ARTS Pick: Claire Lynch

You may not know Claire Lynch by name, but if you’ve ever listened to Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris or Linda Ronstadt, you likely know her voice. Lynch has provided backing vocals for musical greats while working on her solo career, penning innovative tunes that push the boundaries of what bluegrass is and can be. In […]

The Rainey Day Quartet gets downtown grooving

If you’ve been on the Downtown Mall this summer, you’ve likely seen four young musicians set up in front of Kilwin’s, beside a white board that reads “Help Us Pay For College” propped in a guitar case with a shallow sea of coins and crumpled bills pooling at its base. The Rainey Day Quartet formed […]

The Equalizer 2 can’t match its predecessor

Denzel, by his presence alone, has the ability to make a bad movie good and a good movie great, and director Antoine Fuqua is best known for swinging for the stylistic fences on even the most boring dud of a story. That shared enthusiasm for craftsmanship is part of what made their previous collaborations on […]

ARTS Pick: Hop Along

Frontwoman Frances Quinlan of Hop Along is the modern-day musical equivalent of Walt Whitman. Her poetic lyrics jump from brilliant and obscure to shockingly relatable in the space of a few notes. “Pale as a banshee sun / Think I should stop checking myself out in the windows of cars,” sings Quinlan on “How Simple,” […]

ARTS Pick: When Particles Collide

After finding similar rock ’n’ roll roots while acting together in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Sasha Alcott and Chris Viner joined forces to create When Particles Collide, a fast-paced, uncompromising band whose sound defies definition—or any sort of containment, for that matter. The duo tours full-time under its own record label and with the […]

Sorry to Bother You is seriously entertaining

Revolutions are always messy affairs, and so is revolutionary art. But without the trailblazing, reckless spirit of innovation and true inspiration, you don’t get works of originality and beauty like Sorry to Bother You, the debut film from writer-director, musician and overall Renaissance man Boots Riley of The Coup. Riley’s vision is a wide-ranging one, […]

ARTS Pick: The Cocoanuts

One of the earliest Marx Brothers comedies, The Cocoanuts finds the farcical siblings at their wackiest. Groucho runs the eponymous seedy hotel in Florida, but in reality spends most of his time trying to sell questionable land to unwitting tourists. As with most of the troupe’s wacky tales, the plot is less important than the […]

Sundream. rocks hard with an emotional core

Craigslist isn’t just the go-to site for selling your car or finding a place to live—it’s also a surprisingly effective way to start a band. This is the realization John Tosches had last July when he posted on the site to gauge interest in a new musical project. Jordan Chambers describes how he stumbled across […]

ARTS Pick: MUSE at the Paramount

Hardcore indie rock’s Muse is iconic to the point that fans are filling theaters to watch the rockers fill stadiums via the Drones World Tour broadcast in HD. It’s not quite a live show, but the 360-degree recording, which showcases the best of the band’s 2015-2016 concerts on the big screen, will make you feel […]