Album Reviews [APOCALYPTIC FOLK] The Builders and the Butchers’ fifth album is largely influenced by the postapocalyptic literature of Cormac McCarthy, and it shows: Western Medicine is just as cheerless as T ... More

Album Reviews [ELECTRO R&B] Natasha Kmeto can’t get no satisfaction, and it’s killing her. As a singer raised on both the come-ons of ’90s R&B and the all-night throb of house and trip-hop, the ... More

Album Reviews "The mouth is an open wound,” sings Kelli Schaefer on her new EP, and the 28-year-old Portland enchantress lets hers bleed all over these four spectral songs. On 601, Schaefer’s already unado ... More

Album Reviews Space Waves bassist-vocalist Sarah Bourland unwittingly sums up the entirety of her band’s second full-length a mere 25 seconds into the song “Underworld”: “Nothing’s quite wrong/But it� ... More

Album Reviews [ANTHEMIC ROCK] More often than not, when Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton produces a record, his involvement turns out to be a blessing. His work with James Mercer in Broken Bells imparted an ap ... More

Album Reviews [RETRO  DISCO]  Unlike other Portland dance acts, Ancient Heat isn’t simply influenced by disco music: This nine-piece ensemble is a living embodiment of the much-maligned genre. And ... More

Album Reviews [MOOD PIECES] There’s no way around it: Swim, the fourth album by local jazz institution Blue Cranes, is as heady and dark as anything the group has done in its six years together. The big cha ... More

Album Reviews [PUNK METAL] As the Minutemen’s Mike Watt once observed, a good song title is worth a thousand lyrics. With Gaytheist, that advice is well-heeded: Lest anyone feel fatigued by the bulldozing pun ... More

Album Reviews [HEARTBROKEN ROCK] Don’t be fooled by the picture on the cover of Scout Niblett’s new album, a photo-booth shot of a couple in full make-out mode. The heart of It’s Up to Emma is not a rom ... More

Album Reviews [POP OPERA] Concept albums demand some suspension of disbelief and a little imagination from the listener. When the story being related is in the realm of epic fantasy, as is the case with Morni ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Four years ago, I sat, a fresh-faced prospective intern, across from WW’s notoriously cantankerous assistant Arts & Culture editor, Steffen Silvis, and told him I wanted to write about music. He ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Some people love to be the center of attention. Danny Seim, best known as drummer and co-songwriter for the awesome, experimental-pop triple-threat Menomena, is not one of those people. He’s bee ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Mike Dixon doesn’t cater to just your average nerd. He may be a high-school accounting and introductory computer teacher in nearby Olympia, Wash., but the bespectacled 29-year-old spends just as ... More

Here Comes Your Fan I believe it was the Boss who so eloquently sung the praises of “human touch” back in the ’90s. And though husband-and-wife duo Viva Voce—whose discography includes such mushil ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Christian rock is probably the furthest thing from most kids’ minds when considering ways to rebel. But Greg Glover—host of KRNK’s Sunday night program, the Bottom Forty, and founder ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Tom Jones turns 68 years old this Saturday. Yet, last Thursday at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, women of all ages threw panties at him, squealed with twitterpation and smiled at his every word. E ... More

Here Comes Your Fan At the end of the South Park episode where the Cure’s Robert Smith defeats a giant, monstrous Barbra Streisand—she plays “Mecha-Streisand” to his “Smithra” in a bat ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Do-goodery hits us at different times. For 16-year-old Lincoln High student Alden Harris-McCoy, the charitable urge struck when he realized profits from his Curbside Market—a food cart he runs d ... More

Here Comes Your Fan I have a lot of faith in Colin Meloy. The Decemberists frontman is capable of many wondrous things: writing a pop song that casually employs the word “balustrade,” for one; convincingly de ... More

Here Comes Your Fan Last Monday night, I found myself wandering under the Fremont Bridge’s industrial east side. The block I was pacing—between North Albina Avenue and Tillamook Street, just off the MAX&rsquo ... More

