​Yesterday I asked you all to defend your Dirty Projectors love in an opportunity to win a pair of tickets to tonight's show. Kenneth C. was the winner of the random drawing (congrats!), and here's what he and the rest of you said in defense of this strange little band:

"I sometimes wonder if there is something wrong with my ears. I definitely understand what you're saying about how 'to actively, regularly listen to Dirty Projectors is to enjoy music not because it's lovely, soothing or even palatable but because it's interesting,' but I still find their music absolutely beautiful. I completely love each singers' voice and their music (particularly on the last record) is the perfect blend of avant-garde guitar work/DIY production and R&B's vocals, movability, and swagger. I love DP because they make me dance embarrassingly but I'm too happy to care all while my intellect is being intrigued."

More >>

Duff McKagan's column runs every Thursday on Reverb. He writes about what music is circulating through his space every Monday. Slash plays a sold-out show at Showbox Sodo on Saturday.

​The first time I heard Slash play guitar was in 1984 in the basement of the Los Angeles townhome belonging to his mother, Ola, a woman who would later become like a surrogate mother to me during my early years in L.A.

Slash didn't have to try to impress--he just picked up an acoustic guitar and started to play. Up to that point, I really thought I had seen and heard the whole gamut of the talent pool of my age group in America. I had toured extensively with punk-rock bands, and had seen just about every band that came through Seattle from '79 to '84. But when Slash played in that basement that night, all I thought I knew was suddenly swept aside.

More >>

​"Yulia" is my favorite track off Wolf Parade's Expo 86, and I'm also loving the song's just-released new video. The clip was directed by Scott Coffey, who's also done clips for Death Vessel and Dan Boeckner's other band, Handsome Furs.

In the Soviet-era clip (it was shot in Portland), a blond cosmonaut is rocketed into space while his presumable girlfriend waits at home in anguish. Says Coffey:

Wolf Parade's Expo 86 has been the soundtrack of the summer of 2010 for me. When I first heard "Yulia" my head was flooded with images. The song is totally cinematic and has an urgent, longing drive that I wanted to try and express through images.

During the Cold War at the beginning of the Space Age, the Soviet Union was rumored to have two space programs - one a public program, the other a secret 'black' one, in which dangerous and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. Cosmonauts would be shot into orbit without the means or resources to get them home, stranded in an expanding orbit around earth, slowly pulling away, frozen in space for eternity.

I wanted to create a kind of formal and slightly nostalgic vibe. At the same time, I wanted it to feel untethered to an exact era -- not specifically in the past. I shot in Portland Oregon and a little in Romania and I was really inspired by Russian cinema and Communist propaganda posters.

It is indeed ambitiously cinematic, but Coffey pulls it off. If you're not reminded too much of Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler in Armageddon, it'll definitely tug at your heartstrings.

Click here to head to Bravely Done and watch "Yulia."

Laura Musselman

​Arcade Fire
KeyArena
Wednesday, Sept. 29

15 minutes before Arcade Fire took the KeyArena stage on Wednesday night, two men bellied up to a pair of urinals, unzipped, and started discussing the cups of beer that got them there. "How do I know if this cup is compostable or recyclable?" one man asked his friend.

90 minutes later, just before the Montreal-based kings and queens of Stateside indie rock wrapped up their set, frontman Win Butler announced that the night's show was particularly special because a dollar from every ticket sold was going to Partners In Health, a non-profit benefiting relief work in Haiti. The audience responded to this proclamation with loud cheers of self-congratulation.

Arcade Fire is the largest musical component of a movement that far transcends notes on a keyboard and strings on a guitar. It's a movement -- or at least a following -- of "Modern Kids," to borrow a Butler term, that wants to know that their beef was happy before it was slaughtered, that cares that the cup they drank their Bud Light from meets an appropriate afterlife, and that wants to feel as though they're not acting selfishly by purchasing a ticket to a rock concert, but are donating part of their disposable income to help the homeless and the hungry. That Arcade Fire is playing--if not coming close to filling--arenas is as much an indication of the growth of the movement as it is the growth of a fanbase specific to the band. At least in this town.

More >>

​Artist: Tim Kasher
Album: The Game of Monogamy
Label: Saddle Creek
Release date: October 5
Rating (Skip, Stream, or Buy): Skip
Local show: November 6 at the Tractor

As frontman of the Omaha indie rock outfit Cursive, Tim Kasher & co. released a couple of mediocre records in the past few years and two excellent records earlier in their careers. 2000's Domestica and 2003's The Ugly Organ were both concept albums, imaginatively riffing on clashing, divorcing couples and the commercial music industry, respectively. Kasher's new solo album, The Game of Monogamy, has a concept too, but it's a macho, puerile one -- wanting to fuck around. The Kasher camp is billing the album as "the score for our collective repression in the name of romance," a criticism of "relationships in a starched shirt society," but there's nothing so noble about this record. By Kasher's account, apparently if you're in any kind of faithful relationship, you're just a clueless stuffed shirt missing out on a whole lot of fun.

