Well, it may be only Thursday (March 23rd), but even still, there’s a ton of things going on, and one of said things looks especially cool. See, local photog/manager/music-lover/tastemaker Mark C. Austin will be celebrating his 40th birthday (young’uns, I swear…), and he’s doing it with a full-on party/charity concert tonight up at The Heights Theater…
Hey, there — it’s now Saturday, March 11th, and while the grand opening festivities that were planned for today over at the rechristened/remodeled Avenida Houston (i.e., the area of Downtown Houston around George R. Brown Convention Center) was postponed to a later date because of the weather, there’s still plenty going on…
Alright, y’all. We’re at the start of what promises to be a very busy not just weekend but full week (hell, almost two weeks), and yours truly is going to do his best to keep up with it, beginning with tonight, Friday, March 10th. And away we go…
So, this right here is a very, very cool thing. Everybody knows that if you have a band or play music solo or whatever, you need to have pictures of yourself, of some kind. Really, you do; as somebody who often has to use said pictures, trust me, you fucking need them…
Well, so I blew it for yesterday’s pile of cool shows, sadly — had a thing, and it ended up taking all damn day… But we’re back again for Sunday, February 19th, and lo and behold, there’s one show in particular that sounds like it’s worth checking out…
So, um…hi! I know, it’s been a while, and I feel like an ass about that — many times I had fully planned on posting about one show or another, but something would intervene (multiple illnesses, family emergencies, injured children), and said show would fall by the wayside. Hell, I didn’t even get to post anything about the Super Bowl madness that engulfed the city for the better part of three weeks…
Hey, all — long time, right? This new year of ours has been a little rough on yours truly, between frenzied work to meet post-holiday deadlines at the Day Job (and yes, said deadlines have since been moved, naturally), some personal family stuff, holiday recovery time, and the flu thing I’m still fighting right now…
I’m not an art guy. I tried to be, back when I was a kid, but it turned out I was pretty mediocre at it, so it fell by the wayside. And in terms of speaking about art, I’m largely clueless — I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary for that, in a lot of ways…
Hey, folks — back again with Part 2 of SCR‘s little rundown/preview things of as many randomly-selected musicians and bands performing this weekend —Saturday, December 17th & Sunday, December 18th — at Day for Night as we can cram in in the short time we’ve got left…
Okay, so we’re hard at work on our whole set of previews/rundowns for Day for Night, which starts up tonight, Friday, December 16th, with its VIP-only kick-off party and runs through Saturday & Sunday, December 17th & 18th, but we couldn’t let this slip completely by…
Alright, people — Day for Night is very, very nearly upon us, with only a day or two until it explodes into new venue Post HTX (aka the former Barbara Jordan Post Office in downtown Houston). And I’ll admit to having some mixed feelings about it; on the one hand, I’m psyched…
As we mentioned a short while back, this year’s Houston Press Music Awards are upon us. While I’m sure there was some whining and griping, as always, especially about the new, more free-form, less rigid categories…
Alright, folks — I had planned to post about this yesterday…and then there was that torrential downpour that hit most of the city last night, and, um, I was afraid I’d put up the post and then immediately have to say, “welp, sorry, it’s been canceled due to the weather.” So I chickened out, I’ll admit it…
Yes, it’s true — the list of nominees for this year’s Houston Press Music Awards has been released. Hang on…3, 2, 1, okay there we go — cue the complaints about the new format, gripes about deserving bands being overlooked, diatribes about how it’s all pointless anyway…
Once in the long-ago, this little Website used to be an even-littler actual print zine. I know, right? Paper — who the hell does that? (Kidding! Kind of…) But before that, even, there used to be little old me as a college student…
Y’know, after last year, I was afraid Something Wicked was done for; when they had to cancel due to the torrential downpour hitting the area, people were pissed…
Anybody can write a political song; conversely, very few people can write a good political song. For every Public Enemy or Billy Bragg out there, there’s a metric ton of flat-out terrible also-rans. And then, thankfully, there’s The Wheel Workers, who take political songwriting and graft it to smart, clever, earworm-packed pop…
And here we are, again, with the second of this weekend’s several festivals, this time way up north of town in Old Town Spring. It’s a brand new one called End Hip End It (the joke of which I just got), and unlike most of our local music festivals…
Dammit. This was supposed to get posted last night, but yours truly actually passed out on the couch and blew it — it’s been a long-ass week, I’m afraid. Sorry about that… But hey, you’re not completely out of luck, because Untapped Houston kicks off this afternoon at 4PM (3:30PM for VIP pass holders, I believe)…
This weekend, y’all — I mean, seriously. There’s so much going on that I’m having to split it up and skip a whole bunch of stuff…or else I’ll never have enough damn time to post about any of it. Not a bad problem to have, all things considered. So here’s what’s happening just tonight, Friday, October 14th…
So, did you realize Houston has a Thai soul-pop band? None of whom are from Thailand, mind you, as far as I’m aware, but Khruangbin have embraced the ’60s-era pop/funk stylings of that country, where bands took American and British pop music and filtered it through Thai culture to make it something strange and different and their own…
