Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
Treasure Island Weekend is upon us… And, if you still have the energy, here’s a few more shows to go to, as well!
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 10/14/2010-10/20/2010”
On a chilly Saturday night, I exited my car, parked on 6th Street and Howard, clad in black stiletto ankle boots and a form-fitting black/white striped dress accented with a scant red cardigan that provided a bit of warmth en route to Mezzanine – located a few blocks away. Normally, I’m a jeans and hoodie kind of gal when it comes to attending live shows. However, since my Spinning Platters colleague, Dakin Hardwick, and I were meeting Dan Black, one of the opening acts on the All Hearts tour, co-headlined by Robyn and Kelis, for an in-person interview, I felt an overwhelming urge to dress up.
Continue reading “Show Review: Robyn, Kelis, and Dan Black at Mezzanine, 7/24/10”
The last week of July is looking pretty crazy… Tons of amazing shows going on this week, including two very rare 4-band shows that are worth arriving early and staying late. Time to buy some Red Bull!
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 7/22/10-7/28/10”
There’s more to life than Noise Pop. Not much more, so these week’s list is going to be a bit shorter than usual, but there is still plenty to do that isn’t with the masses.
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 2/24/10-3/2/10”
You could go to SXSW and see lots of indie buzz bands from Brooklyn. If that’s your thing, great! As for me, I’ll be running around Austin chasing down the chance to see bands from other countries visit our shores, sometimes for the first time, sometimes for the only time. (I even have a tradition of seeing a band I’ve never heard of, from a country I’ve never been to. Give this one a shot.)
So if you go to Austin, and want to hear the best of pop music from the Old World, make sure to check out these six bands.
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Picks Six: European Pop Acts You Should Go See at SXSW 2010”
For most of my life as a music nerd, Tuesdays were always my favorite day of the week. On Tuesdays, I’d stop at Strawberries Records in West Springfield, MA and shop the new release rack. I wouldn’t let myself leave without buying at least one thing. This is how I ended up with The Bends, as I had liked “Creep” but not Pablo Honey, but there really wasn’t anything else interesting out that week. As time has passed, Tuesdays have become less and less important, because now the release date for an album is somewhat random: when it shows up online, it’s released. Yet for some reason, the record labels are clinging to these release dates. And in many cases, they still release albums on different dates in different countries. This, for obvious file-sharing reasons, is beyond lunacy. This post is a plea for record labels to end the archaic practice of release dates. Not to help me–I’m well served by the Internet–but to help themselves.
The company I work for in my everyday life has a saying: “We make it easy for our Customers to buy from us.” When will the record labels adopt this attitude?
Continue reading “Record Labels, Please Change Your Archaic Release Date Practices”
What follows is a pretty simple list of every single musical act I saw at Glastonbury 2009 for at least one song. There were others that I walked by, and sometimes it takes a whole song to walk by them, but when I don’t know who’s playing until I’m finished walking by them and have gone back to my tent to look at a list of who was just on stage, I don’t think that counts because I wasn’t paying any attention at all. I’m looking at you, The Script (or was it The View?) I’ll make very brief remarks about some acts, and pretty lengthy ones about others. I probably won’t say too much about the music for some bands, but will assume you know them already instead. Find out which acts had me dancing, which had me skankin’, which ones had me screaming, and which one left me in tears. Buckle up, because this is going to take me a while. Continue reading “Glastonbury Diary, Part Three: The Music”