Exotic Payday sounds like a moon-shined Paul Bunyan careening around the lumberyard with a hatchet recently sharpened on the ol’ whetstone�in other words, heavy, ungainly and dangerous. Is it wrong for me to think Mr. Peter Makowski is just cuter than ever as he gargles, spits, retches, spews rabies-laden saliva and shreds his throat into Austin pork barbecue to get across his tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, red-hot-burning angst? … read more
Salt Lake has been overrun lately by blues-influenced, mostly acoustic musicians�a visit to any coffee shop on gallery stroll will confirm this. It makes it that much more refreshing to find someone who experiments with the genre and successfully turns it on its ear. Aye Aye does just exactly this. … read more
The Black Hens started as a fluke; a thrown together project birthed from a one-off jam session with SLC folk powerhouses: Glade, David Williams, Band of Annuals members jeremi Hanson and Brent Dreiling while in … you guessed it, Albuquerque. … read more
I was pleasantly surprised when I popped in Knifeshow’s blue sounding album Here Until It’s Gone. The first thing that caught my attention was Brent Anderson’s falsetto vocals. His voice sounds like a cross between Jeff Buckley and Muse front man Matthew Bellamy. Maybe those two are secretly his parents and he just doesn’t know yet. … read more
Loom and Prize Country pair up for this split EP from Exigent. Like kissing cousins at a family reunion, Loom is the agonized genius hanging out in the back room gnawing on beakers and discovering the secrets of the universe while Prize Country is the Pabst-guzzling uncle with a two-foot beard and a long and lively prison record. … read more
Greg Midgley is one of SLC’s geniucians (genius + musician), which sounds a lot like “magician.” Not a coincidence. Boy can play piano, climb pillars and strut with more heat than a mating tomcat. And now he can croon. … read more
Initially released as a limited-edition, hand painted cardboard-box CD package, Summer is now available for mass consumption, courtesy of local label/booking company, BearTalk. … read more
Before the screening, director Maxim Pozdorovkin jokingly warned that his film, Our New President, had so much archival Russian propaganda footage that it was probably not safe for human consumption in one sitting, saying, “You’re not going to feel good at the end of this.” … read more
Director RaMell Ross described the loosely developed plot of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, as an “anti-narrative.” The film is a series of beautiful scenes of Hale County, Alabama, and seems to be a love letter to the people there, specifically the black community. … read more
Kailash is a World Documentary selection that covers many horrors of child labor and the fight against it. Kailash Satyarthi is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his work of fighting against child labor around the world. … read more
This band’s name makes no sense to me, but I give them a big ol’ thumbs up “Welcome to Gotham” style for being creative and whacky. … read more
After years of teasing and torturing with a single-track acting as the only officially released material, �Andale! have finally released a full-length album. Although the wait was long, the self-titled album lives up to the precedent set by “Hit the Ground,” the track featured on DBS II. … read more
