What’s more American Summer than packing the car and hitting the road for an adventure? For Weezer, that road trip wound its way to Merriweather Post Pavilion Friday on their Indie Rock Road Trip Tour, where the band has had different openers at varying legs of the tour. This stop included Baltimore’s own Future Islands and pop-punk heroes Joyce Manor.
Les Claypool reunited Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade for his Summer of Green Tour, which recently landed at The Lyric Baltimore. Steve Satzberg was there to photograph the show!
Steve Miller Band made their annual visit to Wolf Trap recently, and Jason Nicholson was there to capture the action in pictures!
The DMV edition of the Re:SET Festival drew to a close last Sunday at Merriweather, featuring sets from L’Rain, IDLES, Jamie XX, and LCD Soundsystem.
Genres can not only confine but also stifle innovation. Today, many musicians are discovering ingenious methods to transcend categorical boundaries. The second day of the Re:SET Concert Series at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, recently strongly emphasized this notion.
The festival’s music lineup was undoubtedly a highlight, boasting a mix of established and emerging artists who graced the stage. The performances on June 17 showcased musicians that seamlessly blended sonic styles, akin to different realities colliding in the multiverse. The exceptional acts that took the spotlight included Fousheé, Toro Y Moi, James Blake, and Steve Lacy.
“People don’t understand the union movement,” Jon Langford, leader of Chicago alt-country rockers the Waco Brothers, told the audience at Pearl Street Warehouse on Tuesday evening.
Introducing “Plenty Tuff/Union Made,” he spoke of people fighting and dying for things we now take for granted, like the vote and the weekend. “It wasn’t Prince Charles,” he said of the recently crowned monarch of his native United Kingdom. (Langford was born in Newport, Wales.) “It wasn’t the racist founding fathers.”
An unabashedly political band, the Waco Brothers find common ground in the working-class themes of punk rock and traditional country. Long associated with the indie label Bloodshot Records (which recently came back from the dead), they were one of the bands that spearheaded “insurgent country.”
Performing a sold-out show in the nation’s capital can turn out to be an important milestone for any musician. To do so with relatives in the room can make the night all the more meaningful.
This past Sunday night, Wednesday rocked the living hell out of DC’s famous Black Cat nightclub, showing why the Asheville outfit has become such a sensation, but also serving as an important, inspiriting night for band leader Karly Hartzman and her local family members.
In the admittedly very humorous 2000s Channel 101 series “Yacht Rock,” a fictitious Kenny Loggins serves as the protagonist as the navigates a career of creating remarkable tunes in the genres of folk, soul, and country pop.
A managerial character loosely inspired by Tommy Mottola schemes to get Loggins under his thumb to write hit Hollywood soundtrack themes, declaring him to be “a hit machine with the heart of a rock-and-roller.”
Elements of all of this surfaced in the background during Kenny’s recent sold-out two-night stand at Wolf Trap, where much of the audience turned up in soft captain’s hats in homage to the “yacht rock” phenomenon and Kenny engaged a talented cover act collective called the Yacht Rock Revue to open the show. Most remarkably, the Loggins show, billed as his farewell tour, was a massive guitar attack that did indeed reveal the heart of a rock-and-roller.
Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews is known for his relentless work ethic. He’s never taken a real vacation. In a recent interview with nola.com, he expressed his unfamiliarity with the concept of vacation, saying, “I don’t know what that feels like. If I’m playing in Miami, I may stay an extra day. Whenever we play at a place for two days, that’s considered a vacation. But other than that, I have never been on a vacation.”
By that standard, the recent two-night weekend stand at Wolf Trap, where Trombone Shorty co-headlined with Ziggy Marley and had opening support from the legendary Mavis Staples, must have felt like one hell of a vacation.
Concertgoers of all ages recently gathered at The Fillmore Silver Spring to witness $NOT on The Get Busy or Die Trying Tour. The hooded rapper was full of energy, and the crowd responded surging forward and creating mash-pits the atmosphere was electric.
