Thanks for stopping by. Ear Candy is experiencing technical difficulties at the moment. In the meantime click here to get your fix of local music goodness.
Upon entering Showbox Market for dance-funk duo Chromeo's sold-out show I immediately noticed a somewhat unsurprisingly large amount of people dressed in their '80s best. 3-D glasses, pink tights, Miami Vice-style blazers and plenty of neon colors glowed amid the audience, making it very clear what they were there to do - get down with their bad selves to the band's throwback synth smoothness.
Opener Holy Ghost laid down some impressive modern electronica, warming the crowd up with an uptempo disco/house approach. But the openers had barely cleared their gear from the stage when the anxious attendees started shouting Chromeo's name to the tune of the familiar Wizard of Oz palace guard/LL Cool J's "Goin' Back to Cali" chant - Chro-MEEE-Oh...OHHHHHH-OH. The crowd was already in the palms of P-Thugg and Dave 1's hands before the show even started.
Chances are if you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing the outlaw cowboys known as Brent Amaker and the Rodeo in concert then you know about Tiny Dancer. He’s the slim and silent guy dressed in all black from head to toe who slings a mean six string. Okay, so everyone in Brent Amaker in the Rodeo is always garbed in black from head to toe, which makes them look like the biggest bunch of badass goth cowboys this side of the Mississippi, but you still know Tiny Dancer when you see him.
While Amaker is the man who writes the country hits, Tiny Dancer is the guy who makes them shine with solid fretwork that never oversells a song’s merits and never undersells its groove. Unfortunately a few weeks ago Tiny Dancer broke his leg and is out of commission and he doesn’t have insurance to cover the costs of hospital bills. Adding insult to injury is that he can’t perform his day job as a house painter for three months due to his broken leg.
To help Tiny Dancer’s recovery, both financially and spiritually, there’s a benefit show going down at the Sunset Saturday featuring Nightrain, The Young Evils and Daniel G. Harman & the Trouble Starts. The show will be emceed by Brent Amaker himself and will feature DJ Broken Tiny Dancer spinning tunes on the ones and twos. Tickets for the show cost $10.
While the music Saturday night will be fantastic, there will also be a raffle for some pretty sweet prizes and an auction for a red velvet cake made by Brent Amaker from his grandmother’s recipe. The raffle includes a pair of tickets to any Crocodile show, tickets to see Grand Hallway and Head and the Heart, a gift certificiate for a massage and more. The raffle will also include the first pair of tickets for Ear Candy’s FunOfficial Bumbershoot Party. The full list of items being offered up to support Tiny Dancer is below.
THEESatisfaction has taken Seattle by storm. They stunned at the Capital Hill Block Party and turned a lot of industry heads at SXSW back in March. Now, Seattle is taking more notice of this emerging femme rap duo, embracing their jazzed-out boho “one love” vibe and scooching over a tad, anticipating their dominance. Real-life couple Cat and Stasia are breaking down what you THOUGHT you knew about women in the hip hop world, spinning it around and dishing it out in a smart, aware, and irrevocably cool way.
THEESatisfaction aren’t just rappers. Sure, they can lay down a solid acapella flow with ease, but their stunning live soul interludes and choruses are the sweet, sweet icing on the cake. The Columbia City Theater literally set the stage for their brainy, soul-infused, sci-fied performance on Saturday night. They owned the theater, Cat strutting around and punctuating Stasia’s crisp flow with cooing backing vocals. They wear their sexuality on their sleeve, speaking positively and with conviction about who they are (self-proclaimed “Black Weirdos”).
Editor's note: Ear Candy's Brent Stecker spent the past few days in Chicago and while there he visited Grant Park during Lollapalooza. Out of the dozen or so bands he saw live only one inspired him enough to write some words about what he witnessed. That band was Soundgarden. Here's what Brent thought about the group's biggest reunion set to date:
In its heyday Soundgarden was never the biggest band, nor was it exactly the most important. But now that the Seattle-based four-piece is back to doing what it does best — rocking its heavier-than-heavy doom metal riffs, frenzied mosh-pit anthems and sweet but dark psychedelia to adoring hard rock fans — it is apparent just how vital Soundgarden was, is, and could still be.
Soundgarden continued to blaze its reunion tour trail last weekend with two shows in Chicago. The first show, which happened Aug. 5 at the Vic Theatre, was in a rather intimate setting as the band performed a 22-song set before a crowd of around 1,400. The second set went down with a bit more grandeur before a quite larger audience at Lollapalooza. The shows were the second and third concerts the band has performed since its breakup in 1997.
While Soundgarden rocking stadiums in 2010 is great news, to me that's not the best part of what went down over the weekend. The most interesting part of the Chicago shows were the set lists, which saw the band digging deep into its catalog to play plenty of older material and even perform a song live for the first time ("4th of July"). This continues the trend the band started with its April show at the Showbox by not relying on its hits and catering its sets toward the hardcore Soundgarden fans. "Jesus Christ Pose," "Face pollution" and "Mailman" were a few of the deeper cuts that made the set lists that weren't performed in Seattle. The set lists for both Chicago shows more or less contained the same songs just in different order with a few exceptions ("Pretty Noose, "Superunknown," "Head Down").
Truckasaurus isn’t your typical Seattle band so it makes sense that the group’s elctro-meets-hip-hop mashup at Neumos tonight won’t be your typical show.
The show, dubbed Kevin Collabo (named after this guy), will see the Truck create musical backdrops for more than 30 of Seattle’s finest rappers to use as their lyrical playgrounds. Merging Truck’s instrumental dance music with Seattle’s hip-hop elite is the local music equivalent of chocolate and peanut butter, which should make tonight’s show a memorable, and musically delicious, experience.
The list of participating rappers reads like a who’s who of everyone who has made a splash in the local hip-hop scene during the past few years. Champagne Champagne, Spaceman, Ra Scion, Geologic, Grynch, Tislon, Sol, Mash Hall and more will take the stage during what will likely be a series of one-off live collaborations. Since Truck’s job has been to create beats, which is something that can be done without interacting with a vocalist, many of the MCs will meet the band for the first time on stage tonight.
Cotton Jones are playing at The Sunset Tavern this upcoming Sunday, August 8th, sometime after 9 p.m. for $8. Mike Ramos does an excellent job of writing about upcoming shows here on Earcandy, but I wanted to take a moment and highlight this one in particular because I think will almost certainly be worth your time to attend it.
First - who are Cotton Jones? Essentially, they are the most recognizable members of the defunct band Page France, Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw, who now write and play brilliant, beautiful, and quirky southern folk rock instead of the brilliant, beautiful, quirky, and cute pop songs of Page France. They hail from Baltimore, Maryland, and are currently on tour promoting their newest LP, Tall Hours In The Glowstream, out August 24th on Suicide Squeeze. If you have never heard them before, I recommend that you start with this Daytrotter set. They also have a really nice KEXP set here and another Daytrotter set here (I'm not as crazy about the other songs in this set, but Spring To My Ear, featured here, is among my favorite songs that Nau has ever penned). Their first album, Paranoid Cocoon, was my favorite album of 2009, and was the album that defined my summer last year. The one song I have heard from their upcoming album doesn't disappoint.
Upon entering Showbox Market for dance-funk duo Chromeo's sold-out show I immediately noticed a somewhat unsurprisingly large amount of people dressed in their '80s best. 3-D glasses, pink tights, Miami Vice-style blazers and plenty of neon colors glowed amid the audience, making it very clear what they were there to do - get down with their bad selves to the band's throwback synth smoothness.
C
T
S
T
C