Music “I just want to talk less and less,” says Holcombe Waller. “It’s like, conversations walk by and I have all these ideas of things to say, and I just sit there and let them go because I’m l ... More

Music What do sailors and Southern gothic folk bands have in common? According to the Builders and the Butchers’ singer-guitarist, Ryan Sollee, ... More

Music [RAW CHORAL POP] It’s not too often that an album sinks its teeth into a listener within the first five seconds. AgesandAges’ debut, Alright ... More

Music   ... More

Music   They don’t look like revivalists of the groove-heavy sound of vintage Ethiopian funk and soul. To the outside observer ... More

Music [THE OL’ SLOW ’N’ SAD] Barry Brusseau is a man with many gifts: a clear, low-register voice that reminds of Smog’s Bill Callahan; dexterous hands that convey soul and patience ... More

Music Northwest hip-hop wasn’t born when Oldominion formed in 1999. But the expansive Portland/Seattle crew united the local underground rap scene for the first time, and in the band’s 12-year r ... More

Music [PRODUCER POP] Talkdemonic. Blind Pilot. Horse Feathers. World’s Greatest Ghosts. If you peruse the liner notes of many of the best indie rock and folk albums released in Portland over the past ... More

Music Born: 1946 in Chapel Hill, N.C.Sounds like: Steve Martin playing a banjo concert at a Delaware prep school. For fans of: Pete Seeger, Bob Seger, Richard Thompson, Kate McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wai ... More

Music [RIFFS OF LIFE] If anyone ever wanted to do an indie-rock remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, Sweet Apple singer John Petkovic has a few casting suggestions: himself as George Bailey and his bandma ... More

Music Stories No one could ever mistake Desire Lines as anything but an album by Camera Obscura. All the identifiers are there: melodies meshing the chirp of ’60s radio pop and ’80s post-punk devilry, and t ... More

Music Stories Years active: 1990-2001, 2008, 2010-present.  Sounds like: Television and the Stooges-inspired darkness, with dueling, strained guitar lines turning into a lascivious, bluesy and slightly dr ... More

Music Stories How will Portland jazz survive without Andrew Oliver? Since Hurricane Katrina blew the young pianist back to his hometown in 2005 after a few years at New Orleans’ Loyola University, he ... More

Music Stories Nothing makes a 30-year-old music writer feel like a decrepit, out-of-touch sack of dust more than scanning a Warped Tour lineup. The hordes of pierced, tatted and asymmetrically coiffed mall-pu ... More

Music Stories Portland music-scene fixture Joe Haege returns this week to premiere new 31Knots songs—which his own bandmate, Jay Winebrenner, will be hearing for the first time and giving commentary on from ... More

Music Stories Somewhere on Marisa Anderson’s résumé is the phrase, “Once portrayed the ass-end of a jaguar.” It was the mid-1990s, a few years after the Northern California-born guitarist dropped out ... More

Music Stories When New Zealand’s Flying Nun Records first came to the attention of the international music scene in the 1980s, it was hard to believe such a wealth of talent could exist on one tiny island nat ... More

Music Stories Jeff Hylton Simmons can see the finish line. Seven years ago, the 37-year-old Midwest transplant, sound engineer and broadcaster hatched the idea for a free-form, Portland-inspired terrestrial r ... More

Music Stories [FAMILY PARTY] For some of the residents of Southeast’s Washington Towers, the drab apartment complex down the street from Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery has another name: Futro Towers. That’s beca ... More

Music Stories The conflict: Two members of hip-hop’s greatest dynasty, the Wu-Tang Clan, are coming to Portland, vying for your hard-earned dolla, dolla bills, y’all, on two successive nights. Times are t ... More

Night Avenger Strip clubs are like raindrops in Portland: They're everywhere. And like the rain, stripculture is seemingly indiscriminate, catering to a largely mixed (and mixed-gender) crowd. For anyone to willing ... More

