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It’s been a while since we’ve heard much from Dan Croll here in Philly (or the states in general). The Liverpool-based songwriter’s last (and first) album, Sweet Disarray, dropped all the way back in March of 2014 and it’s been about the same amount of time since he’s graced...
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When having to imagine all of the best artists to co-tour with, touring with Tricky is “seriously, an honor,” says Terra Lopez, lead singer of Sacramento-based band Rituals of Mine (f.k.a. Sister Crayon) during their opening act at Underground Arts for the Bristol-based heavy-bass-heart-of-darkness. A heckler in the crowd...
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Illinois duo Icon For Hire have been around for the better part of a decade now, kicking out jams that blend turn of the century nu-metal and radio rock with contemporary electro-and-hip-hop-infused pop, but in a lot of ways 2016 is a new beginning for them, with You Can’t...
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I’ve been onstage with Iggy Pop four times The godfather of punk has also kicked me in the head mid-stage-dive, salivated me...
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This Friday, October 28th, Black Kids are back in Philly with new tracks from their upcoming (yet to be named) 2017 album, including their latest release: Obligatory Drugs, headlining at Kung Fu Necktie. Whether you remember a time you had danced at a DIY basement party with a fervent...
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It’s been a few years since we’ve heard from indie poppers Miniature Tigers… However, next week, October 28th, to be specific, sees the release of I Dreamt I Was A Cowboy, a gloriously lovely sunshine alt pop album reminiscent of the best summertime junior high jams of the mid-late...
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen delightfully raucous garage rock duo The Pack A.D. here in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection (I believe the last time was when they were supporting Man or Astro-Man? At Underground Arts two years ago, although they’ve also put on...
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Fans of American Idol (or televised vocal spectacles in general) likely remember Allison Iraheta from the show’s 2009 season, when she appeared alongside Adam Lambert, belting out tunes by Kelly Clarkson and Aretha Franklin (Those of our Spanish-speaking, Telemundo-loving readers might even remember her from Quinceañera: Mamá Quiero Ser...
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New York-based singer/songwriter Margaret Glaspy recently got confirmed as the opening act for The Lumineers’ “mega” January arena tour (also featuring Andrew Bird). In addition, she’ll be playing the Iceland Airwaves Festival this November, followed by a bevy of European dates. However, she does have a handful of upcoming...
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This Monday, October 10th, singer/songwriter Lissie will play both her biggest and most intimate Philly date yet, when she will be headlining a sold out solo acoustic show downstairs at World Café Live. The date celebrates the release of Live at Union Chapel, Lissie’s latest live album, which boasts...
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About a decade ago The Bird and The Bee were pretty much my favorite band. The product of singer/songwriter Inara George and multi-instrumentalist and producer Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue, Sia), The Bird and The Bee churned out jazzy, ethereal, space age, electro dream pop, resembling something a...
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Sadly, Tacocat’s last Philthy show, this April at Everybody Hits, got cut short due to a delayed start and early curfew, leaving the self-described “Post post punk pop pop” Seattle quartet with a mere ten-minute set. However, Philthy’s coolest kids were likely spread pretty thin that evening, as Iggy...
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Julia Jacklin is certainly the coolest musician I’ve ever met who cites Britney Spears as her initial inspiration. Australian singer/songwriter swears that her first push towards singing came when she was 10 and saw a doc on Britney Spears while vacationing with family… In the time since, however, her...
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Last month Philly got to experience an uncharacteristically hip evening upstairs at World Café Live, when LA rock noir duo The Peach Kings put on the grimiest and sexiest performance the dinner theater venue has seen in years. The Peach Kings, comprised of Paige Wood and Steven Dies, have...
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Last month Arc Iris put out what is undoubtedly the best sophomore album of the year, if not the year’s full-out best record. August 19th saw the release of Moon Saloon, the full-length follow-up to Rhode Island trio Arc Iris’ 2014 self-titled debut. The album plays like a quirkily...
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This Wednesday World Café Live Upstairs will host The Ragbirds, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based band whose sounds and stories are a little too varied to put into existing words. I recently got a chance to chat with songwriter, vocalist, and violinist Erin Zindle, and when I ask her if...
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Earlier today Stereogum premiered the music video for Minnesota-based songstress Haley Bonar’s “Called You Queen.” The song and video serve as hyper-quirky sendups of suburbia, with a subtle nod to New Wave (both the Godard and Blondie varieties). The track is off of Bonar’s latest album, Impossible Dream, her...
