ARTS Pick: Algiers hailed as the quintessential protest band

Experimental group Algiers might be this generation’s quintessential protest band. Hailing from Atlanta, the four-man act creates music with lyrics as radical and furious as its sound, with influences ranging from post-punk to Southern gospel. The band’s name refers to a famous anti-colonial battle, and its tracks usually comment on America’s history of slavery and […]

ARTS Pick: Seductive Sounds brings the funk

With roots in Washington, D.C., the funky subgenre of go-go music is almost exclusively celebrated in the mid-Atlantic area—and Seductive Sounds Gogo Band is the newest incarnation on the local scene. Formed by members of the renowned Double Faces Gogo Band, including Blacko Da Rappa, the band embodies the blend of funk, R&B and hip-hop […]

ARTS Pick: Dinosoul experiments with indie sound

Pittsburgh’s dark-pop quartet Dinosoul takes experimental-indie to the next level, mixing synth, reverb and delay-heavy guitar riffs with emotional vocals and health and wellness. Yes, that’s right. Band founder Donny Donovan is also a health, wellness and fitness coach, and Dinosoul offers a mission statement at its shows that asks “the universe to allow it […]

ARTS Pick: Liz Cooper goes from golf clubs to rock clubs

The psychedelic folk-rock band Liz Cooper and the Stampede formed at the unlikeliest of places—a golf course. Two things in life came easily to Cooper: golf and music. So, when she moved to Nashville, she found work at a country club, and eventually recorded her first EP with some co-workers. From there, she added Ky […]

Movie review: Hereditary taps the dark side of the psyche

Ari Aster’s Hereditary may be the best, scariest, and most effective American horror film in years. Not because it has the loudest scares, not because its ghosts have the creepiest faces, and not because its deaths are the most gruesome (though it does have its share). Writer-director Aster’s feature film debut builds dread at an […]

Jeremy and Allyson Taylor’s environmental art approach

When it comes to visual art (paintings in particular), you can’t throw a rock without hitting a pastoral fantasy. Which may be why local artists Jeremy and Allyson Taylor’s reverence for nature comes as such a surprise.  “I definitely go to the grotesque,” Allyson says, “because I find it really beautiful and interesting. And sometimes disgusting and […]

Blackberry Smoke expands musically on new album

Bands rarely come as well-rounded as Blackberry Smoke. For fans of open-minded Southern rock, the five-piece outfit covers all the bases—pensive highway songs, distorted, arena-ready scorchers and bluesy explorations doused in Dixie grit. The group emerged from Atlanta in the early 2000s, and, as required by independent bands since the turn of the century, hit the […]

Gorilla Theater amends Dennis Lehane’s Coronado 

Nearly every Christmas, as the Stewart family unwraps its gifts, someone asks, “Who got the new Dennis Lehane book?” The answer is usually “everyone,” says Kendall Stewart, exaggerating only slightly about her family’s Lehane“obsession,” which began more than a decade ago when Stewart’s mother photographed the Boston-born crime and mystery writer. They’ve read most everything […]

Artist Frank Walker captures the value of human life

It’s a humid but not hot Saturday evening in early May. Jazz floats through the auditorium of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, filling in the spaces between laughter, delighted gasps and conversational murmurs in the next room. Dressed in brown slip-on shoes, relaxed fit jeans, a short-sleeved chambray shirt and a dark blue […]

ARTS Pick: Car Wash replay brings the funk

“Working at the car wash / Working at the car wash, yeah.” Those of a certain age can’t glide through the auto wash without humming a few lines from the 1976 movie Car Wash. Starring Richard Pryor and George Carlin, the time-stamped comedy follows the employees and owner at a Los Angeles car wash who […]