Music

In the back yard of Angeline's Bakery in Sisters, a young and dreadlocked Noah Gundersen and an even younger Abby Gundersen stood on a small stage, playing deftly arranged, intensely emotive folk songs and rarely looked up from the wooden deck below their feet to meet the gaze of the capacity audience rapt by their music.
The scene was a late-afternoon performance at the 2008 Sisters Folk Festival where a then teenage Gunderson played a supporting role. Now the organization is bringing Noah Gundersen and his new band The Courage back to town for the Winter Concert Series this weekend. But the Noah Gundersen coming through this time is far from the seemingly meek wunderkind we saw two years ago. He's older – still young at 20, but older nonetheless – and he now will gladly rock whenever he feels the need.

Shearwater
A Golden Archipelago
Matador Records

When Jonathan Meiburg decided to leave behind his shared writing duties in Okkervil River to focus more on Shearwater (a side project he and Okkervil band mate Will Sheff started in 1999), the result was the critically acclaimed Palo Santo. Less than two years later, with the release of Rook, Meiburg and Shearwater mainstays, Thor Harris and Kimberly Burke, showed even more evidence this band could go to any musical landscape they deemed fit. So, with Shearwater's sixth album, and third in a series relating to mankind's impact on the world, A Golden Archipelago is colossal in not just the physical land it covers, but the emotional, larger-than-life adventure, and grief-stricken scope it seeks. The best album to date in this new decade, Golden displays Meiburg and company fit for any stage.

“I feel like the ska janitor, you know? I'm coming through with a broom and cleaning up everybody's mess,” says Rob “Bucket” Hingley, the front man and sole remaining original member of The Toasters.
His metaphor is more than apt. While it's difficult to know for sure, The Toasters were most likely the first ska band to come out of America back in 1981. Now, some 30 years later, they are one of the most well-known bands of that genre still on the touring circuit. Sure, they benefited from the ska explosion of the mid-1990s, but whereas so many of those horn-laden, suspender-wearing acts faded into oblivion (you just don't hear people talking about Save Ferris anymore, do you?) the Toasters, or at least Hingley, has survived. And if he has to clean up the genre, then so be it.

There's something about seeing music outside. Maybe it's the bigger crowds or the fresh air or the fact that you can spill a few drops of your beer on the ground without feeling too bad about it. Over the past three years, the music at WinterFest has become one of the biggest draws of the annual event – which is worth noting, given that WinterFest also includes ice sculptures, motorcycles and skiers/snowboarders launching into the stratosphere.
Last year, temperatures well below freezing didn't discourage folks from crowding in to the Old Mill to see performances from acts like Sweatshop Union and Dirty Dozen Brass Band, among others. Without WinterFest, we in Central Oregon would be looking at a gap in outdoor live music as long as seven months, which explains why folks are willing to bundle up and head out in the middle of February.

Johnny Cash
American VI: Ain't No Grave
American Recordings/ Lost Highway

Editor's Note: For all of you that caught the Cash'd Out show at the Domino Room last weekend (check www.tsweekly.com/blender for video from the show), here's some more about the Man in Black to keep you in the country spirit.

The final installment of Johnny Cash's posthumously released American recordings series, American VI is full of hurt, devotion, malaise and dejection – everything, really, that you'd expect from a well-rounded Cash album. The first few tracks – particularly his cover of Sheryl Crow's “Redemption Day,” a song I had to pause twice to keep from breaking into tears at the office – are bone-chillingly haunting, and eerie in the beautifully sad way that only Cash could pull off honestly.

It's been more than three weeks since the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, taking 170,000 lives (and possibly many more) and decimating the infrastructure of the already poverty-stricken island nation. There's been an outpouring of donations and other support from not just the neighboring United States, but also from around the world, to help the country.
The stories surrounding the earthquake, most of them heartbreaking, have flooded the media, and the phrase “Text Haiti to 90999… ” has become omnipresent. But as time goes by, the news reports will begin to fade. According to Jesse Roberts, founder of the locally based humanitarian non-profit, Rise Up International, Haiti's need for aid will endure.

It's a Friday afternoon in Portland and like so many others of us on this, or any other Friday afternoon, Sean Badders is trying to make it to happy hour in time.
But he's not rushing to grab a cheap beer and some discounted hot wings. Rather, Badders is en route to meet up with the two other members of his band, The Quick & Easy Boys, at the Laurelthirst Public House. This is where for the past year the band could be found about once a month, playing to the sort of crowd that likes to, as Badders puts it, “dance at six o'clock in the afternoon.”
For the past couple years, people have been gladly dancing and drinking along to the sounds of The Quick & Easy Boys in Portland as well as the other cities through which the band has toured. They've become, in a way, the ideal bar band – a three piece rooted in rock and roll that wears its funk and honky tonk influences on its sleeve. Maybe this is what the Hold Steady would sound like if they came up in Oregon and not New York City.