I don’t care if you call it “melodic punk,” “post-hardcore,” or “emo,” whatever; the music San Bernadino band Forever Came Calling makes on its debut full-length is flat-out great, great, great, awesomely melodic, beautiful-yet-fiery rock that doesn’t stroll…
Bikram yoga and comic books come together in Gayby, a movie about Jenn (Jenn Harris), a thirty-something yoga instructor who decides that single life isn’t enough and asks her gay best friend Matt…
The Asia Society Texas partners with Q-Fest to present “Focus on Asia,” two documentary films that examine the notions of gender and identity within Asian cultures. The presentation begins with Wariazone…
Last year, Beauty was submitted as South Africa’s entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 84th Academy Awards. It’s easy to see why, as Oliver Hermanus, wearing the hats of both director and writer…
I usually do these interviews by email, but when Craig Kinsey of the Sideshow Tramps invited me over to talk in person, it was a hard assignment to resist. For several years now, I’ve been wondering how Craig Kinsey and his Sideshow Tramps…
Q-Fest kicks off at Museum of Fine Arts Houston Thursday night when the Southwest Alternative Media Project partners to bring award winning director Thom Fitzgerald‘s third feature Cloudburst to town…
Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) kills people. For $20,000, he will take care of any problem you have, permanently. That is, when he’s not tied by his day job as Dallas homicide detective. And that’s the good news…
My first introduction to St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) was her album Actor, which I admittedly enjoyed a bit too much. I only can say now that I enjoyed it a bit too much, mind you, because after hearing Strange Mercy…
I think what I’m liking most about From Beyond One Year EP is that while it is heavy, make no mistake about it, it’s not too heavy; it’s just the right amount of stomping, crushing thunder so that it doesn’t get dragged down…
I’m honestly kicking myself now for not listening to this sooner. College Station band The Ex-Optimists have been on repeat in my headphones for a while now, drowning me in a turbulent squall of Sonic Youth guitars, driving ’90s indie-drone-rock melodies…
For all the layers of sound on Bang Bangz’s debut EP, there’s a quiet, somber darkness that’s worked through the whole thing, from start to finish. Simply put, it’s a “night” album, but it’s not a “whoo, I spent all night partying with my bros” album…
These days, it’s getting hard to throw a rock in this city without hitting a roots-rock/indie-folk-country band, and while it’s true that a large number of ’em are good, it can be tempting to get jaded and cynical each time a new one comes along…
B L A C K I E — that’s all caps, no spaces — seems like the type of musician who doesn’t want you to hear his music. It almost seems as if the first track on GEN, “Gen I,” is a test to see if you can make it to the rest of the songs…
I’ve been listening to a whole heck of a lot more techno music lately, and it definitely hasn’t been on purpose. I keep getting these bands that have songs with those modern disco beats in the background, but yet they sound like an indie-rock band…
Grace — that’s what it is, I think. There’s this weird, serene feeling I get whenever I listen to The Eastern Sea, this strange calmness that rolls over me like a wave (appropriately enough), leaving me drifting along, pulled by the music…
When I first heard Dead Sara, I didn’t know exactly what to make of the band. I knew that they had a quality of rock that made them sound like a harder version of Melissa Etheridge. That was as far as I got in my ideas, and then something very simple…
This is not the Steve Jobs you remember from the keynote speeches at product unveilings. This is Steve Jobs in exile like Napoleon or Machiavelli, patiently planning his triumphant return. Here he is not the master of the universe…
Normally, a ground-up reboot would be seen as a mixed bag. It means that your series has gotten off-track somewhere and needs to be brought back to its roots. Or that the filmmakers have completely run out of ideas and instead have chosen to go back…
I had been hearing about Venomous Maximus for a couple years. From the name, I’d expected an all-out blitz of Slayer-type metal, a type of music that I have no interest in whatsoever. However, when they shared the Bryan/College Station Loudfest…
More than anything else, on Summer Us, Jody Seabody and The Whirls feel like a band out of time. Sure, the trappings of more straightforward, radio-friendly alternarock are in there, definitely — especially in the opening tracks of the album…
Okay, so this feels a little strange. Back in the spring of 2011, I reviewed an album called Unite, by a band called The Wheel Workers that I’d never heard of before but which had seemingly popped, fully-formed, onto the scene…
