Robyn Hitchcock settled in at City Winery for the second time in just over a year, with just himself, a guitar, a harmonica and a piano as tools to enthrall and humor the collective room. Oh, and his wide-ranging internal thought process too. That’s pretty essential and has been his secret ingredient and common […]
FOTOBOM: ELECTRIC WIZARD, MIDNIGHT @ THE PALLADIUM
Do you like your doom metal with a heavy ladleful of occultism and leather-clad biker imagery? How about with a cannabis cloud that could suffocate a small village? Scores of battlevests were seen massing around the streets of Worcester last Friday in anticipation of a rare Stateside performance by Dorset England’s Electric Wizard as […]
FOTOBOM: TOOL, KILLING JOKE @ TD GARDEN
A bizarre clash of music fans took place this past summer, when the hotly anticipated, decade-plus return of Tool got Swifties all upset when Maynard and company’s Fear Inoculum banished Taylor Swift’s Lover from the top spot on Billboard after one short week, by far her shortest reign at the number one spot. And in the […]
FOTOBOM: THE NATIONAL @ AGGANIS ARENA
I said it when I last caught up with The National, headlining two nights at a New York City festival of their own curation last year, and it bears repeating now: it’s still a little weird for this band, of all bands, to have made the leap to arenas. But Thursday’s sold-out show at […]
FOTOBOM: OH SEES, PRETTIEST EYES, OCEANS OF THE MOON @ THE SINCLAIR
After ignoring Boston for close to a decade while NYC shows were not so unusual, Providence native son via SF > LA John Dwyer has brought his ferocious, multi-headed garage/psych/neo-jam outfit to town on a fairly routine schedule these last few years. After closing shop for a brief time when Dwyer moved from […]
FOTOBOM: WILCO @ WANG THEATRE
The joke inherent in Wilco’s new record Ode to Joy – the band’s eleventh full length – is that it’s actually kind of a downer. The Chicagoan collective who perpetually straddle the lines of indie, art-rock and alt-country have never been the cheeriest band to begin with – the centerpiece of what’s arguably their sunniest […]
FOTOBOM: BORIS, UNIFORM @ THE PARADISE
Around the time in the early 90s when I became aware of bands such as Acid Mothers Temple, Ghost, Zeni Geva and The Boredoms, I’ve come to live by one simple rule. If a Japanese band is playing in your town, go see them. It’s not that complicated, it doesn’t overrun your social calendar, […]
FOTOBOM: MASSIVE ATTACK @ THE WANG THEATRE
Looking backwards over two decades can be a belly-gazing exercise in self-indulgence, but the Mezzanine XXI tour succeeded on nearly every level. The pioneering trip-hop record from Massive Attack was gussied up for tours of Europe and North America, with this stop being rescheduled when the entire tour was postponed in March. Not content to […]
FOTOBOM: THE WHO @ FENWAY PARK
Without disparaging the good name of The Pretty Things, The Who really put the term ‘rock opera’ on the musical books when they created not one but two enduring works in Tommy and Quadrophenia. So what do you do when you’ve done countless tours and it seems like you’ve done it all? You go full […]
FOTOBOM: PSYCHO LAS VEGAS 2019
A multi-day metal fest in the middle of the summer, in Vegas? What could possibly go wrong? Well, aside from punishment to your bank account, liver, and skin if you weren’t smart about routine SPF applications, most things went right. Set in the city where dubious decision making is a key branding strategy, the […]
