The first time I saw Kelvin Underwood perform was an experimental hip hop open mic in Ashland. Most of the other emcees played beats from their phones and lazily rhymed about weed. He came on stage with a massive Japanese taiko drum, and complex, polyrhythmic flows so sociopolitically savage

  Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian pop tart of “Call Me Maybe” fame, wrote more than 250 songs for her 2015 album, Emotion. That’s a pretty furious pace for someone that can’t even decide whether or not you should call her. Though he’s still a few songs short of  the

  In 1969, The Doors’ lead drinker Jim Morrison told Rolling Stone that he didn’t think the band of the future would be a band at all. “I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electrical … like an extension of the Moog synthesizer — a

I never cared for emo. Even just a few chords from bands like Dashboard Confessional, or Saves the Day, caused me to slip into some absurd macho stereotype of a high school football coach complete with the overwhelming urge to grab the band venting their inner turmoil by the ears

When describing a band, lounge, is kind of a dirty word, a term that’s most commonly employed to mean corny. Background. Elevator. But like all genres, it can be used for good or evil. It’s just that in a modern context, lounge is most commonly used for evil. But the

A few years back I attended a panel at SXSW entitled: “album release strategies for the future.” It had the prerequisite discussions of social media and internet strategy for looking forward. But what I found odd was that it only seemed to focus on albums whose production was still rooted

In his book, How Music Works, David Byrne of Talking Heads devotes a chapter to his theories on how the physical space in which music is performed in influences the music being created, as it encourages or discourages certain styles through acoustics and aesthetics. For example: the lush reverbs of

As a critic, I’ve made no secret of my antithapy towards the Rogue Valley’s penchant for folk revivalism. Not because I don’t like the music, but because of the rehashing of standards with lyrical themes about tripping the life hobotastic while fleeing the dust bowl while we are currently neck

Forrest Gump’s mom was wrong. Boxes of chocolates come with labels. If anything, life is more like a local music review column in that you never know what you’re going to get. The genres are as fluid as the talent, and the moment you think you know what’s coming (probably

For awhile now, the buzzword of choice in hip hop has been conscious. Ashland emcee Lxor heads in nearly the opposite direction, towards the occult. Topics on his new album, Moon Tow Drivers 1.0, released in late April,  include pentagrams, outer space, devils, secret computer viruses, fallen angels, conspiracies, and