Alright, so this week I’m attempting to get this whole “cool shows coming up” thing done a bit early, in part because, well, I keep running out of time at the end of the week and partly because there’s some seriously awesome stuff happening mid-week. So here’s my attempt at Part 1 of your weekly rundown, with subsequent parts (hopefully) to follow…
So, if you fall off the horse, you’re supposed to pick yourself up and get back on it again, right? That’s what I’ve always heard, and it kinda-sorta feels like it applies to yours truly right now. I’d planned on doing all the weekend-rundown stuff last weekend…and then other things intervened, like me getting sick, and one of the kids getting sick. It happens; sorry about that…
Okey-dokey — back on this horse, sort of, and since I’ve already been running later than I’d like to be, I’m now at least trying to get ahead. It is one hell of a busy weekend, music-wise, and some of it we’ve already talked about, but there’s plenty more we’d recommend…
So. I stopped doing these little weekend-preview things a while back, because honestly, it was eating my life and giving me a nervous breakdown; I kept running out of time to do ’em, which meant I had to scramble, and that stressed me out, and y’know, other stuff needed to get done, right? Lately, though, I’ve been missing it…
There’s a hell of a lot of good stuff going on this weekend — and yeah, we’ll hopefully get to that soon — but this one stands out for me. It’s partly because the Steamboat Ampworks guys are good people and partly because, well, if money was no object, I’d already freaking own one…
Oh, man. I got a bit wrapped up in the countdown to Yes, Indeed! 2016 last week, so I let this one slip a bit, and that means that unless you’ve been sailing a raft across the ocean for seven or eight days now — or, alternately, hate music and/or joy, in which case I don’t have a clue how you’re reading this — you know that the organizers of Day for Night, FPSF‘s quasi-sister festival in the winter months, released the official lineup…
Alright, so it’s not a show, but it’s damn cool anyway. Tonight, Monday, September 19th, the good people of WIRED UP — modern conveniences (one of whom is Bucky Thuerwachter, who you might remember fondly from the Hands Up Houston days, among other things) will be hosting a pre-release/listening party for excellent, excellent Philly dudes Beach Slang…
Back again, as promised, for Round Three (aka The Final Round) of SCR‘s happy little preview/writeup things for Yes, Indeed! Music Fest 2016, which will be unfurling tomorrow, September 17th, over on the eastern fringe of downtown. 25 damn cool bands/musicians, from here and elsewhere, will be doing their thing at four stages…
Alright, and here we are again, with Round Two of our little writeups for this Saturday‘s (September 17th, for the calendar-less) Yes, Indeed! Music Festival, slated to explode into the area east of Downtown, right around Warehouse Live, wedged in between the George R. Brown Convention Center and the BBVA Compass Stadium…
Yes, friends, neighbors, Houstonianites, it’s just about time again for the “other” half of the bi-annual music festival extravaganza that’s known either as the Yes, Indeed! Music Festival or Madness on Main Street, both put on by super-organized people Jason Smith and Phil “Bassman Pep” Peterson…
Well, the weather is looking like crap where I am, but hopefully not over at Discovery Green, because tonight (Tuesday, September 13th) the Green will be hosting a very cool-sounding event, one that I think would be pretty fascinating to see and hear. (At the latest check, this is on, rain or no rain, but I’d bring an umbrella, myself…)
I know I’ve been missing a ton of great shows lately, but dammit, I can’t let this one slip by without a mention. Keeton Coffman, who the longer-memory-having folks among you might remember as the frontman of gone-too-soon band The 71’s, is my absolute favorite guy singer/songwriter in town these days…
So, it looks like Arthur Yoria has come back home to Houston, and oh, man, am I glad to see it. The last I’d heard from Arthur, back in 2010, he was moving up to Brooklyn to try out his sweet-voiced, sometimes stoner-like pop songwriting chops on the hipsters that dwell there…
I don’t get out much these days; it’s a sad, sad truth of my near-suburban Soccer-/Theater-/Cub Scout-Dad existence. When I see a show coming up, even one that sounds truly, truly awesome, my immediate, instinctual response is, “ah, fuck, I’m too damn tired, it’s gonna be too far away, too late a night; I should just stay home and watch TV or read.” So, in a lot of cases, that’s exactly what I do…
Hey, folks — I just wanted to poke my head up briefly to mention a couple of SCR-related things that have been going on behind-the-scenes, to let everybody know in case they themselves have run into ’em. First off, the website was hacked over the weekend, which meant that yours truly got to spend his birthday evening frantically installing WordPress security plugins and trawling through files to look for bogus code. Argh…
I’ve gotta be honest: I was skeptical that White Oak Music Hall, the new purpose-built venue for local music-promotion icons Pegstar, was ever going to really materialize. Ever since the new venue was announced a little over a year ago…
I don’t know his name. He was just a random fat guy in an extra, extra, extra large t-shirt that read “Clinton Lewinsky 2016” and had some crude carnal phrase in smaller print below that. He was wearing a Donald Trump baseball cap that may have said “make America great again”…
And here we are, the day before Free Press Summer Festival 2016 truly kicks off (Sat., June 4th, & Sun., June 5th, over at the mercilessly flat, heat-reflecting NRG Park Yellow Lot), back with another (and probably final) pile of previews…
Hey, all — sorry for the delay on Round Two of the preview-y-type things for this year’s Free Press Summer Festival, but I was knocked down flat the past 24 hours with a nasty (and hopefully quick) bout of the flu. While I’m feeling somewhat better now, I don’t remember much from about 9PM yesterday to 5PM today…
