Sound Stories & Interviews

The thing that gets me every time – be it on a Bad Seeds' album, in his fiction or with Grinderman – is how human Nick Cave is. He is a flawed, soft-fleshed mortal creature, just like the rest of us. His humanity comes out in the way he sings like he's speaking in tongues, repeating a word or a phrase over and over again until he's wrung all the blood and fluids from it. The way he growls and hums lyrics. And the way he talks of the nightmares in his head: of eating inchworms, of swearing off God, of black unicorns, slave dwarves and Steve McQueen.

Deb Yager didn't start playing guitar until she was in her mid 30s, but you wouldn't know that by listening to the smartly crafted folk numbers on the six-song EP that she recorded in her former hometown of Austin, Texas. Yager has been in Bend for the past five years, playing music with her band Little Fish, which includes her husband, Bo Reynolds, while creating songs of her own on the side.

Atmosphere, the indie hip-hop super group coming to Midtown on Tuesday, is one of those groups whose fans are just as cool as they are. More of a College Radio Top 10 chart topper than Top 40, Atmosphere is about as introspective as hip-hop can be without getting all emo. That hipster girl who you've seen studying race and pop culture at Thump? She's an Atmosphere fan. So is her professor, probably.
The group, which includes frontman Slug, producer Ant, Erick Anderson on keys and Nate Collis on guitar, has been making waves on the underground rap scene since 1994 and is a major reason you should head to Midtown on Tuesday. Their new album, a double EP titled To All My Friends, Blood Makes the Blade Holy, will only be for sale digitally on iTunes and Amazon, with CDs sold exclusively during the tour and through Fifth Element (fifthelementonline.com).

“This year's festival has a really bluesy feel to it,” says Sisters Folk Festival artistic director Brad Tisdel of the event's 15th anniversary lineup.
He's right. Sisters Folk has always strayed from pure folk music, but this year's festival, taking place this weekend throughout the city of Sisters, features a lineup that's as eclectic as ever. The fest is headlined by John Hammond, but still features folkies like Ray Wylie Hubbard and a parade of other singer songwriters. In the past few years, Tisdel has focused more and more on exposing fans to new artists who they otherwise might never encounter.

Westin Glass is the drummer for the Thermals and last week when he checked in from North Carolina where he was visiting family, he wanted to talk about friendships. More specifically, he wanted to talk about his relationship with his two band mates.

It's a soundtrack for a movie about being a teenager. In love. And beating the shit out of the world and shoving it in his pocket. At least, that's what I gleaned from the trailer – and even more so, the soundtrack. The Twilight franchise
shocked everyone with its (admittedly) amazing soundtracks, and Scott Pilgrim's tunes follow suit here. Beck happily throws himself back to his bizarre Midnite Vultures phase as the fictional band Sex Bob-omb for four super-fuzzed, video-blippy garage rock tracks.

Longtime local rocker and one-time Ranch Records employee Don Hoxie is so clear on his album opener, “Welcome,” that he's not impressed by the lack of skill and hard work demonstrated on current records. I agree, music seems too easy to record and sell. Problem is, few artists with strong musical chops make memorable albums. Yes, Joe Satriani might wail on gee-tar… but his albums blow. Just because you can play guitar doesn't necessarily give you the green light to record.

Whether it's by design or just a happy accident, the Les Schwab Amphitheater (LSA) concert series has managed to attract some of America's foremost songwriters and storytellers over the past few years, a line-up that includes Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard on the country side and Beck and Bob Dylan on the pop and folk side with plenty of good natured (classic) rocking in between – think Lynyrd Skynyrd and Steve Miller.

Mat Kearney, the pride of Eugene, Oregon, makes the sort of music that's perfect for doctors to make out to in hospitals. Not real doctors with their stethoscopes and decades of education and sleep-deprived, stress-laden minds, but rather television doctors. You know, the ones with the sort of good looks that make super models want to vomit more than they normally do and who trade sexual partners like Brian Cashman trades designated hitters.Of course, we're talking about Grey's Anatomy here, the television show that helped launch Kearney into the mainstream, exposing three of his songs, including the smash hit “Breathe In Breathe Out.”

If you judge Kousefly's Down By A Billion by its faux-metal cover art, you might expect late '90s-style rock. And while the local duo that has been gigging regularly around Bend for several years is anything but Godsmack wannabes, it takes several songs before the album realizes its direction.