In the strongest sign yet that the quixotic quartet known as Chat Pile are neither to be underestimated nor to be considered a band that’s only willing to strike the iron while it’s hot, they have delivered Who Loves the Sun. While that news no doubt titillated fans, many of us wondered, “Yes, but do they have anything left to say?” The answer, of course, is an unmitigated yes.
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Mitski reins in her sometimes thudding humor, fuses the musical sophistication of her previous album with the mutant pop genius of Be the Cowboy and delivers easily the best album of her career. The songs on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me sear the heart, with the loose narrative of a woman losing herself preparing beautiful dramatic scenes of the storms of the inner heart in the midst of seemingly-mundane common life.
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“I don’t like not being able to control my destiny.”
-Unto Others frontman Gabriel Franco
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Portland, Oregon’s Unto Others are no strangers to Boise, having graced stages in this city in November 2021, May 2022 and November 2024. Tonight marked the retro rock band’s fourth performance in the City of Trees and its first time playing at the Shrine Social Club. Unto Others set the table for Castle Rat‘s rousing, hallucinatory, medieval-fantasy performance – while simultaneously erasing all memory of superfluous opening act Wraith Knight, which refers to itself as “dungeon synth,” whatever the hell that is.
One of the many reasons Unto Others were the band that should’ve drawn the biggest crowd in Boise this evening – even with Iron and Wine playing at the Knitting Factory and lovable death-metal goofballs Nekrogoblikon hunkering down at the Shredder – is that Unto Others are a truly one-of-a-kind band in a music climate that seems to subsist on copycats. Unto Others’ sound is a blast from the past; no other band is busting out throwback dark rock with the acumen and authenticity that frontman Gabriel Franco and his pals are producing.
Last year, this writer penned a story about Unto Others for New Noise in which Franco rejected the lazy and inaccurate labeling of Unto Others as a “goth” band. While the article possibly helped deflate the erroneous pigeonholing, it presented just a small fraction of the extensive conversation Franco granted to yours truly. In honor of Unto Others’ fourth performance this evening in Boise, The Bad Penny now brings you the entire – dare we say definitive – conversation that Franco graciously granted to us on November 8, 2024.
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With 2017’s Time Well — gorgeously spacious, at times heavy and with a dose of folk at its roots — Cloakroom redefined how trust develops between the artist and the audience.
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Paradise Gallows, the third album by Inter Arma, saw the band aiming their post-metal cannon for the sky, letting loose upon unwitting metalheads a darkly ominous record with a huge sense of scale and blend of extreme genres that only Isis had successfully pulled off prior.
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With nary a word spoken over the course of its 11 songs, on paper (sans the title), Giraffe’s Towering Inferno With Bongo Drums would seem to be for the jazz or jam-band set: It was recorded in one day after the four players had developed familiarity with each other by performing improv sets in their hometown of L.A. And while the bulk of instruments are ones you would spy in a jazz nightclub—12-string guitar, fretless bass, drums and the like—it’s the other tools that propel Giraffe’s debut record into the far reaches of outer space: electronics, a Clavinet, an electric sitar and samples galore.
Continue readingMastodon and Deafheaven let it riff in Garden City, Idaho, last night – a stone’s throw away from Boise, with the two metal bands at the topic of their game and finally touring on the same bill.
Here are some the images from the action-packed concert:
By and large, Spacemoth’s Inward Eye is an autobiographical affair that multi-faceted artist Maryam Qudus created in tandem with digitally archiving her family’s home movies using a VCR that she left running repeatedly in her abode. While that might drive just about anyone nuts, Qudus exhibits no signs of erratic behavior on Inward Eye, a chill record in the vein of late-career Flaming Lips.
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Whereas most artists put blood, sweat and tears into ensuring that their records bear a consistent sound, theme, story line—or all three—Green Lung torched that handbook well before creating Necropolitan. If you thought Black Sabbath threw curveballs with “Changes,” “FX” and “Laguna Sunrise” on Vol. 4, you’ll be agog by what’s in store when you listen to Green Lung’s fourth album for the first time.
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Spread Joy have ponied up another 16-or-so-minute release called—wait for it—III (Feel It). And with COVID now years removed, what does the increasingly punk-ified band choose to do with their captive audience, at a time when ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have invaded their home city, prospects of the future look bleaker than ever in recent memory, and bands can barely afford to tour, much less exist?
Well, they return to having fun and letting loose, of course. Hold your tongue before spitting at this writer for making what could be interpreted as a disparaging comment; my intent is to congratulate Spread Joy for staying true to their original goal, which was to provide an escape from the misery of the pandemic—and now, one could argue, the misery of the Great American Project or even human civilization itself. Put simply, they are the musical embodiment of an Irish funeral.
Read the full review via Treble.
