‘Round Town
Posted by Cindy on June 8th, 2006
We are busy busy busy working on getting the site all gussied-up for it’s debut on Saturday, June 10th. However, Amanda and I are too excited to just sit in the technical room and not post some stuff. So we’ll post a little here and there between now and our baby’s big day.
In this week’s Dallas Oberver music section, I found a couple of my pal’s in print:
Darryl Smyers reviews my boys – Spector 45′s kick-ass (aaaaaw, my first “kick-ass” on the new site) recent release, We Wanna Go…
Spector 45 is a trio in their late teens who revel in the three-chord simplicity and silly, leather-clad fashion sense of the Ramones, but they add a menacing, shit-kicker’s mentality to the fast-paced proceedings…Read it all
Among other things, Sam Machkovech talks about darling Johnny Lloyd Rollins’ recent success across the pond in this week’s Odds & Ends:
…Truth be told, we ain’t never seen him live, as his home-recorded Let’s Be Poor Together never made a huge impression. Rollins doesn’t disagree: “You definitely have to see my live show. I played Bend Studio right before I left [for Liverpool], and people freaked out.” So we logged onto his MySpace page and found a short concert clip that, admittedly, is pretty damn good singer-songwriter stuff–the range and emotional delivery of Jeff Buckley without any annoying showiness…Read it all.
Merritt Martin writes a splendid piece on the oh-so-magnificant the pAper chAse…
The piano greets me before I even reach the main entrance to the Dallas apartment where I’m meeting the pAper chAse. I wait for the playing to pause before knocking…it’s just polite.
The greeting is appropriate–that very instrument symbolizes the thread of transformation, and even maturation, that the Dallas band (originally a trio, now a quintet) has undergone for close to a decade. Declarative and rambunctious bass and percussion remain a key part of the pAper chAse sound, but raucous, guitar-driven recordings beginning with 1999′s split EP Essays On: Frantic Desperation, Annihilation, and From Another Passerby have transitioned into “more keys, less axe” with each album, culminating in the band’s latest national release, Now You Are One of Us…Please do read it all
SaMach has been pretty instrumental (pun intended) in bringing some particularly amazing artists and bands to my attention…and while I disagree with a few bands he don’t like so much – I have always agreed with the bands he do like so much. Thanks to his decent taste in fine music, and a slight pulling of his weight as the editor of the D.O. music section, Sam managed to bring one talented young lady to The Cavern this Saturday night (June 10th)…
…But Reilly has won over wizened ears for good reason. On both Ghost and her 2003 debut Arc of Tessa, her light Tennessee accent adds a teaspoon of sugar to both her soft croon and her room-filling high notes, as if Dolly Parton sang in her sleep and occasionally wailed in terror at a nightmare. Her songwriting is a perfect match–sparse, bluesy lyrics wrap themes of loss and Southern cynicism in a sense of…well, not so much hope as it is confidence. Sadness may very well be inevitable (like in “Blackhearted,” when the protagonist tries to drown herself, only to find that the river isn’t deep enough), yet things eventually make sense in the end…Don’tcha wanna read the rest? Sure you do!
Join Sam and all the cool kids at The Cavern on Saturday for the gorgeous musical stylings of Megan Reilly, along with other greats, The Naptime Shake, Kim Pendleton’s THe BAcksliders, Chris Garver.
Doors at 6 PM (Upstairs) – $6.00 Cover – Music starts at 9 PM
Click here for all the rest, taking special note of “Playlist” and “Critics Pick” – dead-on this week…dead-on.
***Ed. Note – man I forgot how much I missed blockquotes…***