I was first exposed to The Gaslight Anthem via a concert at San Jose State with the Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, and Thrice about a year ago. They were the openers and I almost chose taking a trip to the merch booth over listening to their set. Luckily, I didn’t take that trip and now I am a fan of their music. So when I heard that they were playing a free show in San Jose, I was anxious to go. I was geared up and ready to hear their new album played live and possibly some old songs off The ’59 Sound. I got there two hours ahead of time to stake out my spot and didn’t intend on moving. Let’s just say it was well worth the lack of food for six hours.
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OK Go, with bells
While a great number of artists have passed through the doors of Ex’pression College to perform at the school’s Meyer Performance Hall, in intimate shows offered to a handful of lucky radio winners and passionate students, never before has one of these performances — dubbed “Ex’pression Sessions” — included more than one band at a time. It’s also not terribly easy to predict exactly who will be coming through the doors, since all manner of musicians, performers and artists have taken the stage over the last several years. With these considerations in mind, Monday’s performance was a never-before-attempted feat, as it involved two artists of a fairly well-known stature: Amanda Palmer, expert pianist and purveyor of all things art, and OK Go, arguably the Most Famous Band Thanks To The Internet. [read the whole post]
Last night was yet another opportunity for San Francisco’s considerable population of Ohioan expatriates to cluster around and listen to one of our homeland’s finest musical exports. Dayton and Cincinnati were enthusiastically represented by the barreling, moody Midwestern rock of Heartless Bastards, while Akron was represented in absentia by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, whose influence is largely responsible for the recording careers of both the Bastards and opener Hacienda.
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Jennifer Knapp performing at Club Café in Pittsburgh last month. Photo by Marcia Furman.
After a seven-year hiatus, bestselling Christian singer/songwriter Jennifer Knapp —who always stood apart from her contemporaries in terms of her musical grit and unadorned emotional ferocity; who created some of the most iconic songs of her genre and generation, such as “Undo Me” and “A Little More,” — came back with two big announcements: (1) she’s returning to music; and (2) she’s a lesbian. Predictably, the latter has eclipsed the former. But Knapp is first and foremost a musician, as she demonstrated last night at Red Devil Lounge (I can only imagine what her horrified conservative fans think about their disgraced idol playing at a San Francisco bar named after Satan, which: bonus!).
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