Results tagged “lazonarosa”

Tonight at La Zona Rosa, Jeremy Enigk and the rest of the original Sunny Day Real Estate lineup will take the stage, playing songs from their recently re-released LP2 and Diary.

Sure, you just spent your weekend trudging through mud and withstanding unusual conditions to satiate your musical thirst, but there's something happening this week even exhausted music nerds are thrilled about.

Austinites sure are going to be spoilt for choice this weekend. If ten plus hours a day of live music on eight stages at Zilker Park isn’t enough, we get to pick from a plethora of mouth-watering late night gigs to satisfy our yearning ears. And since this turbulent economy has everyone pinching pennies, we’re offering our readers a chance to win tickets to two choice aftershows in town this Friday.

A trio of local entities, SureFire Media & Promotion, Launch787, and Direct Events invite you to spend Friday night (the 18th) at La Zona Rosa with three talented Austin bands. Headliners Alpha Rev spent the early part of the year in New York, honing their sweeping, soaring melodies and recording a first full-length for Hollywood Records. In town, they were named “Best Pop/Rock Band” in Rare Magazine’s The Rarest Issue this past May.

Photos courtesy Nari.

Mates of State are regulars in Austin. Each year they show up to perform at a festival and/or a few headlining gigs peppered around town. But the sun-kissed charm of this poppy duo never gets old for us. Husband-wife team Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel are the only two members of Mates of State, but they deliver ringing harmonies each time, with only the sounds from their vocal chords, drums and an organ (or keys).

The sold out show was a hit, not surprisingly. Born Ruffians opened. Pooneh Ghana was there to capture the mood of the evening as the band emerged to meet fans, pose for pictures, show off adorable '70s era George Harrison t-shirts and be generally likable.

Crystal Castles performed at La Zona Rosa last night, and Austinist contributing photographer Pooneh Ghana was there to catch all the action.

Coming back from a holiday weekend is never fun - just as you've begun to relax, reality chimes in with it's nasty Monday morning alarm. Fortunately, this is Austin and that means Monday evening will be a-bumpin' with a great music, giving you reason enough to keep the party going. And we don't want any pathetic excuses like, "it's a school/work night." How often do you get the chance to hear ear drum annihilating electronic mix up music? Okay, maybe pretty often, but Crystal Castles is a little different from the rest and worth checking out.

Mates of State were just here, but we're not complaining. Last year's ACL festival seems like ages ago now that spring has broken in, and between twitterpated birds and post-SX sunburns, we're quite in the mood for lilting male-female harmonies and delicate keys.

Lucinda Williams and her big broken heart return to Austin next week as she kicks off her 2009 touring. A benchmark live performer, Williams never shies from the spare, sullen lullabies that made her an icon.

One of our fav-o-rite bands here at the Austinist is Denver's ultra-eclectic DeVotchKa, a band that skillfully skirts what just about anyone would expect from an indie scene that most often pulls only haphazardly from old world influences. And yes, we mean accordion. We also mean a four-piece band in which every member plays multiple instruments, and not just in that screw-around manner, but actually knowing how to play them. In advance of DeVotchKa's sure-to-be crowd-pleasing performance this Sunday night at La Zona Rosa, we hopped on the ol' internets for a chat with Tom Hagerman, the band's fantastically essential violin and accordion dynamo.

Dremnt The End specializes in slick dance-rock ditties powered by sizzling six-string output and catchy hooks galore. The band formed in Austin in 2004 and over the years, has garnered a sizeable legion of fans craving epic rock songs. Dremnt The End first showcased at SXSW in 2005, and in 2007, they finished in the Top 20 in The Dell Lounge pre-ACL Fest contest, The Sound and The Jury. The band’s huge sound, produced and polished to perfection, should translate into a scintillating live show, and we want you there! Enter the form (further) below for a chance to win two tickets to their concert at La Zona Rosa this Friday.

Nothing Happens for a Reason brings the young band into a much bigger space. They're still confidently mixing elements of big-room emo with more subdued indie-pop (the comparisons to Jimmy Eat World and Death Cab for Cutie aren't without warrant), but they've also warmed up to some heavier territories, revealing influence by bands like Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Ros.

Oh lordy how time flies. The Roots, one of the hip-hop world's most successful and influential acts, has been around for...wait for it... over two decades. We just checked our watch and did a double-take. DAY-uhm.

Part motivational speaker, part armchair political scientist, part hack comedian, and 100% self-promotion, Henry Rollins brought his one-man spoken word show, Recountdown 2008, to a packed La Zona Rosa Sunday night. Folding chairs were laid out from the stage to the back of the room, but even so, a spillover audience filled out the wings and spots by the bar. Looking decades younger than his 47 years, Rollins spoke for well over two hours, hunching over his mic as if it were a live snake, and never missed a beat.

Stereolab performed at La Zona Rosa Wednesday night. Eric Uhlir was there to take some photos.

As if there wasn't enough to do this week, La Zona Rosa drops a gem in our collective laps. UK's Stereolab have spent the better part of the last twenty years curating Moog-fused pop delicacies, and as we reported earlier this year, their latest album is a meaningful step forward.

