Mixtape 350 • Goodbye My Love
The season is upon us, and no one can better represent this fresh start than Tyler Ballgame.
The season is upon us, and no one can better represent this fresh start than Tyler Ballgame.
After a dozen years of keeping us waiting, Mariachi El Bronx returns horns a-blazin’.

A new album from The Bobby Lees is making its way to us, and I’m banging on the table in anticipation. Also, I meant to call that Alt-J song “Breezleblocks,” it’s a long story. Freaky weather continues!

It’s unseasonably warm, not like you’d be able to walk around in a T-shirt, but definitely not the type of weather you’d expect of the Grand Valley in February. It makes a perfect setting for The Barr Brothers and their urgent machinations. I remembered to get my hat, not that I need it.
Little Dragon guards a treasure hoard of beats and drama, but they are quite willing to share.

Always a special treat to be back on the air after missing a show. This is the third show in a year that I’ve started with a Fugazi cover, in this case Failure taking on “Waiting Room” with their trademark grinding, implacable approach. The power of these songs, its distinctive musicality and lyrical content, is undiminished in the hands of any band bold enough to take on the material. Tonight also featured the confluence of several loyal listeners, including James in California, Underdog in Georgia, and Charley who is on South Korea time and got to take benefit from the time zone.

Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
There are several sounds that are most definitely British, and with their clear soaring female vocals and intimate indie pop sensibility, The Catenary Wires are a textbook example of one of them.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.