Music Zac Nelson has already proven his music to be a compellingly creepy, weird, and absolutely wonderful thing through his previous project Hexlove. But with his new solo cassette—Towards Your Own Worlds, released November 1 on Field Hymns—he ups that ante, goes all in, doubles down, or whatever other gambling metaphor you can come up wi...   More

Music For the past little while, Run On Sentence leader Dustin Hamman has been on the road with his lady friend, Kyle Durrie, as she offers up seminars and services with her rolling letterpress truck (learn more about that here). As part of this trip, Hamman found himself spending a week and...   More

Music When Casey charged me with writing a little something about the new Ross Beach disc, my immediate question was, "Where the hell has that guy been?" Thankfully, Beach has answered the question for me in a blog post entitled: "Where the hell have I been?" It reads: 
My shows-per-year has dropped off almost as precipitously as my upda...   More

Music One of the coolest parts of the cassette resurgence of recent years is the return of the compilation. Alright, to be fair, the compilation never really went anywhere. But for a writer who grew up in a small town pre-Internet days, hitting the local Fred Meyer to track down cheap compilations that could provide some insight into what was going on in the music world, seeing a compilation like this n...   More

Music  Courtney Taylor-Taylor/One Model Nation
This strange and cool little project is the brain trust of Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor and artist Jim Rugg. The two have created a graphic novel called One Model Nation that is a fictional story set in 1977 Berlin that, as the press release says, "follows the epic journey of popular art noise band One Model Nation as they become e...   More

Music Here's the blessing and a curse of being a music writer: Once PR companies and record labels and bands get your e-mail address, you start getting flooded with e-mails about new CDs coming out, tours, cereals that a singer has helped create, etc. So, with an overstuffed inbox, things sometimes get missed until dug out of the digital quagmire.
One such e-mail was from a member of Sun Mar who wan...   More

Music Time to fess up to something that could get me blacklisted here in my hometown: I never have liked And And And all that much. I sincerely get the appeal of our 2011 Best New Band, but it has yet to strike a real chord within me.

That said, I also confess to be fairly surprised that I've been so enamored with the solo work of that band's former co-leader Tyler Keene. His project,    More

Album Reviews [MOODY, UNUSUAL AND RICH] Chrome Wings’ music exists below the surface of the water, calmly burbling along while it gets warped by ripples, reflecting back glittering bits of sunlight. At least   More

Music The music that came burbling up from the world roughly stamped as "alternative" in the '90s seemed the perfect antidote to the nature of the rock world that was constantly looking backwards and patting itself on the back for reminding themselves of how good it used to be. Which is why it's strange for me—someone whose musical education came of age around that time—to see so many people embraci...   More

Music If you're going to match up your music to a set of lyrics that manage to be both creepy and nostalgic at the same time, there's no better way than to slip a sample of some horror movie soundtrack underneath your swaying psych-pop.

At least that's what The Harvey Girls do here on this track from their 2007 EP Declinate (re-released re...   More