The aftershows are intended as a showcase for artists who may be missed or overlooked during the glutted day schedule, and present another opportunity for fans to see a favorite artist without the usual festival distractions.

Roll With You (O Division) has boosted Allston-based soul crooner Eli "Paperboy" Reed into the national spotlight, and the lift is well-deserved. Reed's music is a major force in the 21st century soul throwback genre (alongside Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and to some extent, Gnarls Barkley), and his thrilling live set is just one more reason to check him out at this year's ACL festival.

For those not familiar with Squeeze, the most obvious reference points are Crowded House and XTC. The duo of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have been creating a clever, pop-based, amazingly catchy brand of music for over 30 years. Their work has led to countless hits, a loyal audience, and loads of bands like Razorlight and Lily Allen citing them as a touchstone and trying to emulate the band's effortless sound. The band's hit-filled catalog propelled them all the way to gigs at Wembley Arena and Madison Square Garden in their heyday, so it's a rare treat to have a 'greatest hits' show in La Zona Rosa's more modest confines.

If you are still mourning the loss of Danny Young, then you'd likely enjoy this upcoming concert featuring Chicago-based jammers, Umphrey's McGee. They'll be at La Zona Rosa on September 11 - this show has been moved from Stubb's.

Photos courtesy Austinist contributing photographer Gregory Cooper.

The Faint emerged out of the Omaha music scene in the 90’s as Norman Bailey, an outfit that included quite a few of the current members, as well as fellow Nebraska luminary Conor Oberst. The band changed its name to The Faint and eventually sifted its way towards electro-rock by the turn of the century, duly equipping our dance parties for years with anthems like “Your Retro Career Melted” and “I Disappear.”

For a time there, we weren't sure if this show would ever happen. Montreal's Wolf Parade took a lengthy break after touring for debut Apologies To The Queen Mary, which led frontmen Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner to pursue multiple side projects. The resulting success (on album and in person) of their time with Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, and Handsome Furs caused some band discussion about whether to re-activate as Wolf Parade at all. Thankfully, Krug and Boeckner saw the benefit of continuing to work together, and the result was this summer's At Mount Zoomer, which is named after the band's recording space.

Henry Rollins will give a spoken word performance at La Zona Rosa on October 5. Rollins, best known as lead singer of Black Flag and the Rollins Band, continues to rile audiences worldwide with his fiercely delivered poetry and activism. Tickets will go on sale this Saturday at 10 a.m., through Gettix, and range from $25-27.

As the voice of Til' Tuesday, Aimee Mann seemed destined to become a one-hit wonder. But with 1995's brilliant I'm With Stupid, Mann defined her musical identity and found wide critical acclaim (though, at the time, not a sizable audience.) Mann mined the emotional territory of breakups, dysfunction, regrets, and longing, and most who heard the music could relate to Mann's regretful glances into the past. In an interesting twist, right as Mann found her niche, her personal life changed dramatically when she married fellow singer-songwriter Michael Penn.

Like so many punk bands, X formed in that pivotal year of 1977, but all in all they were an 80s band, and arguably one of the best and most important groups who kept the torch burning as the 1977 revolution became intertwined with new wave and the essentially meaningless designation of post-punk. While Wire and Johnny Rotten explored the electronic and twiddled with drum machines, X made garage-ready anthems that clutched rock and roll’s roots closely. Their debut, 1980s’ Los Angeles, is a classic punk record (produced by Ray Manzarek of The Doors) that explodes with sweaty, jumpy anthems and clocks in at under thirty minutes. Their later albums furthered their legacy, with songs like “Adult Books” and the wonderful “Blue Spark” fomenting legions of devotees.

Debuting as a post-Metallica thrash outfit with 1991’s Contradictions Collapse, Sweden’s Meshuggah have been refining their intractable sound to a serene balance of pummeling death metal and intricate technical sophistication. Fittingly, their latest record is called obZen, and for much of its hour-plus running time, the album does in fact bring a sense of zen-like calm to its brutally complex compositions.

Max Bemis is the man behind California pop outfit Say Anything. Bemis started the band in 2001, self-releasing Baseball that year followed by …Is a Real Boy on Doghouse Records in 2004. The latter was Bemis’ attempt to ease out of the pop-punk category towards what he calls “respectable music” per the band’s website. In fact, he went through quite a contemplative stage as he prepared the album -- “I thought often about what the point of my life was. Was I doomed to remain yet another earnest, upper-middle class bred whine-rocker? After all, hidden deep in the recesses of my mind, I had hidden the notion that I could do something incredible and different, that I could be somebody like Warhol, or Jesus. I had to write an album that was revolutionary in its content and presentation. Finally, one night, it hit me. That was what my record had to be about: the artistic struggle, the fact that every creative person has this sick ambition to affect some sort of change in society with their art, to be more than just a guy in a band or a poet or a sculptor. I couldn’t decide if this ambition was a good or bad thing but I decided to parody that overzealous drive in human beings by crafting a truly over the top musical about...myself.”