The Pitchfork Music Festival has finally arrived! It kicks off at 6 pm CDT tonight with z=z local heroes Mission of Burma, performing their album Vs. in its entirety. If you’re not able to attend, the entire festival is being webcast. Given the high potential for a Midwestern version of a Glastonbury-style mudfest – the […]
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Pitchfork highlights: Saturday, Jarvis Cocker
July 20, 2008How did I ever forget how much I love Jarvis Cocker, the charismatic former frontman and principal of Pulp, especially since he wrote one of my favourite songs of all time? (“Common People,” off the 1995 album Different Class.) His self-titled solo album came out in 2006, and he played a set at the Pitchfork […]

Pitchfork highlights: Friday, Mission of Burma
July 20, 2008I’m not going to comprehensively blog the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival; instead I’ll point you here and here and here (and I’m sure you’ll find others, if you’re interested). Rather, I’m just going to focus on one artist from each day. Unsurprisingly, Mission of Burma was my personal highlight from Friday, playing their album Vs […]

Free Pitchfork Fest downloads at eMusic
July 2, 2008Probably the single biggest contributor to having a good time at a live performance is familiarity with the music. The Pitchfork Music Festival grasps this point – as it has for the last couple of years, they’ve teamed up with eMusic to provide free downloads of songs by artists who’ll be performing. If you plan […]

2008 roundup
January 1, 2009Now that 2008 is actually over, time for a quick round-up of some music highlights. This is a highly idiosyncratic list: it’s not comprehensive, it’s not definitive, and it’s not scientific. It’s really just about what I liked enough to spend a lot of time listening to this year. I hope that there’s some stuff […]

Upcoming: Bumbershoot 2008
August 29, 2008Labor Day weekend is upon us, and that means it’s time for the annual party under the Space Needle. The lineup for Bumbershoot 2008 features a number of zed equals zee faves, including The Weakerthans, !!!, Battles, Dan Deacon, Tapes ‘n Tapes, Band of Horses, and Death Cab for Cutie. After a few years of […]

Threesome: 90s Britpop revisited
August 22, 2008Between seeing Jarvis Cocker at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and watching the Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett promo for the Olympics, I’ve thinking about the era in the 1990s when the sun never set on the Britpop empire. Led by Blur (above), Oasis, and Pulp, British acts dominated the UK charts with songs about, well, […]

2007 in review: The National
January 19, 2008The National – how I love thee. Their album Alligator, released at the end of 2005, may be the first CD that I’ve destroyed through overplaying (it hasn’t left my car for two years, and is now skipping uncontrollably), and they almost single-handedly elicited a trip to Chicago, where they played the 2006 Pitchfork Music […]