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Although Austin-based singer/songwriter Adam Torres has been making music professionally for a decade now, in a lot of ways, his upcoming LP, Pearls to Swine, is his first “proper” release. The album, his first release of any kind in four years, is out next Friday, September 9th, courtesy of...
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Last week noise pop extraordinaires Sleigh Bells announced their fourth LP, Jessica Rabbit, which is in stores November 11th and their first on their own brand new record label, Torn Clean. And earlier this week the duo premiered the third single from the album, “It’s Just Us Now,” with...
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Perhaps you saw our pictorial documenting of Montreal’s last stop at Union Transfer by Erika Reinsel? Better yet, perhaps you were even there… According to Erika, the evening featured, “a number of spectacles including masked angels with overbearing wings, gas-masked dancers in onesies, a wedding party, two poodle-wolf-like creatures boxing...
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The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection has seen many of the loveliest icons of ‘90s alternative youth recently… Most notably Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction and heroine of Garbage Shirley Manson… However, the return of Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Kathi Wilcox in The...
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This Thursday, August 18th, Franky Bradley’s will be hosting two sets from LA’s No Small Children, who sound a bit more like a band of superheroes than a band of rockers (Not that they’re mutually exclusive… They did have their cover of the classic Ghostbusters theme song featured in...
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Brooklyn-based, electro-infused indie poppers Savoir Adore are certainly friends of PHILTHY… However, they’re not quite what they were the last time we spoke, three years ago. At the time Paul Hammer and Deidre Muro were a duo, promoting the re-release of their third album, Our Nature, which had the...
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Earlier this year The Besnard Lakes released their fifth full-length, A Coliseum Complex Museum, another brilliantly lovely post-rock exploration of songwriter and frontman Jace Lasek’s much publicized simultaneous loves of The Beach Boys, early Bee Gees, and psychedelic shoegaze (Read more about it here.) At the heart of The...
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Rowdy Americana indie poppers Wild Child have been longtime friends of PHILTHY MAG, and they’ve graced the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection quite a handful of times (Last time we spoke was last January, as they were preparing to play a beyond-sold-out Johnny Brenda’s, but since then,...
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So far 2016’s most pleasantly surprising record belongs to Portland duo (and real life couple) Muscle and Marrow. The album, Love (which dropped this May), is the sophomore effort of vocalist/guitarist Kira Clark and drummer Keith McGraw, a pair who had previously been best known for producing sounds on the...
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Last year LA-based singer/songwriter Emily Clibourn released her debut album, Blow, an album that boasts a contemporary take on smoky soul lounge that could be a perfect fit for supporting Lana Del Rey or the soundtrack of a David Lynch film. And while Emily has played around the LA...
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We at PHILTHY have long been supporters of dreamy shoegazers The Stargazer Lilies. We first met them in August of 2013, months before their debut LP, We Are the Dreamers, was out. We last caught up with them in the summer of 2014, as they were about to hit...
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Over the past two years the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection has familiarized itself with Streets of Laredo at least a bit… The New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-residing band has played the 215 a small handful of times. We at PHILTHY first met them in May of 2014, as...
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Just incase you missed Grime’s epic performance in Philadelphia we have some up close and personal shots of her on stage at the Electric Factory on 6/3. This tour is being sponsored by Wizard World. Photos by Alaina Wray...
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Brooklyn-based Indie Americana singer/songwriter Aoife O’Donovan’s sophomore LP, In the Magic Hour, is simultaneously a celebration of solitude and familial roots. The album’s composition began at the time of O’Donovan’s grandfather’s passing. The inspiration for the tone of the 10 tracks seems to be equally indebted to seemingly perfect...
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Last month Austin’s Megafauna released one of the year’s best schizophrenic record, Welcome Home, their fourth full-length. While the band have become best known for grungy prog rock, this one sees them delving deep into psych grooves, in conjunction with sounds reminiscent of the earliest forms of metal, the...
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“Although there’s definitely still serious stuff in there, there is a lot of irony in the new work, like via Nancy Sinatra, I guess. The producer I’ve been working with and I have been calling it, ‘spooky spaghetti western.’” Sophie Auster is telling me about her upcoming sounds, a...
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Two years ago we met Ben Watt, best known as one-half of Everything But the Girl. He had just released Hendra, his first solo album in 31 years and a huge departure from his DJing and the electronic music he’d come to be associated with in recent years. Hendra, without-a-doubt...
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Although London-based musician Birdy hit 20 just last month, she already has three-full length albums to her name (in addition to award nominations and wins, collaborations with the likes of Mumford & Songs and David Guetta, and over 400 million views on YouTube). Her latest LP, Beautiful Lies, hit...