Night Avenger BC's American Saloon Outlaws, Legends and Lovers, aug. 17"I like rocking with the boot-scooting boogie." That's Tabbitha-but call her Tabotage. Loose black tank top, hair whimsically shorn, she's the ... More

Night Avenger I can't believe it myself. It's as bad as we all think. Inside the newly revamped sports bar downtown called The City, I'm waiting to audition alongside about 400 other idiots/idolaters for MTV's Real ... More

Night Avenger Some think American youth never associate with their elders. These people have never visited Sunset Bingo.Out on Western Avenue, just past the Dolphin II Gentleman's Club and Fantasy Video, stands a b ... More

Night Avenger Koji Okuno is one of a truly rare breed: club owners who are themselves jazz fans, and who want to see the music presented in the best setting possible. That's why the owner of local Japanese restaura ... More

Night Avenger In a city where stripping for a living is considered less offensive than working for Starbucks, the Mardi Gras tradition of trading a glimpse of one's naughty bits for beads seems downright quaint. To ... More

Night Avenger Last Friday night Lisa Wells stood in the front of more than 60 people and read them an acerbic email her best friend, Esther Barnum Alman, wrote her last year, after the 25-year-old woman found out s ... More

Night Avenger At the ripe old age of 25, it has already become apparent that I can't party like I used to. My college years of binge drinking and getting off virtually scot-free are gone. The all-day hangover has a ... More

Night Avenger People like their hideouts to seem immutable--as if a freak landslide sealed a chamber off from the busy world in 1962 and, by chance or fate, they cleared away the rocky rubble to claim this forgotte ... More

Night Avenger Once the holiday hangover wears off, January boasts nothing but bills, bank statements and the chilly suspicion that your heat is about to be turned off. Only one street in Portland can assuage such w ... More

RIFF CITY When Foureveryoung—the musical project of Loch Lomond's Ritchie Young and his three younger brothers—first booked a show at Mississippi Studios, owner Jim Brunberg said, "I'm not gonna che ... More

RIFF CITY Every year, Austin, Tex., is host to literally thousands of bands during the giant annual press conference and music fest that is South by Southwest (SXSW). This year (like most), a good assload of th ... More

RIFF CITY On "Spitting Venom," perhaps the awesomest track on Modest Mouse's latest, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Isaac Brock sings, "We've got a knack for fucked-up history." You can say that again, ... More

RIFF CITY When Riot Cop's Dominic Drumgo saw the booklet for Choke On It—a vinyl compilation of Portland punk that features his band—he treated the record just as he used to treat those by the famou ... More

RIFF CITY In the year since Marius Libman— the finely dressed, massively bearded gentleman behind electronic dance project Copy—released his stellar debut LP, Mobius Beard, and took WW's Best New Ba ... More

RIFF CITY In the land of what he calls "hyper-expressive" songwriters, Michael Rockstar is an odd bird: a musical comedian. What's more: He's actually pretty funny. It's not necessarily his Adam Sandler-esque f ... More

RIFF CITY According to its online bio, local record label Love Harder "started out as a slogan after the demise of the American Electoral System." But, over beers at the label's two-year anniversary show this p ... More

RIFF CITY Jim Fairchild—best known for playing guitar in now-defunct Modesto, Calif.,-based blip-pop band Grandaddy—lived in Portland for only seven months. But during that short time in 2005, Fairc ... More

RIFF CITY Slabtown is more than a bar. The name not only denotes a region—Industrial Northwest Portland—it embodies a history: In the 1880s, rich folks used "Slabtown" to refer derogatorily to worki ... More

RIFF CITY "Guacamole!" exclaim two women at a local Starbucks. They're not trying to place a special order; local blues legend Sonny Hess and award-winning bass player Lisa Mann (who was greeted by Hess with a ... More

Sonic Reducer Black Angel Bitter Suite (self-released) Before their long-running weekly gig at Dante's came to an end, Portlanders with a taste for hot-buttered soul could sate themselves regularly with Black ... More

