Tampa Calling

Lots of new concert announcements arrived in my email box over the past three days. I’ve paired the new with a few that slipped through the cracks for your concert planning convenience. For a complete breakdown of area shows, visit our Upcoming Concerts page.

Saturday, Aug. 8 Sons of Bill, Skipper’s Smokehouse, Tampa, $7 in advance/$10 dos; ON SALE NOW.

Friday, Aug. 14 Tracy Byrd, Dallas Bull, Tampa, $9.95 in advance, $15 at the door; ON SALE NOW.

Sunday, Aug. 23: White Rabbits w/The Fiery Furnaces, The Social, Orlando, $13 in advance, $15 dos; ON SALE NOW.

Friday, Sept. 04: Soja w/The Movement, State Theatre, St. Petersburg, $15; ON SALE NOW.

Friday, Sept. 04 Lee “Scratch” Perry, The Social, Orlando, $20 in advance, $25 dos; ON SALE NOW.

Wednesday, Sept. 16: Living Colour (pictured above), Jannus Landing, St. Petersburg, $15 in advance, $18 dos; ON SALE NOW. Read the rest of this entry »

Scotland’s indie rock foursome Frightened Rabbit, fronted by brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison, hits several festivals (including Pitchfork) and makes a few solo stops this July. The band (pictured at left, photo by Dave Gourley at Kelvingrove Museum) has just announced that it will return to the states for a late summer-early fall tour that kicks off in Morrison, Colo., and ends at The Social in Orlando. They also debuted a new song and played some intriguing covers at Off the Beaten Track, an ongoing video music project (check that out HERE). Here are some highlights from the release (tour dates after the jump):

The foursome will team up with friends and countrymen, The Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks for a raucous Scottish invasion of the States. The band will headline the anthemic rock-filled jaunt, which kicks off in Salt Lake City on September 14, following their appearance at the Monolith Festival in Colorado, alongside Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Girl Talk and the Walkmen. Read the rest of this entry »

Los Angeles Sludge-metal gods Big Business wear their name well. They  deliver a big, low-end, rumble-your-guts sound, and obviously mean business while doing it. That’s to be expected considering that bassist/singer Jared Warren and former Murder City Devil, drummer Coady Willis, are also members in a band called The Melvins. Maybe you’ve heard of them?

Having already gained notoriety for their 2007 LP Here Come The Waterworks, BB are set to release their new album Mind The Drift on Hydra-Head Records come May 12.  They have jumped the gun and set out on a North American tour in support of it that brings them to Czar in Ybor on April 30 and The Social in Orlando on May 1 along with opener Tweak Bird; another L.A. band that judging by their music could be mistaken for a Death From Above 1979 reincarnation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where to begin? Last Thursday seems like so long ago, the start of a very long weekend of incredible music. With the Harvest Of Hope festival bringing bands by the boatload to Florida, many of them played shows throughout the state before and after the weekend. I (with my girlfriend and a few other friends) went to four shows in six days across the state. I did my best to document all of this with pictures and video; and even managed to score a short video interview with Bryce Dessner of The National. Read the rest of this entry »

Girl Talk
Sat., March 7, Club Firestone, Orlando, $15 in advance/$18 dos, clubfirestone.com

One of the hottest DJs on the scene right now isn’t really a DJ at all. Girl Talk — the stage name and dance-music project of 27-year-old Pittsburgh native Gregg Gillis — is more an electronic music phenomenon than anything else. His fourth album, 2008’s Feed the Animals, impressed all-manner of respected music pundits despite being almost entirely composed of several hundred samples from other artists’ songs.

Gillis is among the fast-rising faction of laptop rockers. He calls what he does “pop song re-contextualizations,” which are like mash-ups, but with no less than 15 song samples in any given track. But you won’t find him digging in hole-in-the-wall records stores, rifling through dusty bins or awaiting the latest shipment of retro European LPs. In fact, obscurity is the one thing he tries to avoid.

“To me, the gold mine is the radio,” Gillis said in a phone interview a few weeks ago, during a between-show break. “You turn it on and ideally, you discover songs that people are familiar with and you make something new of them.”

Gillis is looking for music that makes an emotional connection, those Top 40 pop songs that imprinted themselves on our psyches in our formative years and have hung around in our gray matter ever since. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, I thought …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead was an amazing metal band name wasted on some Austin indie rockers. Then I heard Worlds Apart, the band’s ambitious, anthemic, self-indulgent yet criminally underrated 2005 album, and I realized these guys rule.  I finally caught them live in November of 2006. To say they left me wanting more would be too kind.

Disappointment set in when I happened upon their upcoming tour dates. February 23 at The Social over in Orlando. Nothing in our vicinity.

Why am I so disappointed? Well, I’m of the opinion that …Trail of Dead owes us a decent concert.

What happened on-stage at Jannus Landing on November 18, 2006?

Read the rest of this entry »