A few days before Culture Shock, I sent some questions to Melkbelly, the excellent noise-rock quartet that headlined the festival. Frontwoman and lyricist Miranda Winters wasn’t able to get back to me until a couple hours before Melkbelly’s set, during which an oval in front of the middle of Rhino’s ...
The professor, trying to endear himself to the class, told us about hearing his first kid was a boy. Like you could know, I had just thought, when he said it didn’t seem right–– “Babies,” to him, “are girls.” I winced, wondering how often he infantilizes women, and if he’s ...
Sol Ramos is putting together, in his words, “a Mountain Goats fan zine by trans people about trans identity and the Mountain Goats.” The zine, White Cedar, will be available this winter. Ramos studied interdisciplinary visual arts––a degree that let him pursue LGBT art, multiculturalism, and ...
Maybe the spookiest thing about Speedy Ortiz’s “Casper (1995),” off the indie rock band’s debut album Major Arcana, is its lyric’s inscrutability. Many questions are left unanswered, including this bizarre one: what’s the speaker planning on doing with the plasma he has "coming through"? ...
Stephen Deusner is a music critic who lives here in Bloomington. He’s written for Pitchfork, Salon, and Stereogum–to name just a few. We met at Hopscotch Coffee on a Saturday afternoon and ended up talking for nearly two hours. Not all of our conversation is below, as the unabridged transcription ...
Pitchfork Fest is almost here. You only have just over a week to wait until you get to stand in the heat, under-hydrated, with strangers invading your personal space, some of those strangers evidently not too keen on showering, some of them too drunk to realize they’re testing your olfactory system. ...
Mostly Hypothetical Mountains, the novella that comes with physical copies of Father John Misty’s debut album Fear Fun, is in a way another ironic joke of Josh Tillman’s. If you’re not all that familiar with Tillman, he’s given himself a moniker that, in his own words, is "like ‘Alexa Chung’ ...
Aaron Dessner, best known as a co-producer of Mumford & Sons’ latest album, and his twin brother Bryce have curated a roughly-five-hours-long Grateful Dead tribute compilation. Day of the Dead features over sixty artists, including the Flaming Lips, Wilco, and that band Justin Vernon was in before ...
Portlandia, the Emmy-nominated sketch comedy show that elevated Carrie Brownstein to a household name, is mentioned once in her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl–in the epilogue. The title of the book refers to the fifth track on The Woods, the seventh album from Brownstein’s band Sleater-Kinney ...
