High art, pub rock, no-fi: experience a pleasing sensory mush of music and art this weekend on campus. Boychild’s explosive performance art complements the rustic, cherry undertones of Nice Driveway and Rui Barbosa, while the PDG crew crimps the edge of this tidy pork pie. Enjoy the aural hors devours, this weekend it’s on the house ;)
Phatrabbit’s new video for their song “Skinny Legs” is a travelogue of sorts, a collage of the past and present— where the band has been and where they’re headed. Scenery blurs together as a lone traveller boards a bus and heads to the beach, dipping his feet into the sand before his head sinks below the waves.
Sloopy Coos Canyon make music that’s laden with misty guitars and cooing vocals, forming songs that are essentially rock lullabies. Helly Manson and Adam Ettelbrick asked them a few relatively nonsensical questions about their beautiful time in the band, kitchen appliances and most importantly, Lord Voldemort
PWR BTTM sat down with the editors of Aural Wes before their show at Buddhist House on October 15th to talk about babies, their undergrad experiences at Bard, and their incredibly successful first LP, Ugly Cherries, that was released this past September.
Aural Wes is extremely excited to introduce all of our readers to Greyscale, a new student group and platform here at Wesleyan that focuses on expressing reactions to music through creative mediums. It aims to show the subjectivity of music criticism, and personal significance music holds.
Schwab has been on a roll this year. Emerging early last semester, the three-piece immediately settled into a unique sound and have remained an exciting voice of the mellow Wesleyan indie scene ever since. It’s tough to name any sort of genre for the music Schwab makes, and it’s a massive testament to their music that no list of sound-a-like bands spring to mind. Schwab are doing their own thing, and they do it well.
Overcoats is the only thing Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell want to do. All day, every day, they tell me. Sitting in Hana’s sunny bedroom, I’m chatting with her and JJ about Overcoats, their electro soul-folk project. Hana’s bed—“our bed,” as the two of them describe it—is where Overcoats happens. It’s where Hana and JJ (both class of 2015) write their songs, merging artistic visions that come from different places but always end up in the same place. They joke that they’re literally merging as people, sometimes unable to distinguish one’s voice from the other in their songs. What comes of this, they tell me, is a musical project with coherence and sound that neither of them have attained before, and they’re really excited about it. Their excitement certainly isn’t misplaced.
At Alpha Delta Phi this past Friday, Gabriel Garzon-Montano, Don Froot, and Rui Barbosa graced Wesleyan with three incredibly talented performances.
Boston post-hardcore grunge rockers Pile played an explosive set at Eclectic House on Friday night, careening through songs from all corners of their extensive catalog. Accompanied by their Boston noise-rock buddies Kal Marks, Pile's innovative grunge rock never sat still for long, turning on a dime from sparse moments of guitar-plucking intimacy to stadium-scale explosions of ragged, angular power chords. Songs from their upcoming LP You're Better Than This popped up throughout the night, distinct from the rest of the set in their unprecedented dissonance and experimental composition.
Looking back on 2014, we (the Aural Wes editors) share our top 5 albums, favorite track, and most overrated album of the year as well as our most anticipated album of 2015. No year-end collective recap behemoth here, just some personal reflections on groaning Danish punk dirges, twinkly twankly jizz jazz, bangin' lifestyle rap, heady R&B from the future, syrupy personal computer music, and more. Hold each one of us accountable for this sonic smorgasbord.
A string of Christmas lights and a bare bulb lit the basement in a soft glow. Everyone swayed together, shoulders brushing and feet occasionally tapping rhythm onto others. We were packed together so tightly that we couldn’t have disentangled ourselves if we’d wanted to. It was May, the last night of the semester, and the steady indie-rock of all-caps LADD was surging out of a dusty corner.
The morning after their raucous show at Eclectic, Aural Wes's Chris Gortmaker headed to O'Rourke's Diner for brunch with the Harlem hip-hop group Ratking. Over a veritable mountain of brunch-foods, discussion ranged from Ratking's creative process to Pangaea and dinosaurs. A little known link between Aphex Twin and Cheef Keef emerged. Chris never got the toast he ordered...