Shaboozey

Wednesday 10/30 at John Paul Jones Arena Shaboozey may be third on the bill for award-winning country rap headliner Jelly Roll, but he’s already proven to have much of what mainstream music fans want: a No. 1 track (“A Bar Song [Tipsy]”), big name collabs (Beyoncé), and the strength of a heady country-hip-hop mix capable […]

Jonathan Richman

Wednesday 10/16 at The Southern Café and Music Hall In many ways, Jonathan Richman has traveled far from the emotive rock ‘n’ roll where he made his original splash with The Modern Lovers in the early 1970s. Emotive, jubilant, and at times, the lonesome reflections of a sensitive young man, the originality of the Boston-based […]

An otherwise brilliant version of The Scottish Play

“We do it with the lights on,” says The American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse website about its use of “universal lighting.” So right up front you know that whatever you see in its elegant, woody environs will take place with the house lights aglow.  Understandably, in its staunch attempt to maintain historical accuracy wherever possible, […]

STRFKR with Holy Wave and Happy Sad Face

Wednesday 9/25 at The Jefferson Theater It’s probably unfair to reduce a band that’s been plugging away in various forms since 2007 to wimpy dance music for disinterested millennials. It’s also likely giving an unfair shake to a reasonably successful group if you suggest that people like it, or tolerate it en masse, because vocalist […]

Southern Culture on the Skids with The Woggles

Thursday 9/19 at The Southern Café and Music Hall Southern Culture on the Skids has been banging around its campy country-surf rockabilly for decades, with trio Mary Huff (bass, vocals), Dave Hartman (drums), and Rick Miller (guitar, vocals) long outlasting the original four-piece that Miller co-founded in the mid-1980s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Since […]

Andrew Bird and Nickel Creek with Mike Viola 

Ting Pavilion, July 17 Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird has been in a few noteworthy bands and has released or joined in on more records than we have space to discuss here. The singer and songwriter first came to fame collaborating with swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers in the late 1990s and went on to put […]

Fridays after Five: Shagwüf with Holy Roller

Ting Pavilion, July 19 On its face, it seems awfully early in the evening to lose it for the kind of rock ’n’ roll you’ll get out of Shagwüf. Then again, with that Fridays after Five offer (um, free), you can’t exactly complain about it either. A mainstay of local music stages, the self-proclaimed “sweet […]

Achieving maximum heaviness and then some

A metal band in that they definitely sound “heavy” across a large swath of their six album, full-length catalog (big riffs, distorted guitars, emphatic and aggressive vocals), it’s helpful to think of Baroness in terms of pre- and post-bus accident. After the tragic descent of a bus near Bath, England, in August 2012, things changed […]

Look into it

Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. […]