If the only role Channing Tatum is capable of bringing anything like charisma, humanism, and likeability to is that of an aging male stripper, we still get a good movie out of it with Magic Mike, and that’s almost worth all…
It’s been a little while since I’ve run across The Wild Moccasins. I dearly loved 2010’s Skin Collision Past, but I’ve been sorely missing them in the intervening couple of years, not even managing to catch the band live at Summerfest this year…
You’ve got to love a band (and EP) that makes its mission statement clear right from the word “go.” Weird Party’s new 7″ EP, The Secret Lives of Men, does just that, blowing the quasi-artiness of the title apart with an introductory frenzied…
The musical landscape continues to evolve as genre-blurring artists ply their trade in a valiant attempt to create the next big thing. Terms like baroque-folk, moombaton, chillwave, and the ubiquitous and often hollow “indie-rock” have all worked their way…
Having heard nearly everything recorded by The White Stripes, I was more than a little bit intrigued as to what a Jack White solo album would sound like. The majority of solo albums that I can think of (not naming names) sound mostly like the way the band…
Very often there is a fine line between making jokes and being a joke. Van Halen does not concern themselves with that line. That’s something I’ve always appreciated about the joy with which they approach their show…
Leave it to the Linus Pauling Quartet to come up with something like this, seriously: a monolithic, fuzz-drenched, utterly badass chunk of headbanging stoner-psych-rock all about Cimmerian gods, post-Apocalyptic wastelands, playing D&D, and (of course) somebody else smoking all your pot. If you think I’m kidding, well, you’ve probably never heard the LP4 before…
By Sunday, I felt like I was a pro at getting around on the Free Press Summer Fest grounds. The festival organizers were also getting better at knowing what they needed to change…
In the modern American cinematic garden, annual harvests continue to grow ever more bountiful. The Soderbergh and Aronofsky trees, well-rooted and stoic, perpetually plop ripe fruit from their branches. One tends to enjoy a lazy stroll down…
I can’t recall the last time I saw Say Anything live — it must’ve been at least three years ago, maybe more — but I finally got to see them again in April, the first time since then, and let me tell you, they put on a heck of a show…
With three EPs under their collective belts, The Manichean boys — Cory Sinclair, Justice Tirapelli-Jamail, and their capable entourage of musicians — are not the young upstarts that I met three years ago…
There once was a band called Black Flag. This band had an original vocalist named Keith Morris, who would later go on to form Circle Jerks, whilst Black Flag would become more known as being a vehicle for Henry Rollins. Then a bunch of time passed, as it always seems to do, and Keith Morris came out with this band called OFF!. When I was growing up, I didn’t know a whole lot about hardcore punk. I guess in some ways I knew what it was, but didn’t, really…
I didn’t really enjoy the Free Press Summerfest… I devoured it. When I go to a concert with my wife, I try to enjoy myself, take it slow, kick back and relax, but by myself…
I’d always wondered what happened to the guys from once-iconic, ultra-political Houston hardcore band Die Young (er, sorry — Die Young (TX), that is; I completely forgot about that idiotic lawsuit). They were one of those bands that I always meant to…
Miike Snow is not what you think he is (er, they are; sorry). To call the band “poptronica” would be the most accurate genre to pigeonhole them in, but the music they make is not that simple. In ways, the sound reminds me of Peter Gabriel or…
This was the fourth installment of an exhilarating, up-and-coming summertime weekend music festival in the fair city of Houston, thrown by the preeminent local events and entertainment rag of the same name, the Free Press. In its first year, the Free Press Summer Fest featured Broken Social Scene as one of the headliners. Don’t get me wrong…
With Gasconader, the guys in Denver band Flashbulb Fires have seemingly abandoned their previous orchestral indie-rock tendencies aside in favor of sweet, sweet, candy-lush indie-pop that floats and bounces along through the ether…
At this point the history of music, cross-pollination between the U.S. and the U.K. is nothing new; hell, it’s been going on pretty much since that first baker’s dozen of colonies split off from The Old Country way, way back when…
I was first introduced to Kimbra the same way that I assume most people were. One night, my wife turned to me and asked me if I had heard the song “Somebody that I Used to Know” by Gotye on the radio with her. I gave her a confused look and said I was pretty sure I would have remembered…
