Scenester Credentials Vinyl
Shores of the Tundra Heart of the Beckoning 12-inch
Shores of the Tundra’s 12-inch is an impressive artifact before you even drop the needle. It’s a single-sided release, with the epic “Heart of the Reckoning” cut so that it plays from the label to the edge, with a stylized daisy pattern silk-screened onto the [...]

I want to have a commemorative plate destruction party. I was thinking about some Christmastime introduction to this column, and all I could think about was some single woman carefully setting up commemorative plates around her living room, in their little stands, and getting the lighting just right, and it was making me insane with [...]

She Swings She Sways
Wasted Love Songs
www.sheswingsshesways.com
A common sophomoric “insight” into music is that we only have 12 notes, and that this imposes some upper limit on the possibility of musical expression. It’s not like it’s hard to demolish this idea with combinatorial mathematics, but both the argument and refutation are beside the point when [...]

The Tanks
Keep Breaking Down
Scenester Credentials
www.myspace.com/thetanks
When Keep Breaking Down opener, “Command Divide” begins in earnest, after a groan of wheezy feedback, it feels like the two years since the Tanks’ debut, Summon Creature was but a day. Lead singer Kevin Koppes bellows over a thick, sludgy mess concocted by bass player Adam Luksetich and skins man [...]

Imagine that I’m telling you all these things while turkeys are getting slaughtered in the background. Or maybe not. This weekend’s entertainment pickings are a bit slimmer than usual. The Picador used to always have some sort of oddball townie one-off show on Thanksgiving, but not this year! The Mill has [...]

Eugene Chadbourne is a prolific guitarist/banjo/songwriter who has produced a supremely odd, but brilliant, body of work over the last 30 years. He started out as a performer working with John Zorn, a more famous but just as brilliant an experimentalist. When Chadbourne struck out on his own, he genre-hopped with reckless abandon, from [...]

Hi, Kent Williams here. I kinda sorta talked to Melody about doing a Weekender post, but we didn’t really get beyond the ’sure why not?’ planning stage, so I’m operating here on the principle that it’s easier to apologize than ask permission. Anyhoo…
The Mill
Thursday: Monroe Crossing. A Bluegrass outfit that tours nationally and won awards [...]

BEST FORMER ROCK & ROLLER LIVING MORE OR LESS QUIETLY IN IOWA CITY: Pete Balestrieri
Pete Balestrieri was a mainstay of the rotating assembly of musicians known as the Horns of Dilemma, who the Violent Femmes used to add a generous portion of crazy to their live shows, and he appears on several of their albums. [...]

Musée Mecanique
Hold This Ghost
Frog Stand Records
myspace.com/museemecanique
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Musée Mecanique is one of those bands who puts way more into their songs — both the writing and performance — than the short-attention-span musical culture of the US requires. Delicate quiet vocals that trace out long melodic lines, couched in brushed drums and [...]

Brighton MA
Amateur Lovers
Loose Tooth Records
www.brightonma.net
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Brighton MA is a Chicago Band with some ties to Iowa City. They have my sympathies — Chicago is a rough town musically, full of clubs and bands playing mean zero sum games.  Safe to say anyone mediocre or timid gets tossed in Lake [...]