Blogs

Right now the most popular section of AU‰'s student newspaper is Eagle Rants, a daily opinion column where anybody can anonymously post their thoughts on anything. On November 16, in between notes about being lonely in the dorms and arguments that communications...

When Ornette Coleman‰'s now classic The Shape of Jazz to Come was released on May 22nd, 1959, no one was quite sure how to react. At the time, bebop was the dominant form of jazz, reaching its second wave of popularity, and Miles Davis‰' Kind of Blue was to be...

Sometimes saying the word slut just feels so good. But, I used to try to stray away from this word because feminism is no longer solely focused on male-female relationships, but rather female-female relationships. We live in a world where girls are forced to be in...

Jet lag wasn‰'t an issue for Givers. The sunny indie-pop quintet made the journey from Lafayette, La. to London last week, playing Shoreditch hotspot XOYO with all the energy of kids just let out on the last day of school. The night opened with the underwhelming coed...

I turned 20 this summer and as I‰'ve mourned the loss of my teenage years, I‰'ve also been reminiscing about the music that defined them. I can name exactly what I was listening to during every stage of my life. Every graduation, birthday, heartbreak, fight, and...

There are not many bands whose live act could not benefit from a spectacular setting. Surely even the bowel-loosening, Juno-award-winning strains of Nickelback could become magical and intoxicating if you saw them in the right place (inside a burning freight car, in a...

Thee Oh Sees ‰ÛÒ Carrion Crawler/The Dream A combination of two separate EP‰'s, this latest release from John Dwyer‰'s Thee Oh Sees is a relentless, no-frills collection of garage rock stompers, as opposed to the psych-pop tunes showcased on their earlier 2011 album...

CMJ‰'s schedule is full of tiny bands playing half a dozen shows each in an effort to get noticed by college radio stations and blogs and to interface with promotional companies. However cool these bands may try to appear (and I watched two separate bass players try...

Opening for Switch & Scottie B this Saturday at U Street Music Hall, D.C. Drum & Bass DJ Harry Ransom is undoubtedly one of the upcoming creative minds of Drum & Bass in the D.C. area. A man with a tinkering intuition for developing production techniques,...

Writing about Cloud Cult is hard. Listening to Cloud Cult is easy – with mellow percussion and violin melodies, the music feels like something your ears don‰'t just want but desperately need to hear. But thinking too long or too deeply about Cloud Cult is simply...

Without getting all Almost Famousy, what I love about music is that it celebrates what is real and messy and honest. School and society are often preoccupied with perfection and having it all together (it‰'s stressful, man!) but CMJ and more specifically, Atlas Sound...

Merge Records – “The indie label that got big and stayed small.‰” While many indie record labels strive for the “we‰'re doing our best‰” mentality (Fat Possum comes to mind), Merge seeks perfection. But does their quest for Billboard ranks and Grammys stray away...

“Grandma, I‰'ve Been Unruly‰” is just one unique lyric from Purity Ring‰'s collection of tracks. Purity Ring‰'s songs are as naÌøve as they are passionate, and their performance is no different. Purity Ring is an electronic Canadian duo that favors abstract lyrics and...

The year was 1978. Brian Eno, famed English musician/producer, was in New York assisting The Talking Heads produce and master their sophomore effort, More Songs About Buildings and Food. While there, Eno attended a four day long underground rock festival held at...

This could be the hysteria of post-midterms, a 40% on a psychology exam and a C on a paper speaking, but sometimes I feel like I‰'m not supposed to be in college. More times than not, I am plagued with some sort of crisis where the only obvious answer to cure it is...

When you think Oklahoma, you think Pistol Pete, bombings, tumbleweeds and maybe even Hanson. You don‰'t think of rich, moody, harmonic folk pop, but that is exactly what Other Lives is. From Stillwater, Oklahoma, this five person group has everything you want in an...

A “fat possum” calls to mind an image of a rural southern town. It instills thoughts of 1960s jazz coffee houses, back porches, smoky bars, etc. The record corporation known as Fat Possum used to stand for these Mississippi attributes – until the...

It begins like a Beethoven piece would if he had been born on a distant moon in a far-off nebula. The orchestral flushes mix with the extraterrestrial tambour of the instruments, lifting us into another world. A journey is about to begin. Frank Zappa‰'s Hot Rats takes...

Twirkin’ french electronic production duo Mustard Pimps will be spinning on the turntables of U Street Music Hall this Thursday night. For a show that is free with RSVP (for 21 ), you can’t find any better value of Thursday night entertainment in DC....

I used be uncool. A few years ago I had tendencies to wear peach colored track suits with the bedazzled word JUICY sprawled across the ass. I used to dream of being a Lakers cheerleader. I had nights filled with turmoil of who deserved my love more, Justin or JC. It...

They’re either the best, or they’re the worst. Either the greatest, or the most god-awful, horrid, pain-inducing noise ever put on record. Art-rock god Frank Zappa is on record as proclaiming that they’re “better than The Beatles‰Û, while Kurt...

It‰'s finally October ‰ÛÒ my favorite month. Time for crisp autumn mornings, pumpkins, and perfect temperatures for wearing my pea coat, but no list of awesome month-related things is complete without the month‰'s upcoming shows. So here‰'s a look at some bands making...

WVAU’s Electric Factory, a show that rotates a heady mixture of the latest electronic and indie, will be hosting Willy Joy on this week’s episode, which airs Thursday, October 6th from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. An American DJ at the core, originally heralding from...

In my last post I said that it would be pathetic if I didn’t catch my first live show before my next post, and I’m a woman of my word, so I checked out Wolfette at the pub in the Islington area of London, Monto Water Rats And to further the WVAU-relevancy...

Quirky as ever, the progressive rock band Deerhoof rode into the 930 Club with a thunder on Saturday. Without a word to the crowd, they picked up their instruments, confidently assembled themselves in a line at the front of the stage, and began to play. The...

This fall, WVAU.ORG is featuring Show Spotlights to help spread the word about specific WVAU shows. Our inaugural Spotlight profiles Elaboration Collaboration, hosted by DJs Rob Kleiman and Kyle Calian. We talked to DJ Rob about live music, albums of the year, and...

My last music adventure was Labor Day Weekend, which took me to to Randalls Island in New York City for one of the most popular electro/dance festivals of the East coast, Electric Zoo, that left me yearning for a little bit more of live trance and minimal house. The...

If Fugazi is for the bearded used-to-be punx, and Wu-Tang is for the children, then Wugazi is for the children of the bearded used-to-be punx. #logic If there ever was a quintessential D.C. band, it was Fugazi. D.I.Y to the core and ever evolving in sound, Fugazi...

Later on in the summer I embarked on another journey across the US, this time to middle-of-nowhere Tennessee for what I thought would be the ultimate music experience, Bonnaroo. If you are ready to be awakened by asphyxiating heat, consume at least half of spoon of...