Kaleo (Photo by Dan Winters)
Last year, Kaleo unveiled their highly anticipated album Surface Sounds, available everywhere via Elektra/Atlantic. The band now are on the road in a highly anticipated tour (which was previously delayed by pandemic lockdowns), and Kaleo performs at The Anthem in DC on Wednesday, April 13.
Parklife DC is giving away two pairs of tickets for you to see the show!
ACTORS play live at Pie Shop in DC on April 3, 2022. (Photo by Mickey McCarter)
ACTORS, a quartet hailing from Vancouver, have garnered some attention over the past 10 years for creating music hailed by the North American goth crowd. But as evidenced by a recent concert at Pie Shop in DC, the dark wave band fully possesses an abundance of rock ‘n roll chops that distinguished them from many of their peers.
Trixie & Katya romp through the Warner Theatre in DC on April 1, 2022. (Photo by Katherine Gaines)
Drag legends and comedy duo Trixie Mattel and Katya recently visited the Warner Theatre in DC for their inaugural tour together — Trixie and Katya Live!
a-ha (Photo courtesy the artist)
Norwegian trio a-ha play some rare US concert dates over the next week — including a date at Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday, April 12. The legendary chart toppers sold out three nights in a row in Los Angeles, but there are still a handful of orchestra seats remaining for their sole New York City show!
Bedouine performs with Gus Seyffert at The Miracle Theatre in DC on April 3, 2022. (Photo by Casey Vock)
When I seriously got into music criticism about five years ago, I went about it in a predictably autistic way: I went to Metacritic, pulled up their list of all-time high scores, and started working my down. That was around the time the folk artist Bedouine released her self-titled debut album, and man, did she ever knock it out of the park on her first try. It’s one of the best debut albums released last decade, and it’s one of my favorites. As impressive as it was, the follow-up effort, 2019’s Birds of a Killjoy, is an even better album. Last year’s Waysides, a collection of older material, is pretty damn impressive too.
Bedouine was every bit as impressive in a recent appearance at The Miracle Theatre, the small Barracks Row venue booked by Union Stage, in DC.
Colin Hay performs at Lincoln Theatre on April 2, 2022. (Photo by Mickey McCarter)
Who can it be now? Why, it’s Colin Hay, the bearded Scotsman famed for fronting the band Men at Work. With his signature dry sense of humor, Colin is well recognized when he’s on the stage, as was the case at the Lincoln Theatre in DC recently. But at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles, he’s gained quite a bit of anonymity — a far cry from when he arrived for the first time in New York City for he first time 40 years ago.
Matthew Logan Vasquez leads Delta Spirit in a performance at Ottobar on March 26, 2022. (Photo by Casey Vock)
Some rock bands deserve an attached forewarning, even if only half-serious, to help illustrate just what it is they’re doing up there on the stage or in the recording studio.
“CAN YOU HANDLE THE SPIRIT?” has probably been used as a T-shirt slogan or a sticker at some point in the past for some act out there, somewhere. But that could be a good question to pose at the door to who hasn’t yet experienced the furious goodtime that is a live Delta Spirit show.
Led by the energetic and wild-eyed Matthew Logan Vasquez and currently based in SoCal, Delta Spirit was just in town back in the fall but announced another local show at Baltimore’s Ottobar not long ago, and the five-piece group took the small stage at the storied Howard Street venue for what would be a fulfilling, exemplar night led by this consistently thrilling band.
Change often comes gradually, but sometimes the idea has been there all along but needed a reason to become visible. The elements of Car Seat Headrest’s most recent album, Make A Door Less Open, have been around — electronics, rock stylings — but more up on the stage than on wax. But, released in the midst of the pandemic, MADLO was primed to be performed live.
Taking on the masked persona, Trait — which in interviews Toledo has attributed to the beginnings of a side project with drummer, Andrew Katz — Toledo created his first new material in several years (2018’s Twin Fantasy being a rerecording of 2011’s album of the same name) alongside his band: Ethan Ives on guitar, Andrew Katz on drums, and Seth Dalby on bass. And the change from, mostly, a solo endeavor to a collaborative group effort has influenced the sound of Car Seat Headrest in many ways, but most notably the forward presence of electronic and dance-influenced elements. So, it was with high anticipation that Will and company rolled into DC Saturday night to perform at The Anthem.
Joan Osborne (Photo courtesy the artist)
Joan Osborne achieved breakthrough fame and success in the ’90s with “One Of Us.” It didn’t come overnight, though; she had been playing small clubs for years. And while she still sings that song, her career arc has gone back to mining much of the interpretive work in roots music she came up doing. Along the way, she’s received a Grammy nomination (for Best Blues album for Breakfast in Bed), recorded the songs of Bob Dylan and others, and still found time for her own original songs along the way.
Joan’s influences are eclectic, but she probably draws most heavily from the blues, so it’s fitting that she began her performance at The Birchmere recently with a cover of Muddy Waters’s classic “I Want To Be Love,” which she recorded on Bring It On Home.
Pokey LaFarge (Photo by Eliot Lee Hazel)
Having a hook for story is important. Sometimes, the hook is so good, it’s worth stretching things to make it work. The truth is, Bloomington, Illinois, where singer/songwriter Pokey LaFarge was born, and neighboring Normal, where he grew are nowhere near the Mississippi River. They’re right in the middle of central Illinois. But the hook involving the Mississippi is just too good to pass up, because so much of what he does combines the many distinctive sounds of the Big River, jazz and blues, with an Americana brand of country and retro rock.
For the first time in eight years, and his first return to the DC area following the tour hiatus imposed by the pandemic, Pokey performed The Birchmere recently.