Sonic Reducer Amon Tobin Out From Out Where (Ninja Tune) Ninja Tune posterchild Amon Tobin delivers yet another collection of complex, confounding and endlessly creative cuts. This time, he inches closer to t ... More

Sonic Reducer The Badger King The Tongue and Tooth EP (States Rights) Sometimes seeing the Badger King live feels more like being at a karaoke bar than a rock show. It's hard to pin down what, if anything, "pr ... More

Sonic Reducer Hot Hot Heat Make Up the Breakdown (Sub Pop) Victoria, B.C., is known as a pretty traditional town, a geographically and chronologically unlikely outpost of tea-'n'-crumpet Edwardian Englishness ... More

Sonic Reducer Ani DiFranco So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter (Righteous Babe) The album, recorded in "some club in Nantes, France, and that bar in Boise, Idaho, and a few places in between," is a career-spann ... More

Sonic Reducer COCO The COCO Sound (K) COCO's analog drum-and-bass picks up where Dub Narcotic Sound System starts to get boring (i.e., after the first two minutes of any DNSS song) and offers some heady respi ... More

Sonic Reducer American Analog Set Updates EP (Tiger Style) This EP is a collection of two American Analog Set rarities remixed by the band itself, and two remixes each by Her Space Holiday and Styrofoam. HSH pr ... More

Sonic Reducer Antiseen Screamin' Bloody Live (TKO Records) On the night of June 6, 2001, I was torn. Hickoid behemoths Antiseen were set to take the stage at the Ash Street while Dead Moon was over at Satyricon, ... More

Sonic Reducer Abe Schwartz The Klezmer King (Columbia/Legacy) Les Yeux Noirs Balamouk (World Village) Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars Brotherhood of Brass (Piranha)Abe Schwartz stepped off the boat in ... More

Sonic Reducer The Bella Fayes The Truth in a Beautiful Lie (Secret Decoder)Bella Fayes guitarist-singer Lael Alderman has endured some bruising encounters with the beast that dwells within the music industry. ... More

Top 5 John Tejada (Friday, Refuge) The meticulous, melodic house master (pictured) is bringing his all-hardware (read: MacBook-free) set to Portland for its stateside debut. Eat your heart out, San Fra ... More

Top 5 Reel Big Fish (pictured)Ska is overdue for another ironic revival, but until it actually happens, the average Warped-goer is going to wonder what the paunchy Ace Ventura impersonator playing music ... More

Top 5 Iron and Wine (April 2004) This was such a joyous and encouraging night in our early days. A capacity crowd poured in, packed themselves politely into the room, and fell into a perfect hush for t ... More

Top 5 2NE1 (pictured) Mysteriously quiet for the bulk of 2012, YG Entertainment’s 2NE1 are one of a thimbleful of Korean groups to have performed in the U.S. The group hopes to reclaim home territory ... More

Top 5 Goudy Old Style looks pretty slick as an album font.Outdated? Psssh. Typography from 1915 is totally in right now. “Little Lion Man” proves radio edits don’t discourage inappropriate off-air la ... More

Top 5 “The Cuckoo,” Clarence AshleyThis is one of those grand old songs from across the seas that is timeless and transcends the limits of our current mode of musical thought.“See That My Grave is ... More

Top 5 ON FRIENDSHIP Dalai Lama: “Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives.” Anthony Kiedis: “And my friend’s named Bob. Like the de ... More

Top 5 Gazooka Bazooka Apparently, someone or something by that name played the Foggy Notion in March. That’s all we know, but c’mon: You’re just happy to live in a city where something called “ ... More

Top 5 “Cinnamon Girl,” Musicology, 2004 Only Prince has the balls to steal the title of one of Neil Young’s signature songs. Other than the name, the standout track from his “comeback” album ... More

Top 5 Cheater Slicks (April 12)Running on, in their words, “100 percent negative energy” since 1996, the three-man Ohio noise machine makes howling, despondent rock ’n’ roll that, for all its co ... More