on its way out, giving way to what passes for “Autumn” in these parts (i.e., “chilly” temps most Northerners would snicker at, although I’d dare ’em to try to survive the heart of summer down here…). See, Ra Ra Riot’s Need Your Light is, at its core, a summer album, at least to these ears…
I went into Lucky Ones, the fourth album from The Crookes, with some trepidation. See, everything I’d heard or read about the Sheffield band focused on how singer George Waite’s voice seriously sounded just like Morrissey’s…and, to the unending horror of my wonderful, Morrissey-loving wife, I’ve never been a fan…
Once, there was a band called Featherface. They were awesome, an intense, thoughtful blast of fuzzy psych-pop goodness. They toured, played SXSW, moved up to Austin, made some trippy, strange videos, got some cool press, and then…poof, they were gone. Before what turned out to be their last-ever show…
From the moment the video for Frog Hair’s “My Best Foot Forward” begins, it is clear both in its immediate inspirations and the longer, deeper history it is part of. A lonely-looking mad scientist puppet weaves his perfect companion together, or attempts to, unaware that he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams…
I’ll confess to being pretty disappointed in recent years with punk rock in general. Maybe I’m showing my age, but seriously, most of what I’ve heard lately has left me pretty cold, to the point where I’ve wondered if it’s really worth listening to as much anymore. Then, as happens at times like these, the Universe steps in to tell me I’m wrong, and I’m being a moron…in this case, “the Universe” being Pennsylvania rock dudes Beach Slang…
First Thing #1: Apologies for my slowness in getting this online; as happens with the whole having-kids thing, summertime means not only Free Press Summer Festival, but also Vacation Time…
The Wheel Workers are a Houston mainstay, with three albums already under their belts since 2011 (and one on the way), but for anyone outside of Texas, they are criminally not as well-known, despite their obvious greatness. So how does a band go about getting the word out? They hit the road for a six-date tour…
First off, I’m very saddened to learn of FPSF attendee Megan Tilton‘s death. It makes reviews like this seem very trivial. I am praying for her family and hope they get to the bottom of the story of how she passed on…
In preparation for their appearance Sunday, June 5th, over at NRG Park for Free Press Summer Festival 2016, SCR sat down to throw some questions at Blake Miller, frontman of L.A. band Moving Units.
I didn’t get King Finn‘s music at first. I am a graybeard. Think: Van Halen posters and Flying V guitars. The oldest guy in this band was born after I’d crashed my first Mustang. So admittedly, this all begins with a little butt-sniffing, and finding common ground on what it means to be in a rock band in modern-day America…
Alright, so I definitely need to quit referring to — and thinking of, beyond that — Adam Bricks as a folksinger. Because with Relations, he’s pretty much taken that label and lit it on fire, smiling, and then roared on past its accepted boundaries like he’s trying to craft something completely different. And yes, that’s a very, very good thing. Best of all, I think he knows exactly what he’s doing…
“A Tale of Two Elvises” — that’s what keeps popping into my head, weirdly, as I listen to John Evans’ new album Polyester. And it does make sense, kind of, as the album rolls on. I’ll explain how in a minute, but at the root, it’s because, see, Polyester isn’t much like what I’ve heard from Evans…
I never thought I’d say it, but I’m at the point in the whole emo-revival thing where it’s the bands who aren’t truly “emo” anymore that are the most interesting to me. I’m talking about the ones who blend together the original emo/post-emo stuff with, hell, I dunno, folk or prog or barroom rock…
Well, damn. Welcome The Worms, the brand-damn-new full-length from L.A. trio Bleached — two members of which, sisters Jennifer and Jessica Clavin, you might remember from late-2000s band Mika Miko — grabbed tight to my skeptic self from the very first note of “Keep On Keepin’ On” and refused to let go ’til the very end of “Hollywood, We Did It All Wrong”…
Jon Read may not have been born in the sweaty, swampy, dirty depths of Houston, Texas, but the city fits him like a (tattered, weird-smelling) glove. There’s just something about that raw, ripped-open, messy, muddy sound Read’s crafted over the course of his 15 years or so of his musical career…
Frog Hair is JJ White (Drillbox Ignition, Dizzy Pilot) abusing a guitar, singing lead, and doing most of the songwriting. It was previously a two-piece (literally one guitar and one drum), and for their first demos, which recall the earliest, fuzziest Pixies…
Sometimes the process is as cool as the product. (Well, almost as cool, anyway.) That’s definitely how I’m feeling about singer/songwriter and sometime The Rebecca West frontwoman Cameron Dezen Hammon’s latest…
