After dropping his highly successful album Almighty So 2, Chicago rapper Chief Keef recently closed out his A Lil Tour at Echostage. With 2024 winding down, the hype for live music is at an all-time high, and this night was no different. The show sold out weeks in advance, and you could feel the excitement in the air before it even started.
Craig Finn can spin the yarn with the very best of them.
The 53-year-old songwriter and storyteller has showcased his abilities as the leader of The Hold Steady but also with his own studio albums — he’s released five of them along with a compilation.
Finn’s got another record in the works, and this fall he was on the road in Europe and the USA in support of his own material, some of it released, some of it on the way. It was a run dubbed “This is What it Looks Like: Solo Songs & Stories,” and it gave him the chance to engage with listeners in small, cozy venues all over the map.
The result here in the States was a series of shows that the artist himself heralded on his social media as a “major success.”
Reunited Velocity Girl Mesmerizes Crowd at Black Cat
Words by Erin Corbin
Photos by James Todd Miller
Was this the last-ever performance by DC shoegaze heroes Velocity Girl?
On Thursday, Sept. 19, 1985, the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing “not to promote any legislation” but “to provide a forum for airing the issue itself, for ventilating the issue, for bringing it out into the public domain.”
The issue at hand, of course, was that “some music glorifies violence in various forms, sexual violence. Some music advocates the use of drugs, drug abuse, and so on.” In the hearing, the Parents Music Resource Council (PMRC) presented the now infamous “Filthy Fifteen” list of songs in popular music that they found the most objectionable. This list significantly influenced public perception of music as a corrupting influence on youth, but had the unintended consequence of driving up sales numbers.
“It’s Saturday night and we’re in a church…let’s have some fun!”
On an otherwise unremarkably mild November evening in our nation’s capital, I climbed the steps of St. Stephen Church in Columbia Heights. A hugely anticipated event for the city’s punk scene was about to unfurl, and so of course I ran into some familiar faces who perform in local bands, like American TV and Sick Move. Dillinger Four famously holds a very sparse touring schedule, due to other life commitments — and also hey! it’s none of your goddam business — and so the last time anyone in DC had a chance to catch the raucous foursome live was more than six years ago.
AC Newman is best known as the songwriter for Canadian power-pop band The New Pornographers. But he’s been playing in bands since the ’90s, and he’s been releasing solo records for 20 years. It was the 20th anniversary of that first solo record, The Slow Wonder, that brought Newman to The Miracle Theatre in DC for a recent show.
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony recently visited The Fillmore Silver Spring to celebrate the group’s 30th anniversary, and Chris Castillo was there to photograph the show.
Headliner Destroy Boys recently led a night of empowering punk music with support from Sasami and Chokecherry at 9:30 Club.
Los Angeles’s Dawes, led by lead singer and songwriter Taylor Goldsmith, uniquely combine the lyrical sensibility of vintage Laurel Canyon songwriters with a hard-rocking attack that borrows from both the Grateful Dead and Neil Young. With Winnetka Bowling League opening for them, the band brought the best of contemporary SoCal sounds to the Warner Theatre in their recent performance there on the Oh Brother Tour.
Thirty years ago, German blues enthusiast Thomas Ruf founded the label that shares his name. More recently, the label celebrated its 30th anniversary at the Warner Theatre with a lineup of one-woman band Ghalia Volt, classic blues rockers Canned Heat, and Samantha Fish, who launched her career on the label as part of Girls With Guitars.
