Before emo became something of a joke marketed to emotionally overwrought teens, bands like Braid and Mineral and the early Appleseed Cast were lumped in with that genre. By the turn of the century, though, the Appleseed Cast had already evolved into something else. Experimenting more with the noises you…

It’s easy to forget that Judas Priest existed at the dawn of heavy metal, because the band’s most well-known releases are rightly affiliated with the new wave of British heavy metal. Starting out in 1969 in Birmingham, England (the home of Black Sabbath), the group solidified its classic lineup in…

Joe Piza, Dave Beckhouse and Brian Wilson were in hardcore band Warsaw Surrenders around the middle of the last decade. That band split too soon, but the three started playing together again before long and recruited former Vaux bassist Greg Daniels and vocalist Keith Curts, who had been playing in…

The War On Drugs (due Sunday, October 30, at the hi-dive with Purling Hiss and Carter Tanton) started to take shape when Adam Granduciel moved back to the East Coast from Oakland to settle in Philadelphia. Once there, Granduciel began to play music with various people in the area, including…

PORTISHEAD at 1STBANK CENTER | 10/27/11For the last show of its tour, Portishead put on one of the finest performances anyone is likely to see this year or any year. The band’s energy, urgency and intensity kept building and building until the end when the instrumentation seemed to collide with…

Portishead (due Thursday, October 27th, at 1stBank Center) wasn’t the first band associated with the aesthetic of trip hop but it is the most commercially successful with major hits in the 1990s. The thing that made the band so remarkable was that the sound it crafted wasn’t one that was…

CHECK YO PONYTAIL 2 at THE SUMMIT | 10/25/11The highlight of the evening last night came in Big Freedia’s set when she showed the audience that she wasn’t one to just tell people how to bump, but that she knew how to do it herself, and as she proved, she…

For many people in America, Portishead was their introduction to the lush, soulful, experimental music collectively stamped as trip-hop. From its debut, 1994’s Dummy, Portishead struck a wide audience with its seemingly complete disconnect from the grunge and alternative rock that dominated the era. The outfit’s cool, dusky compositions were…

When Adam Granduciel moved to Philadelphia nearly a decade ago, he met lo-fi rock wunderkind Kurt Vile and started the first incarnation of the War on Drugs. Vile has long since moved on, but Granduciel kept at it, and his songwriting evolved over the course of two EPs before the…

Maria Taylor grew up in Alabama, where she was part of the band Little Red Rocket with her friend Orenda Fink. Fink and Taylor ended up moving to Athens, Georgia, where they formed Azure Ray, a band that ultimately landed in Omaha and became one of the groups that helped…

Maybe the name Colfax Speed Queen refers to a weird alcohol- or amphetamine-induced daydream someone had while doing laundry at Smiley’s. Or perhaps it’s a reference to some clandestine encounter with a tweaked-out lady of the evening. Whatever the case, here’s what we know: Colfax Speed Queen (due on Thursday,…

You can’t help but calm the fuck down when you move to Colorado from inner-city Chicago,” notes Craig Fleischman. The drummer, better known as Craig Nice, is one-half of the duo Gauntlet Hair, an outfit he started with Andy Rauworth, a high-school friend with whom he fled the Windy City…

Leave it to a South American record label to release a comprehensive double-album retrospective of this influential local death/grind metal band. Beginning with releases dating back to 2002, this compilation showcases the band from all angles, from its gritty and savage attack on organized religion on songs like “Jesus Is…

The songs on this album conjure the sensation of something unexpected in the weather — unseasonably cold nights in summer or uncommonly warm nights in winter — that makes the mind both nostalgic and able to function with the kind of clarity that makes subtleties easier to notice. Joshua Trinidad’s…

Sweden’s Opeth started out as a fairly straightahead death-metal band, but in 1992, after drastic lineup changes, the band, led by singer and guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt, slowly developed the sound it would bring to its 1995 debut, Orchid. Sonically, Opeth recalls ’70s art-rock bands like Jethro Tull mixed with late-’80s…

Spencer Krug is probably best known to the world as a former member of Montreal’s Wolf Parade. Since that band took a break, Krug has been prolific, to say the very least. In addition to having been a member Frog Eyes, he’s currently still a member of Sunset Rubdown and…

Guitarist Paul Christus and drummer Tony Corona should be given some kind of medal for weathering numerous lineup changes over the years and sticking to their guns. With their long-running band, all capitals, these two guys have rearranged the roster more times than Spinal Tap, but they’ve never given up…

Howard Jones (due Saturday, October 15, at Summit Music Hall) was one of the most successful and popular synth-pop artists of the 1980s. Jones’s songs were uplifting, but never saccharine, and he had a knack for articulating the concerns and hopes of people regardless of age or background…