Sound Stories & Interviews

Dolorean
The Unfazed
Partisan Record

If Dolorean has been lumped with other country folk-rock acts, that move was based on assumptions. Al James' (Dolorean's primary songwriter) lyrics and song-smithing have always elevated this group above the standard break up musings.

“I get bored so easy. That's really my blessing and my curse,” says Tom Shimura, the man better known as Lyrics Born, the stage name he's been using for about two decades now.
It's his insatiable boredom, Shimura says, that has led him to reinvent himself as a musician not just between albums but on a song-to-song basis. While most know him as one of the leading rappers in the Bay Area hip-hop scene, when he comes to WinterFest on Saturday night, the set he and his band kick out will be far from straight-ahead rap music. That's because on his latest record, As U Were, Lyrics Born has shifted gears – once again – this time molding his sound into an electro-rock funk machine.

While some kids are punching out the lenses of their mom's ridiculous '80s glasses to add irony to their wardrobe, Tacoma's Owen Hart picks and chooses the best of metal from ages ago on its debut album, Earth Control – and not for irony's sake.
The band isn't reinventing the wheel here, but that's not what matters. It's more important to note that Owen Hart somehow sandwiches speed metal, thrash, hardcore and death metal together – a combo that would be easy to screw up – on Earth Control.

When most girls her age were, well, doing whatever it is 11-year-old kids did in the mid 1990s, Joanna Lee was already writing songs. And now, 14 years later, she's recorded one of those tracks, filmed a video for it and the tune has become a calling card of sorts for her unique blend of indie folk and soul music.
That song, “Sunshine,” was one that she penned with her mother, and she wrote it with one intention in mind – to impress a boy, of course.
“I wrote it about a little boy. I was in sixth grade and I had a crush on this eighth grader. I thought if I played the song, I thought he'd fall for me,” says Lee, a graduate of Bend High School who has been playing music since cutting her teeth at church performances with her two musically inclined parents.

The sonic backgrounds on “Walking Far From Home,” the first track on Iron and Wine's new album Kiss Each Other Clean, craftily connects Iron and Wine's impressive effort on The Shepherd's Dog while, as the song title suggests, being away in a new time and place. We could infer, by studying the cover's illustration of a home in flames, that singer Sam Beam – calm, motionless and knee deep in water – is responsible for the fire and smoke.

If macho hip-hop full of cash-money, bling, Mercedes Benzes and auto-tuned cock-of-the-walk-ery is your thing, it's possible that Apollo Kids will not be your thing. Ghostface Killah, on his ninth solo record, is no saint. Hell no. But the key difference between him and the mainstream superstars of the hip-hop biz is that Ghostface's stream-of-consciousness lyrics are believable. When he says he sold parsley to people who thought they were buying weed, it's not for shock value. You believe that he has truly done that.

You may not even know it exists, but there is a remarkably high-quality electronic music scene here in Bend. To say this faction of the music scene is underground would be an understatement – if you haven't seen a show flyer or caught wind of a gig by way of social media, you may have never even known that some of the region's best DJs reside right here in Bend.
But if you're walking past the Midtown Ballroom on Saturday night, the electronic music community will be tough to ignore. Local DJs and promoters are throwing a show called Quarantine featuring a sampling of Bend's finest electronic music purveyors, as well as two emerging European acts, Cottonmouth and Robokop. With one of the most high-end and sizable sound systems you're likely to see in an indoor music venue in Central Oregon, Quarantine should provide the sort of bowel-shaking bass notes and dubstep glitches that bring dance party lovers out of the shadows and into the club until the early morning hours.

There is little in the music world that polarizes a room quite like a discussion about the merits of music originating from the 1980s. You either love it or you hate it and if you say something like, “I dunno. It's OK, I guess,” you'll be outed as the fence-sitter that you are.

Deerhoof vs. Evil isn't the first time Deerhoof has tackled evil's ugly face. On Apple O', the band took a scattered look at Adam and Eve and the mess they made in the garden. On The Runners Four, Deerhoof alluded to the flood and the ark that saved Noah. On their new one, the underlying theme isn't necessarily Biblical, but certainly goodness centered (look at the friggin' heart on the cover!). Evil is also synonymous with other Deerhoof records (i.e. playful, heady amount of sonic dabbling, to the point, great beats, well-placed noise, humorous, fragmented melodies). On “Secret Mobilization” you get slow burning riffs coupled with a desire to bounce and their take on a “Let's Dance the Jet” is basically James Bond rescuing the world from an H-bomb and making it home for supper.

Mickey Avalon raps that he has a “dick like Jesus” (whatever that means) and he's not afraid to let his listeners know things like this about him. That's because the self-dubbed “Mr. Right” – a gaunt 35-year-old rapper, brings an inimitable fusion of glamour, sleaze and guyliner to a music scene that he never could've anticipated being part of.