The past year was a bittersweet one for local music. We said goodbye to Ashland venue, The Lounge South, as well as Musichead in Medford, but saw others like The Haul in Grants Pass and The Phoenix Clubhouse bring the thunder. We saw music licensing agencies try to shake down

I recently told a friend of mine he had to hear an EP from a new Ashland band sent in for review, and then put it on the stereo. We were less than 15 seconds into the opening track before he boisterously demanded a copy, as he had never heard

In the music world, much was said of Las Vegas band Imagine Dragons Grammy for Best Rock Performance in 2013. And while loads of it was the typical sort of slander directed at whomever’s on top, the more substantive conversation was about whether or not the lagging synth-driven sound should

It used to be hard as fudge to put out an album. They were an expensive pain in the ass and no one made one on a whim. Computers have changed that, generally for the better. But sometimes it’s not as clear cut. That’s the case with It, a new

It’s generally not that hard to choose what to write about in this column. But this issue there was too much solid new work from local bands to pass over. So here’s a flyover of new releases from the Southern Oregon music scene. Experiment Station, by Of Addicts and Dramatics

Being a local music critic requires keeping close tabs on the regional scene, on the net and in the clubs. But every so often a new band or artist pops appears on the radar, fully-formed, and you have to ask why it was you didn’t know about them. About 90

  Once upon a time bands were formed, wrote some songs, played some gigs, got some buzz and then went into the studio to put it on wax. Those days are largely gone. The new mode is more of an auteur model, in which an artist labors away in the

As we drown in technology, there has been a luddite revival in music. But while some have aped the sound of the past, cooing songs about farm life over standard banjo, others have applied the soft folk instrumentation to more abstract song forms free of sing-a-long choruses, hook lines, and

In the 10-part Time Life “History of Rock and Roll” documentary series, Ben E. King of “Stand by Me,” fame, discussed his adolescence in a doo-wop group, wandering the streets of New York like a gang, issuing challenges in four-part harmony to every other group they came across doing the

Medford Rockers The Evening Shades Set to Release Debut Album, ‘Alright’ If you want to understand medford band The Evening Shades approach to rock music, here’s an anecdote: During our interview at Medford’s Four Daughters pub, I mentioned how during a similar bar-interview with Rolling Stone, Mastodon frontman Brent Hinds