Music

Social Distortion’s latest, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, is a maturity test of sorts. After all, Social D has been playing its unique brand of hard luck punk rock since the early 1980s. Give any band — let alone a punk band — 30 years, and they’re either going to ...

The idea that suffering makes for great art is one of those time-honored rock ’n’ roll tropes that even made its way into the title of a 1982 Todd Rundgren album (The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect). And while Lucinda Williams has had her share of personal ...

Fleet Foxes make music that hearkens back to the most euphoric of ’60s folk music, and the final product sounds like a blend of America and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with a touch of Nick Drake. The intricate arrangements on the band's self-titled 2006 debut LP ...

TAYLOR SWIFT, who says she looks at albums as “sort of statements,” has sold an awful lot of albums this year. The unabashedly pop (as opposed to country-pop, her previous focus) 1989 sold more than a million albums in its first week and has spent a total of 29 weeks...

Motet founder and drummer Dave Watts had just wrapped up rehearsal when we caught him last week, sounding a bit drained. And for good reason: his day job franchise The Motet had finished a swing through Texas and, connected by a two-plane redeye to Utah, a ski town ...

"It’s not the end of the world...

It has been 19 years since The Presidents of the United States of America first broke into the pop charts with the 13 turbo-charged pop oddities that comprised their self-titled debut. Songs like “Lump,” “Peaches,” and “Boll Weevil,” were short, fast, loud, catchy as...

"Oh my gosh, 2010 has been awesome!” Singer/ songwriter Kate Jaworski is practically laughing she is so ecstatic about her good fortune these past few months. “I traveled to Greece and Poland earlier this summer, and I just had an amazing experience...

It will be a Charlie Brown Christmas when the Turtle Island Quartet and jazz vocalist Tierney Sutton take the stage at Macky Auditorium at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15...

Usually bands — and their labels — try to milk their newfound success for all they can before moving on to another record, so it was something of a surprise when Seabird recently released their sophomore album, Rocks Into Rivers, a mere 18 months after their 2008 ...

Bands are chemistry experiments, and the introduction of a couple new elements can change the mix in not readily apparent ways. Dr. Dog has been together for more than a dozen years and released six albums of widescreen psych-pop, redolent of hooks and rather ...

  For years now, the Curious Theatre Company has impressed me. Always serious but never pretentious, Curious pushes envelopes while never forgetting that the first rule of theater is — and no, it’s not that you do not talk about theater — that theater must ...