LCD Soundsystem and Justice headline the McDowell Mountain Music Festival, with supporting acts including Alvvays, Slow Pulp, Confidence Man, Summer Salt, and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.
Sir Woman's bouncy bedroom pop rests on a foundation of synths and drum machines and borrows more liberally from funk, soul, R&B, and disco than her sadgirl peers, with a sound closer to smoothcore, ready-for-NPR contemporaries like Lake Street Dive and easy-listening forebears like Hall and Oates.
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Sandstorm! SANDSTORM! SANDSTORM!!!11 dududududu! dudududududu dududududududu du dududududu
A night of brainless, pre-dubstep techno could be had by all!
Pioneering electronic multimedia performance artists Kraftwerk visit the Orpheum to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their seminal album Autobahn. The subject of uncountable parodies, from The Big Lebowski's Ueli Kunkle to Saturday Night Live's Sprockets, the Krautrock scene defined by Kraftwerk became an unstoppable cultural force whose influence is felt throughout all subsequent electronic music and manifesto-driven performance art. Realistically, I know we're not spending 60 bucks a head to see Kraftwerk, but wouldn't it be fun?
Cherry Glazerr alum Sasami Ashworth shares some of the indie sensibilities of her former band, but her solo project SASAMI ditches the lo-fi garage trappings in favor of a modern, electronic, girl-pop sound. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Ashworth delivers her emotionally raw lyrics in a rich mezzo-soprano that ranges from ironically detached to delicate and tremulous. When she sings "I'm such a cancer," one hopes she's comparing herself to the disease rather than indulging in her generation's weakness for astrology, an observation that encapsulates my crochety opinion of the pop cohort to which she belongs. Like Ashworth, Jia Pet's music draws heavily from Asian pop-idol aesthetics but skews more heavily toward break-beat, hyperpop and electronic sounds.
English duo King Hannah's wry, singer-songwriter aesthetic evokes contemporaries like Phoebe Bridgers, Courtney Barnett, and Sharon van Etten (a featured collaborator on the band's second album), but their titles and lyrics make clear that they trace their influences to slice-of-life Americana observers like Neil Young and, yes, John Prine. There's a strange menace lurking behind...