Photo: Chris Phelps It won’t be hard to spot indie-rock act Eisley’s tour bus out on the road this summer. It’ll be the one with the “Baby on Board” sign. “It’s going to be funny, with my sisters both pregnant,” said singer and guitarist Sherri DuPree-Bemis of her siblings and bandmates Stacy King and Chauntelle […]
conservatory
Posted inMusic
Aw, Swell
Jonathan Weiner When Nick Diener and his brother formed punk act The Swellers as teenagers, they didn’t know what they were doing. “When we were kids, we had these guitars and we wondered what it would be like to be rock stars. So we formed a band,” guitarist and singer Diener said. “I didn’t know […]
Posted inMusic
To the ’core
Credit: Ross Adams Alex Barnard loves the hardcore scene, its DIY aesthetic and underground culture, but he aspired to play for rooms with more than a dozen people in them. He found like-minded, longtime Oklahoma City musicians in Daniel Weaver, Billy Reid and James Hammontree; together, they formed Chud. “All of us have played in […]
Posted inMusic
Dial H for Hero
At 42, Scott Lucas may be getting older, but he’s not giving up on music. In fact, he’s even more committed. As half of the Chicago rock duo Local H (“Bound to the Floor”), Lucas evidently found one band’s full slate of touring and recording as not enough, so he struck up a solo project, […]
Posted inMusic
Brush with noise
Ross Adams James Hammontree, singer/guitarist for Paintscratcher, took a bad habit and twisted it into the perfect name for his then-fledging, Oklahoma City-based hardcore group. “The thing I used to do when I was nervous was scratch the paint of a windowsill furiously fast. I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good name for how I want […]
Posted inMusic
Bear necessities
One would be hard pressed to succinctly describe the Louisiana metal band I Wrestled a Bear Once. Its songs incorporate a pantry of sounds. Racing metal guitars pushed against adult-contemporary pop; New Wave ’80s synths punctuated with samples of the General Lee’s car horn. The alt-metal quintet formed in 2007 from the ashes of another […]
Posted inMusic
Steady as he goes
It’s hard work writing songs with characters vivid enough to fit a movie script or a novel. Bespectacled rocker Craig Finn’s been doing it for a little less than a decade as the front man for The Hold Steady, Brooklyn’s beloved bar band. Although he’s recently taken a brief detour as a solo artist to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Slow’ your roll
With decidedly repulsive band names like Alabama Thunderpussy, Eyehategod and Goatwhore, it’s no wonder that underground Southern metal remained a subgenre largely unexamined — until the documentary “Slow Southern Steel,” that is. “This was something we felt passionate enough to put out there, because there is no comprehensive documentary about this scene, and we felt […]
Posted inMusic
Let’s be Frank
Frank Smith of Austin, Texas, is an enigma, being that it’s not a person, but a band. Naturally, front man Aaron Sinclair has had to deal with a good bit of confusion concerning the name. “I have been called Frank by people before,” Sinclair said. “That always gets a little weird.” There’s not — nor […]
Posted inMusic
Noisy Baby
History doesn’t foretell too much in the case of Baby Tears. The noise-rock trio from Omaha, Neb., possesses an unpredictable track record of gigs that makes it impossible to pinpoint exactly where the next one will go. “There is no typical show with us,” said guitarist/vocalist Todd VonStup. “It’s unstructured in a good sense. Sometimes […]