Everyone is Dirty Brusque grunge-pop recorded in an anonymous California basement, Everyone is Dirty is fronted by the charismatic Sivan Gur-Arieh on vocals and violin, a welcome addition to the terrific grime-rock. The burrowing and billowing blowback guitar riffs paired with the sweet stings of Gur-Arieh and driving simplistic percussion is a new twist on […]
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Out of Town 12/3-12/11
portland friday 5 Holiday Spectacular: Portland Cello Project and Ural Thomas & the Pain The Portland Cello Project has more soul than the average string group, and a reputation for transforming pop music with its evocative covers. But the group takes its genre-transcendence to the next level in its Holiday Spectacular with Ural Thomas—the 70-something […]
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A Very Mariachi Christmas
Forget the Mexican hat dance
For most of us not regularly exposed to traditional Mexican music, the mariachi genre recalls little more than quick strumming, stacked harmonies and abundant horns and, of course, those lovely elaborate and colorful cowboy suits. But Jóse Hernàndez, bandleader of Mariachi Sol de México—a group he founded in 1981 at just 23-years-old in Los Angeles—explained […]
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Romeo, Oscar, Charlie, Kilo
Tango Alpha Tango goes live
Portland foursome Tango Alpha Tango’s strengths lay in the details of its ripping blues rock. Unfettered guitar solos burst out of the script of songs like The Incredible Hulk punching through a solid brick wall. Nathan Trueb’s dirty vocals land somewhere between Lou Reed and Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show, both measured and […]
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Source Suggests 12/3-12/11
Hot Buttered Rum Your first December dose of progressive bluegrass, Hot Buttered Rum, returns to the Belfry with twang-laden country-bluegrass arrangements strapped with wholesome three-part harmonies. The band are the kinds of dudes you want to crack a beer with, kick back, and maybe even add a fourth part to those hedonistic harmonies. 8 pm. […]
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Source Suggests 11/26-12/4
Zachary Lucky It may seem like an oxymoron, Canadian country music. What could be more wholly American than the twangy Nashville-esque sounds of pedal steel ringing through low and lauding laments? But rambling Canadian native, Zachary Lucky comes from the stock of country music, his grandfather Smiling Johnny Lucky, who the younger Lucky claims was […]
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Flying Solo
Brooklyn’s Christopher Paul Stelling picks his way down the left coast
“I’m writing this from an airplane. We are currently experiencing much turbulence. I’m confident, though, that all will turn out well and I will get safely to my destination…” says Christopher Paul Stelling in an email interview with the Source. That’s what it’s like being on the road as religion, he says. “It’s like that.” […]
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Out of Town 11/27-12/3
portland friday 28 Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony Even the tallest dinosaur, the Cretaceous-era brachiosaurus only measured 50 feet tall, which means even standing on its hind legs (which it wasn’t capable of), the tallest dinosaur still could not even reach the top of the seventy-five-foot-tall tree in Portland’s Pioneer Square. The annual tree lighting and […]
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Soulful Not Solitary
Possessed by Paul James, one man with meaning
Switching effortlessly between guitar, fiddle and banjo, one-man-band Possessed by Paul James is as raw as they come. Named for a combination of his grandfather, Paul Wert and his father, James, his music has an old-timey country vibrato, telling stories about 38-year-old cocktail waitresses, growing old, growing up, perfume letters, loving and losing. All the […]
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Abiding
An interview with Jeff Bridges on acting vs. music and his (un)defining role
Before he was an Oscar-winning actor—before he was even nominated, before he was known as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, before Lebowski, before that magnificent, flowing grey hair and crackling baritone voice that ends sentences with the incomprehensible address, “man…” were pop culture tropes—there was Jeff Bridges the musician, a reality most fans […]