I’ve found that since becoming a parent myself, stuff involving kids just breaks my heart, y’know? Not that I didn’t care at all before, but it seems to hit a heck of a lot closer to home now that I’ve got my own little person to watch over and worry about. I guess that’s kind […]
Yep, they finally pulled the trigger & did it — following a threat of lawsuit, H-town’s own The Dimes are now…dum-da-dee-dum…Young Mammals. Same band, they swear, just a different name. Not bad, not bad…
Well, at least they’re going out with a bang — you can’t really get more indie-hipster than the difficult-to-pin-down Fiery Furnaces, at least in my book. They’re a quirky, quirky bunch of people, whose latest release, Widow City, I’m still endeavoring to wrap my head around, honestly — it’s like ’70s rock gone totally freakin’ […]
Well, after last year’s ridiculously good bumper crop of local releases, I’d kind of wondered what 2008 would bring — I feared it’d be a quiet year, relatively, with everybody touring on past CDs & 7″s & such, and no new stuff out ’til later on. What the hell am I gonna do without new […]
I dunno whether it’s some weird alignment of the stars or the writers’ strike or what, but H-town shows have just been insane lately. Not that they’re not often good, of course, but that in recent weeks they’ve been stacked three deep each and every weekend night. Crazy… At any rate, tonight (Friday, Jan. 11th, […]
Yes, tonight, Thurs., January 10th, is officially the last-ever show at the 2610 Ashland St. home of Super Happy Fun Land before they pack it all up (and believe me, there’s a lot to pack) and move the whole mess over to 3801 Polk Street — they’re sliding languidly southwest-ward from the Heights and over […]
Awesome, awesome… This coming Friday, January 11th, at Walter’s on Washington, local old-school punk kids Something Fierce — who happen to be one of my absolute-favorite bands in town these days, honest — are heading out on tour (for the first time? not sure…) with fellow badass rockers The Monocles (whose debut 7″ is a […]
A little slow, I know, but what the hey — that’s how I roll, generally. Managed to drag my couch-sitting/munchkin-minding self out of the house this past Saturday, mostly because there was just too damn much Rock going on in H-town to ignore. I had a hard time deciding, considering that Thee Armada, Alkari, My […]
I mentioned a short while back that a little bird told me H-town punk heroes Latch Key Kids were back together, at least temporarily. And when I came back into town after the holiday madness, I had real-live confirmation awaiting me from LKK singer Tim Guerinot, who had this to say: Absolutely!!! We’re writing some […]
Yep, as always seems to happen this time of year, the shows scheduled are changing faster than yours truly can keep up with — a few shows slipped by me this last week, unfortunately (damn, that River Oaks Theater show sounded cool, too…), and didn’t even make the most recent Rundown, so I figured I’d […]
At the risk of being totally meta-referential by patting a guy on the back while he’s patting me on mine, I’d like to urge all & sundry to check out Ramon Medina‘s two-barrelled blast of year-end wrapping up over at both the Free Press Houston and Nonalignment Pact sites. I’ve been meaning to point to […]
Yearggh. I need sleep. But before I pass out, Dear Reader, I feel obligated to let you know what wonders await you this holiday season. ‘Cause boy howdy, is there a lot of it. So go on, ditch the parental units, lie and say your boss called you back in to work, whatever you have […]
Jee-sus ‘effin Kee-rist, it’s been a hell of a couple of weeks. Yours truly has been hammered by multiple deadlines in advance of the coming days off (all next week! woo!), and as a result I’m just now managing to climb out from under my work-imposed rock to discover, holy crap, there’s been a lot […]
It’s gonna be a good weekend, y’all. Why? Well, because starting tonight we’ve got the damn-cool-sounding Texas Gone Garage festival going on at Rudyard’s and Walter’s on Washington, with a couple dozen of the best garage-y bands around (some local, some not) gracing the stage and getting rowdy (okay, I’m guessing on that one). Not […]
Yep, it’s happening again, believe it or not — since their last reunion show last January went off like a bomb, H-town ska legends The Suspects have decided to, well, do it again. They’ll be playing at The Continental Club next Friday, December 21st, with The Aqua Velva & ’80s cover act Molly and the […]
It just seems like it’s been one thing after another lately, doesn’t it? Clubs closing down left and right (R.I.P., Cosmos Cafe, the most recent casualty that I’ve heard about), musicians passing away or getting injured (I’m sure everybody’s heard about Pimp C‘s untimely death — heck, it made the nightly news last night — […]
Ooh, cool. Spoke (okay, emailed) recently with JD, the mystery being behind the Secret Saturday Shows phenomenon — previously posted about here, and which is a better and better idea the more I think about it — and he let slip a few details about upcoming SSSes. No dates, mind you, but for players he […]
Seemingly in an effort to prove once more that Houston drummers just don’t freakin’ sleep, local drum god, Houston Press writer, and SCR contributor guy Danny Mee deserves a mention today both for his brand-new band Kvalla and for a brand new track, “Highway At Night”, up on the Myspace page of his “real” band, […]
Just a quick note to let you know that this next week’s installment of the Grey Ghost CD-R series is gonna be ever more supremely badass than it usually is — it’s reportedly one eleven-minute Hell’s Angels clusterfuck entitled “Hawg!”, by none other than the Linus Pauling Quartet, who thanks to their latest album All […]
Been meaning to mention this for a while now, but I wasn’t actually sure what the deal was — it’s a little hard to plug/describe, seeing as the participants are, well, pretty much anonymous (although ADR over at Skyline seems to know who’s gonna be playing from time to time, via his vast network of […]
