Music

When I tell Brett Dennen that I think I just may have broken my computer, he's quiet for a moment, then laughs and says, “Remember the old Nintendo games where you could just pull them out and blow on them? Everybody did that and it seemed like it worked.”
Anyone born this side of the Ford administration knows exactly what Dennen is talking about and probably performed this Nintendo maintenance procedure. Of course, Nintendo has nothing to do with Dennen's folky pop rock or his recent rise to national fame or his work with kids. And blowing on my computer isn't going to fix it, but the fact that he wants to talk about old-school Nintendo rather than the fact that the last year has seen him emerge as one of the biggest names in the singer-songwriter genre just might be the reason why people tend to love Brett Dennen.

Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation
Released: 1988
Filled with anthems, energy and angst, Daydream Nation portrays the best snapshot of the late '80s East Coast underground rock scene.
Sonic Youth's sixth studio record immediately plummets into an atmosphere of oddly tuned guitars and melody lines come incredibly close to the boundaries of pop. But, Sonic Youth doesn't want you to be comfortable. Songs like “Total Trash” pull you with a toe-tapping melody and then drop their Doc Martens on your foot with an exploding barrage of sound.

When Aaron Freeman, better known as Gene Ween, is reached by phone on a recent afternoon, he's in his native Pennsylvania and driving to rehearse with his band, Ween, and says he can't talk. Less than an hour later, Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween, answers his cell phone while at the aforementioned rehearsal. He can talk because, apparently, the practice session is already over.
As far as interviews and the arrangement thereof goes, this is strange, but for Ween, the band that made strange a career, this is probably business as usual. But still, a question remains, what happened to that rehearsal?

The Minus 5
Killingsworth
Yep Roc Records

Portland's Minus 5 arrives in style with, Killingsworth, a Gypsy caravan of acoustic folk songs woven through with softly ethereal, downtrodden voices. Most of the tunes are downers to the point of absurdity, but absurdity hardly indicates a lack of artistic worth.

Almost nothing about Roger McNamee's band, Moonalice, is conventional.
For starters, McNamee isn't your typical rock star – by any means. The guy is a massively successful businessman, holding degrees from Yale and Dartmouth and founding a private equity group, Elevation Partners, that includes a team of high-flying names like, for example, Bono. Also, the fledgling act really isn't a fledgling act. Moonalice is essentially the Traveling Wilburys of the jam and blues rock world combined with a dude (and his wife) who really wants to be (and can be) in a killer band. With an album produced by roots rock heavyweight T-Bone Burnett and a lineup including people like G.E. Smith (as in G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live Band) and Pete Sears (Jefferson Starship, Rod Stewart), Moonalice is playing clubs and bars throughout the country as McNamee attempts to reinvent rock and roll protocol.

Helado Negro
Awe Owe
Asthmatic Kitty Records

Helado Negro's debut album (or Roberto Carlos Lange latest project), Awe Owe, is a mix of traditionally structured songs sung and strummed by Lange, with heavy looping, samples, handclaps, the dabbling of woodwinds and Latin percussion. The album can be patchy as if intended for a canvas or tapestry. It's oddly mysterious, too, with 11 relatively short compositions that meander from one to another without much interruption. The album has a densely ambient feel, yet the repetitious sounds never command a repetitive feel.

The names of the two men at the helm of this band should be familiar to local music buffs – but the same can't be said of Warm Gadget as a whole or the music this band produces. Colton Williams and Tim Vester have a couple of decades worth of local music experience between them – Williams played in the now-defunct Vihara and Vester served as the hilarious front man of the Kronkmen until just recently – but what they're doing now is nothing like either of those acts.
Warm Gadget is the dark, slightly electronic and mostly industrial brainchild of Williams and something he's been toying with since Vihara disbanded a couple years back.

Sixty-three year old John Hancock has been pickin' and grinnin' for as long as he can remember.
“I've been playing guitar as far back as my memory goes,” Hancock said recently in an interview with the Source, “I don't know. I grew up with it. I'm originally from way, way back east and my whole family is musical. We've been around music our whole lives and bluegrass is where we started and stopped.”
So when he and his wife, Nancy, looked at a 40-acre piece of property out by the Bend airport, the first thought that came to mind was that it would make a really good venue for a bluegrass music festival. After buying the land, they set to work on creating what Hancock calls the “best bluegrass festival in Oregon” (though he admitted he might be bias), the High and Dry Bluegrass Festival.