Worse than this silly narrow perspective, though, is that Kasher seems to have lost the spitting fire and rage he channeled in old Cursive songs like "Art Is Hard" and "Driftwood," replacing it with whiny sentiments like, "I wanna have sex with all my old girlfriends/ I swear it's just the familiarity I miss." He sounds like a hormonal frat boy instead of the 36-year-old man he is. There are times on the record when Kasher nears something like poignancy, like on the milky "Strays," which ditches the rest of the album's overstuffed instrumentation in favor of a toned-down acoustic guitar, or the part in "I'm Afraid I'm Gonna Die Here" when he sings, "The town's bloated with old folks' homes/ When we kick the bucket, who's to really know?" as flutes trill slowly along with his voice. Unfortunately, that's a rare touching moment. As the album winds down, on "The Prodigal Husband," Kasher seems to be asking his wife to take him back, now that he's gone out and had his fun, a request she unsurprisingly seems to be resisting. "I'm a grown man," Kasher sings at one point in the record. Start acting like one then.

​This isn't the first time that the dusty psch-rockers--guitarist/vocalist Justin Deary, bassist Bradford Button, and drummer Faustine Hudson--have promised a new record by spring,but it sounds like they're ready to make good this time. Says drummer Faustine Hudson:

"It just so happens we are in the beginning phases of mixing the new record. It is going to take your tequila-sippin' self and make ya wanna shake ur arse. Our "wintering" consists of finishing it up and then releasing it in late winter, early spring!"

This is one we're all looking forward to. Fingers crossed.

Expect the band to throw down plenty of material from the new record -- which, hopefully, is a lot like what they've been spraying around town these last few months -- when they play SW's REVERB Festival on Saturday, Oct. 9.

​
Bob Dylan does his own thing and doesn't back down for nobody -- not even the President. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, President Obama recounts seeing Dylan perform "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at D.C. event celebrating the Civil Rights era. Says the Prez:

Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage... comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves... That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise.

"Fuck, I'm old."

​From the first time I saw the name "Royal Unicorn" in the NW Karaoke Newsletter, I knew it was a bar I needed to check out. And I loved that it was on Richmond Beach Rd. I'm from Greenwood and that's like two neighborhoods away.

Last Friday I was fired up. It was the day after Springsteen's 61st birthday and I felt like celebrating so I decided to party with the good people of Shoreline. I spent most of my early years singing with Shoreline folk at the Peking Palace (R.I.P.) right on the city limits so I treated this as sort of a homecoming.

Anticipating a slow start, I decided to get there at 9:30--figuring the show started at nine. For some reason I didn't think it would be a Chinese restaurant, but a dive bar with a really cool name. I walked in the lounge entrance to a quiet room with three customers and no KJ. Karaoke didn't start until ten. It's always a bit uncomfortable coming into a place solo when it's that slow, but all it takes is a beer and a shot to fix that. I spotted their jukebox and immediately turned the place into my own.

More >>

Photo by Alex Crick

​Redwood Plan leader Lesli Wood is having a pretty good Wednesday; her band was just confirmed as local support for the upcoming Corin Tucker Band show at the Showbox at the Market (Portland-based band the Golden Bears are also on the bill). This is the Seattle debut of the former Sleater-Kinney frontwoman and a pretty dreamy opportunity for an artist like Wood, who was so highly influenced by S-K.

"I had my mind blown when I first saw Sleater-Kinney play in a living room in Detroit when I was barely 20 years old," said Wood when I spoke with her this morning. To get the chance to share the stage with any member of that band is one of the reasons I moved to Seattle years ago."

Congrats to Redwood Plan...You can learn more about Tucker's new project and pick up your tickets for the show over here.

Avatar Young Blaze has quite the background: born in Estonia, the Russian emcee lived and banged in Seattle's Central District and attended Garfield High before moving to Los Angeles, his current home, at the beginning of the year. And with three mixtapes out in the last nine months, his drive is respectable; the most recent, Russian Revolution, sports original production from the likes of local legend Jake One, Cam'ron's guy Araab Muzik and Trap Camp. But the big name collaborations are nothing new, and the tracks he's jumped on with the likes of Lil' Wayne and Alchemist are proof.

But among the mountains of kush and pistol-packing rhymes, his persona raises the question: can you be a skinny Russian kid and push gangsta rap? Well, yeah, yeah he can. As divisive as Young Blaze's been, and for all the disrespect he's earned on message boards and blog comment sections, Avatar speaks on what he knows and speaks it well. If The Game can get clowned on a dating show and Rick Ross can rap about Big Meech and Larry Hoover after his previous life as Correctional Officer Roberts, I'd say Avatar has a solid up on a decent amount of the "gangstas" in the credibility arena. Factor in the bars on bars he spits and banger beats he spits over, and you've got a real problem. Cosigned.