Got an email the other day from SCR contributor Creg L., who happened to run into ex-Sprawl/-Middlefinger/etc. frontman Matt Kelly (who lives in Austin these days, I believe, or at least somewhere between H-town and there) at the Meat Puppets show a short while back. He got to talking to Matt and one of the […]
Ah, dammit. I’m surprised I haven’t seen something else about this ’til now (haven’t checked the Press blogs lately, though) — Matt Sonzala of the way-more-in-the-know-than-I H-town hip-hop blog HoustonSoReal, the Damage Control radio show on KPFT, and a metric ton of cool local rap shows posted last week that he is moving the whole […]
Argh. Sometimes, I really, truly hate the holidays, mostly ’cause they totally fuck with my schedule of Stuff I Really-Really-Really Want To Do/See/Hear/Etc. There’s always some Christmas party to go to, some office thing, some trip out of town, some pile of lights and ornaments to put up. It’s totally non-conducive to getting to do […]
Following a recent discussion over on the Hands Up board, I figured it’d be a good time to post this. Pretty much everybody in town who likes music knows KTRU, the Rice University radio station that lives at 91.7 FM — whether you love it or hate it (and people seem pretty much to fall […]
I sure do wish those sweet-singing popsters in Program played out more often — it seems like they hardly ever do, these days, which sucks for me, ’cause I’ve never been able to catch ’em live. In the meantime, I have to make do with stuff like the two videos below, recently posted on the […]
When the hell is it gonna end? It seems like this week’s been a nonstop roll of bad-bad-bad news for Houston’s music scene, and all of that pales in comparison to the news broken on the Free Press Houston blog yesterday evening that local music scenester/journo Rick Smith has passed away unexpectedly. Damn, man. I […]
What the hell is going on, people? I mean, I’ve known Houston’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it city since I first moved here, but lately it’s been a little ridiculous. On top of the news that The Proletariat is likely going to be knocked down to make way for the Richmond light rail, now the folks up at […]
What, is there some sort of karmic balance in the Houston music scene that must be maintained, else the universe slips off its axis and we all suddenly never existed? That’s really the only explanation I can come up with for this — we get the word that Cactus is coming back, only it’s followed […]
Y’know, I’d wondered what the heck had happened to Cameron Dezen (now “Cameron Dezen Hammon,” officially). She put out a truly brilliant solo album a year or three ago, Love + Rescue, and then…well, nada. The last time I even saw a show listed was the Houston Press Awards like 2 years ago, now. Anyway, […]
Yep, from the Holy-Fuckin’-Shit! File: much-revered, sadly-missed local music emporium Cactus Records has clawed its way out of its grave. I’d heard rumors that this might happen for a while now but was trying not to jinx it by putting too much stake in ’em, y’know? It almost sounded too good to be true. Now, […]
Props to Lomax over at HouStoned for this one — it turns out this year’s Peak Oil conference hit Houston last week, and author/anti-petroleum/anti-car guy James Howard Kunstler was there to finally sample all that Helltown has to offer. Now, I should state up front that I do agree with a heck of a lot […]
Crap. I really wish my Wednesday nights weren’t pretty much already spoken for, especially after finally checking out the tracks up on Say Hi’s Myspace page… The Prolo’s got a good one tomorrow evening (10/24, for the chronologically-impaired), one I’d highly recommend checking out. I was totally unfamiliar with Seattle-bred headliners Say Hi (formerly known […]
Yes, it’s true. Scenester/erst-and-again booking guy Bucky has decided that dangit, he just hasn’t done enough music-related crap in this here city, so now he’s opening his own record store, to boot, called On The Mouth. Not only is the new enterprise named after one of the best.damn.Superchunk.songs.EVER (okay, yeah, I love the OtM album, […]
Hey, folks — longtime readers (yes, the few, the not-so-proud, the downright embarrassed…) will have probably noticed that the Featured Bands section of the site has been woefully outdated for, oh, about three years now (at least). ‘Til recently, long-dead or moved-away folks like Middlefinger, Washington Westcott, & Panic In Detroit had been up there […]
Damn. I’ve been meaning to post about this for days now, seriously, ever since the beginning of the week… Today (Saturday, that is) is the very, very last-last day to buy the week’s installment of the Grey Ghost CD-R series, this ultra-super-limited edition (13 copies only) bunch of little EPs put out by Grey Ghost’s […]
Don’t worry, no long-term commitment or anything — I know how much people hate that crap. Just wanted to mention two little areas where good local scenester folks have asked for help recently & see if anybody’s down: First off, the ever-awesome Steven G. of punk heroes Something Fierce has sent out a call for […]
Ah, festivals. Those super-extra-multiple band extravaganzas that bring together young & old, fat & thin, cool & lame, true rockers & poseurs. Houston generally seems to have a fair crop scattered throughout the year, especially touring deals like Warped and local biggies like the International Festival, but it seems like this fall has brought on […]
Yeah, it might be a little sad, but this made my week — I honest-to-Yahweh thought Katy-dwelling pop-punk dorks The Phlegmatics had gone the way of the dodo ’til I ran across the band’s MySpace page (as far as I can tell, their “real” Website is toast). I’d seen the band once and only once […]
I think one of the best things about the whole Myspace thing, at least w/regards to bands & music, is that it brings me back to the experience of actively looking for new music that knocks me on my ass. When I was a kid I’d scour tape bins for that ultra-obscure band (mostly cheesy […]
No, not the city, but Houston Calling, the excellent, excellent blog by Envy Music Editor (and sometime SCR contributor) David Cobb has moved from its longstanding home over at donewaiting.com to its very, very own Web home at “www.houstoncalling.net”. Go check it out, and make sure you change your RSS feed stuff, too (like I […]
