There’s a generally held belief that critics are hateful misers, lurking in a dark room while stroking a cat like a supervillain, waiting for any opportunity to blindside innocent, unsuspecting artists on nuclear blast. In my experience, they’re more akin to cultural patriots; fans so passionately committed to the cause

For a band called Slow Corpse, it rose from non-existence pretty quickly. The Ashland indie-rockers dropped a pair of EPs in late 2015, and immediately started packing clubs throughout the west, signing with Portland’s Cadillac of indie labels, Tender Loving Empire, in 2017. The band’s first record with TLE, Fables,

The Bouray doesn’t waste a lot of time. After bandleader John Johns exited The Rogue Underground late last year, he assembled a new group, and hit ground gigging. Barely a weekend goes by that The Bouray isn’t playing somewhere in the valley. And on March 10 they played the release

It’s said that we never really leave high school. For music critics of a certain age, that can be a problem, as they endlessly pine for the fading sounds of their fading youth. For my certain age, however, it bring the extra complication that music was something very different when

Writing about music has never exactly been straightforward. But it’s definitely getting harder to write about Americana. The genre is oversaturated, and so full of both modern and traditional conventions, that a lot of it just blends together. I can’t really say that about King Roy Wing, and their new

On the surface, drawing a clean line between the music of Intuitive Compass, and the solo work of guitar player Jason Dea West is a bit thorny. The warble of his distinctive voice and his deft finger-style attack on the resonator are the band’s Titanic-sized anchor, and that one-two punch

Ashland folksters The Brothers Reed launched several years ago as a leaner, more frequently bookable vehicle for brothers Aaron and Phil Reed’s songs than their nitro-charged bar band, Bucklerash. As an acoustic duo, they could play virtually anywhere, regardless of noise constraints or whether the rhythm section was available. The

Bands tend to release albums in two-year cycles. And a lot of Southern Oregon’s established acts had new releases in 2016, which made this year pretty thrilling. Almost everything that crossed the Rogue Sounds desk was something totally new, and much of it delivered. Here in no particular order were

There’s an old joke in Hollywood: How do you become a producer? You say, “I’m a producer.” It’s basically the same with indie music labels. Starting one requires little more than saying it exists and then behaving accordingly. But starting one, and running it well are different animals altogether. And

I fell in love with compilations when I was 17. My parents owned a small rental house, and one of the tenants that vacated it left behind a basket full of tapes and CDs. One of them was a compilation from Fat Wreck Chords, a small Bay Area record label.