The Who perform at Capital One Arena on May 23, 2022. (Photo by Jason Nicholson)
The Who were in top form at the Capital One Arena in DC, capturing some of their best-known hits spanning their nearly 60-year career during their The Who Hits Back! Tour.
On Monday, the storied English band opened with the Overture from the rock opera Tommy and finished with the magnum opus “Baba O’Riley” from Who’s Next.
Sleaford Mods dance in the dark at Black Cat on May 21, 2022. (Photo by Mickey McCarter)
When you first ever see Sleaford Mods, you might not know exactly what to make of them. Are they aging hipsters? Roadies who found their way on stage? A few pissed off guys who want to dance?
It turns out that the duo — Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn — are serious artists who make compelling music. They recently filled Black Cat in DC with a lengthy set of about 23 songs, presenting an engrossing act that makes you reconsider what exactly constitutes a concert.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred. I’m no Einstein, but I’m confident that principle was proven during EarthGang’s recent performance at The Fillmore Silver Spring.
The Atlanta hip-hop duo, consisting of Olu (aka Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (born Eian Parker), engaged fans in call-and-response — “when I say earth, you say, gang” — doused them with water guns and enthusiastically rhymed verses from their catalog. The charged-up audience returned their energy at every opportunity.
Earlier this month, Sofi Tukker’s sophomore album, WET TENNIS, debuted at No. 1 on Chartbeat’s Current Electronic Albums chart and No. 12 on the Dance/Electronic Billboard 200 chart. The duo dropped by 9:30 Club in a celebratory tour, and Katherine Gaines shot them in action.
Rodney Crowell came to Nashville from his native Houston 50 years ago, apprenticing himself himself to master songwriter Guy Clark. In the five decades since, he’s written songs for Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Bob Seger, and Rosanne Cash, to just rattle off a few very partial list of the folks who’ve covered his songs.
In addition to his solo records, he worked as a rhythm guitarist and backed vocalist in Emmylou’s band in the late ’70s, and the duo reunited in the middle of last decade for a pair of albums that each won the Grammy Award for Best American Roots Album. In 2004, he reunited for a well-received collaborative project with old friend Vince Gill, The Notorious Cherry Bombs. All this is to say, Rodney and his band played for more than 2 hours at The Birchmere recently, and there wasn’t a weak song in the set. As long and wide-ranging as the evening’s setlist was, Rodney could easily have added even more of his songs without diluting the quality of the material.
The South London band Dry Cleaning are a bit of a mystery. They seem to have appeared suddenly, out of nowhere, but that’s not quite true. In 2019 alone, they released two fantastic EPs and then followed those up last year with the band’s first LP, New Long Leg — a brilliant record that’s hard to not listen to constantly. And in that short time they’ve created a buzz that’s hard to ignore.
On their first full US tour, Dry Cleaning recently made its way to a completely sold-out Ottobar. (Right before the pandemic, the band did play a short swing through the states.)
NLE Choppa performs at The Fillmore Silver Spring on May 16, 2022. (Photo by AJ Waugh)
Memphis’ own NLE Choppa and his No Love Ent crew lit up The Fillmore Silver Spring recently for the DC stop of the NLE tour. The 19-year-old rapper’s charisma oozed throughout the night as Choppa performed most of the songs from his latest EP Me vs. Me — including hits like “Shotta Flow 6,” “Jumpin,” and “Final Warning.”
Steve Kilbey fronts The Church at Cruel World 2022 on May 14, 2022. (Photo by Nacho DelaGarza)
The inaugural Cruel World Festival was undoubtedly a smash. Fifty thousand people filed into Brookside at the Rose Bowl earlier this month to see the most impressive gathering of new wave and post-punk bands in decades thanks to a festival produced by Goldenvoice.
There are certain songs you wanted to hear and certain bands you wanted to see represented at such a thing of course. You would want to hear “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus, “Whip It” by Devo, and for my money surely “Under the Milky Way” by The Church.
Singer-songwriter VINCINT, born Vincint Cannady, headlined Union Stage in DC recently on The Getaway Tour, and Katherine Gaines was there to photograph the show!
VINCINT’s tour followed the 2021 release of his debut full-length album, There Will Be Tears, which spawned five singles including “Getaway.”
Chris Smither (Photo by Jeff Fasano)
On the 2014 album A Link of Chain: A Songwriters’ Tribute To Chris Smither, a number of artists who have been influenced by Chris’s music cover his songs. Among them was folk-blues enchantress Eilen Jewell. It only made sense for the two of them to appear together on a double bill at The Hamilton Live recently, giving the audience a wonderfully intimate evening of songs and stories.
