Tami Fertig:
Arab Strap
Cherubs
Imagine this: a sweet and simple guitar melody floating lazily atop the slow and steady beat of a drum machine -- over and over and over again.
Coheed and Cambria is "progressive rock, definitely not run-of-the-mill." Occasionally lumped into emo, or emo-core, the group's rock stylings are comparable to those of close friends and frequent tourmates, Thursday and Thrice.
Ben Kweller
On My Way
Ben Kweller wrote his first album during puberty, lived his adolescence in a recording studio and now, at 22, professes to know life's transcendental truths.
As it is at any concert featuring a band that has recently been on Total Request Live, the average age of those attending the Simple Plan show couldn't have been over 16, and that's including the small upstairs 21-and-over bar area.
For their third visit to Philadelphia, Broken Social Scene invited their brass section (members of Stars, the night's opening act) on stage for a sultry night of indie rock.
Tami Fertig:
The Magnetic Fields
Get Lost
Lest we forget, Magnetic Fields mastermind Stephin Merritt was making records long before 69 Love Songs. That one was okay, but c'mon.
Dave Scher wishes people would dance at shows like they used to. One half of the duo that makes up California-based All Night Radio, Scher remembers his upbringing in Long Beach, California as a time when people danced at shows.
Lou Reed
Animal Serenade
Warner Brothers
Lou Reed's 5,000th live album, Animal Serenade, shows that the 62-year-old legend can still put on a great show.
Tami Fertig
Q Lazzarus
"Goodbye Horses"
Y'know that scene in The Silence of the Lambs when serial killer Buffalo Bill tucks his crotch between his legs and dances naked to an obscure '80s synth-pop song before sewing a suit made of human skin?
Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of The Walkmen, isn't buying into any of the buzz. To him, the New York rock revival is nothing more than a press creation.
"I don't buy any of that shit," he explains.
Leithauser and bassist Peter Bauer left The Recoys in order to join The Walkmen, a group founded by three former members of Jonathan Fire*Eater -- Walter Martin, Paul Maroon and Matt Barrick.
Fire*Eater was a critical success, and one of many "next big things" to never actually make it in the mainstream.
Michael Franti is 6'6" and thin -- wiry, some might say. Long dreadlocks peek out the front and back of the hat he customarily wears onstage, but they never seem to stay contained.