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Not only is Rae Fitzgerald’s Popular Songs for Wholesome Families the best title of anything to come out this week, but also the best studio album to hit shelves this Friday. While previous work from the Missouri-based singer/songwriter tended to be categorized securely in the folk pop/Americana genre, her...
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The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection has a number of well-worth-checking-out shows coming up next week (including Purity Ring at Union Transfer, Wax Idols at Boot & Saddle, Birdy at the TLA, and Colleen Greene at Kung Fu Necktie), but none that we’re more excited about than...
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If you have not heard of Grimes, you have literally been living under a rock. Claire Boucher exploded into the electronic music scene back in 2010 with her releases on Arbutus Records. She graced the covers of The FADER, Nylon, Dazed and Confused, NME, Flare and more. Ever since her emergence, she has released albums...
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This November it will be 21 years since I bought my first Stones album… No, it wasn’t Sticky Fingers or Exile or some best of comp… but Stripped (which I’m almost sure was also the first album I ever bought on release date… which would go on to lead...
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Big Thief’s debut LP, Masterpiece, is out today courtesy of Saddle Creek, but there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve seen the band around town recently. Last October they opened Boot & Saddle for Here We Go Magic, before returning for a headlining show in December, and this February they...
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For the past two years Seattle duo NAVVI have been receiving major recognition from the likes of NME, Brooklyn Vegan, and The Line of Best Fit for a string of self-released singles, however, this Friday, May 27th, will see the release of their debut full-length, Omni. The album, which...
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This Friday, May 27th, will see the release of The Backbone of Night, the debut album from The Philistines, a spacey, deserty, post-punky psych rock six piece out of Kansas City, of all places… The album would seem to be equal parts early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, latter-era Mazzy...
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Sadly, I’m guessing most of you missed Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop’s 7-song, mini-headlining, set from downstairs at World Café Live this past Thursday, as part of this year’s sold-out NonCOMM convention… Apparently it was quite something… Well, fortunately, for the rest of us (Yes, I was absent as...
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SHEL are a perfectly and beautifully confusing intersection of classical, modern, and post-modern… SHEL are four Nashville-based sisters who grew up on an abandoned-trailer-park-converted-farm in Colorado, studying classical music, loving the best pop singing/songwriting of the 1960s, and embracing contemporary electronic modes of musical production (in addition to beatboxing)....
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Garage rockers Eureka California’s latest record, Versus, could be as infectious to children of the ‘90s as chickenpox is to kindergarteners with boundary issues. Much of the album rings of the exact half-way point between the quiet loud quiet college rock of Pixies and the rambunctious power pop of...
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I recently got a chance to chat with two-thirds of LA trio Pollyn, a band who would seem to be most famous for avoiding traditional genre labeling. When they first began making noises together they were most closely aligned with ‘90s electronic music, but they’ve transformed and expanded their...
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The term “alt-pop” is thrown around pretty casually these days… And I’m not entirely sure anybody knows what it means… I suspect it would imply a popular chanteuse (not diva) who has integrity and a soul (That would be the alternative part, right?) Well, “alt-popper” VÉRITÉ, who is indeed...
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Although the music of Meghann Wright generally comes off as exceptionally soulful Americana, in a recent chat with the Brooklyn singer/songwriter I find that she is, additionally, quite into punk and metal… Last year Meghann released Nothin’ Left to Lose, an LP reminiscent of the mid-‘90s, when so many...
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We at PHILTHY MAG have long been fans of Cincinnati-born, Texas-residing rockers Heartless Bastards. Over the course of five albums the band has woven an amalgam of twangy Rock’N’Roll that is nearly as indebted to psychedelic garage rock and post-punk alternative as it...
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Few contemporary bands could better soundtrack a Saturday night than Canadian quartet Born Ruffians. The band are currently touring behind their fourth full-length, Ruff, which dropped last year on Yep Roc Records. The album is a bit of an all-star amalgamation of history’s greatest chaotic pop music, which lands...
It’s been a while since we’ve heard much from Dan Croll here in Philly (or the states in general). The Liverpool-based songwriter’s last (and first) album, Sweet Disarray, dropped all the way back in March of 2014 and it’s been about the same amount of time since he’s graced...
When having to imagine all of the best artists to co-tour with, touring with Tricky is “seriously, an honor,” says Terra Lopez, lead singer of Sacramento-based band Rituals of Mine (f.k.a. Sister Crayon) during their opening act at Underground Arts for the Bristol-based heavy-bass-heart-of-darkness. A heckler in the crowd...
