Sitting in a bustling coffee shop in Seattle, it occurs to me that Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn — simply Mirah for the purposes of her records — has nothing to prove.
Since her full-length solo debut, You Think It’s Like This but Really It’s Like This, she’s carved out a niche for herself as a much loved and respected member of the Northwest indie elite, winning accolades for a series of lo-fi albums that have met with broad critical acclaim.
I’m also talking with cellist Lori Goldston and accordionist Kyle Hanson. They don’t have much to prove either. They’ve made their marks in Northwest art music as founding members of Black Cat Orchestra, Spectratone International, and the duo The Shifting Light; they’ve scored silent films and collaborated on dance, music, and theatre projects. Goldston has played with artists like Nirvana, David Byrne, and John Doe.
Though Goldston and Hanson have, in fact, already once collaborated with Mirah by way of Black Cat Orchestra — on To All We Stretch the Open Arm, a collection of politically-minded covers of works by Kurt Weill, Stephen Foster, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and others — Share This Place is a whole other animal.
For the past fourteen years, Mesa, Arizona natives Jimmy Eat World have made a career out of their own angst-ridden youth.
Experimental indie rapper Sole, A.K.A. Tim Holland, has released a grim new music video with his three-piece backing group, The Skyrider Band. The video is for their song “Stupid Things Implode On Themselves,” featured on their collaborative self-titled debut.
Savannah, Georgia-based metal band Kylesa have announced their return to Europe with a tour in support of Time Will Fuse Its Worth, their October 2006 release on Prosthetic Records. Starting January 26, they will be performing around Europe for nearly a month with sludge metal band and hometown friends Baroness.
What Would Jesus Buy? sounds like a reactionary right-wing religious slogan. However, this documentary is a relatively left-wing protest of over-consumption — particularly America’s extreme shopping at Christmas time — led by fictitious Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.
I don’t post video clips often because they seem to get deleted from YouTube soon afterward, but I can’t resist this one! I use this in my “Exotic Dance in Contemporary Film” presentation, and this is the first time I’ve found it online.
There are a number of ways to interpret Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (Drawn And Quarterly), the graphic novel released as part of his indie cult series Optic Nerve. Part race-relations study, part real-world relationships examination, the story raises a number of questions, but never does the disservice of answering them outright.
Noise/grind band The Locust recently suffered a robbery during a show in St. Louis. After performing on November 25, they returned to their tour van to find it broken into and a significant amount of their personal belongings missing.
Since its debut in 2004, piano/guitar folk duo White Magic has challenged listeners and stayed true to the vision of songwriter Mira Billotte.
Second Nature Recordings has begun taking pre-orders for Voices, the upcoming debut album from Able Baker Fox. The four-piece melodic rock outfit is comprised of guitarist Nathan Ellis (The Casket Lottery, Coalesce) and three members of Small Brown Bike.
A bizarre synthesis of psychedelia and electronica, Ultimate Reality again unites visual artist Jimmy Joe Roche with electro-spazz musician Dan Deacon.