No stranger to local rock 'n roll, Sean Carlson ran Just Another Scene as a resource on independent music across New England from 1998 until 2005. He now runs his own consultancy, and his writing has been published in The Irish Times, Boston Globe Magazine, New York Daily News and elsewhere.
After nearly a decade of songwriting in a gothic-folk tradition often tinged with early ’90s grunge, Keith J.G. McCurdy drew from a deeper well in crafting Vudu Sister’s 2021 EP, Burnt Offerings. As a Classics and English double major with a minor in Medieval Studies at the University of Rhode Island, he empathized with the […]
Seeing himself as a “roadie in training for a very, very long time”—having supported his mother’s country and classic-rock cover band, Roadhouse Band, on Long Island since childhood—lighting designer William Succoso first found himself mesmerized by the visual effects created by the lighting systems at summer concerts on Jones Beach. He tried his own hand […]
As the house lights dimmed on a nearly sold-out crowd of 3,000 at the Providence Performing Arts Center on January 29, the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra, silhouetted in silence on stage, anticipated the arrival of singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov at the foreground. Under a shadow cast by a backlight stepped Isakov, with his solitary croon […]
In Sleepwalker, a one-man show created and performed by Andy Russ and stage managed by Ollie Crowe, at the Wilbury Theatre Group in Providence, an open-air cell claims center stage. Absent walls except for a floor panel, the metallic frame of the cube suggests an imprisonment while allowing for permeability. Its bars segment the blankness […]
After paving a distorted pathway in the early ’90s with three albums on Sub Pop Records, the band Earth — bearing a name chosen in homage to Black Sabbath’s original moniker — marked their emergence from an extended period of recovery with the 2005 release of Hex; Or Printing the Infernal Method. The album saw […]
Mirah’s second full-length, Advisory Committee (K Records, 2002), came out during the spring of my freshman year at Boston University. While the album’s title perhaps suggested some homage to academia, the songwriting mostly revealed a study of contrasts. Spartan and robust, serious and mirthful, soft and assertive, literal and symbolic, the singer-songwriter Mirah Yom Tov […]
In “Big Mood Machine,” her 2018 essay for The Baffler, journalist Liz Pelly honed in on the role of digital music as part of “a burgeoning industry surrounding technology that alleges to mine our emotional states.” Zeroing in on Spotify and its familiar categorizations, ranging from “Chill” and “Focus/Study” to “Commute” and “Girls Night Out,” […]
Cave In emerged from the Merrimack Valley north of Boston in the mid-1990s to become a prominent presence in New England’s D.I.Y. music scene, their blistering and emotive hardcore-inspired approach to metal finding a natural home at local shows in warehouses, basements, and community centers. They quickly went on to become a juggernaut on stages […]
Shortly before an array of computer printouts and hand-written notes announcing business closures and curbside pickup policies presented a kind of collective commentary on COVID-19 along North Main Street, somebody spray painted a plea on an undeveloped lot near Rhode Island School of Design’s administration building: “PUT SOME ART ON THIS WALL!” For months, the […]
As an undergraduate arriving at Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, Alta L. Price was dead-set on studying German at “the school across the street” — Brown University. Growing up in New York’s Mohawk Valley, Price had fallen in love with the language rather by accident as a teenager after stopping by the village […]