January 28, 2013 5:00 am by: Art Levy
It can be hard for any person to retain anonymity nowadays, let alone a musical artist, but that's exactly how
Unknown Mortal Orchestra introduced itself. In 2010, UMO's song
"Ffunny Ffrends" popped up online, going viral in a matter of months. Bloggers and fans scrambled to find out who the creators were, to no avail. Finally, a musician named
Ruban Nielson unmasked himself and claimed he was the man responsible.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra's self-titled debut came in 2011, and even the music itself is somewhat mysterious. Positioned somewhere between psychedelia, funk, and glam, the LP is a world in itself. Nielson, who hails from New Zealand, recorded the album with two other musicians in his Portland, Oregon home studio. Even with this unassuming background,
Unknown Mortal Orchestra caught on,...
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2013 marks almost 20 years as a recording artist (and well over 20 as a songwriter and performer), and as she prepares to take the stage Saturday night at the Moody Theater, there's no sign she's stopping anytime soon.... » read more
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Even growing up in relative isolation in Alaska, the members of
Portugal. The Man fell in love with the psychedelic music of the Beatles and Pink Floyd. On their new album,
In The Mountain In The Cloud, the quartet continues to...
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Randy Reynolds wouldn't object to being called student of rock and roll. He might object to being called a rock and roll nerd. Both descriptors fit. Reynolds arrived Austin after Hurricane Rita drove him out of his native Houston and he's been writing and recording straight-ahead...
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Eric D. Johnson started the
Fruit Bats out of his Chicago bedroom in 1997, recording simple folk songs on a four-track recorder. While over the past few years the Fruit Bats have turned into a full-band effort, Johnson's new album,...
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Two distinctly different soul bands have emerged on the Austin music scene over the past few years. On the one hand, you have the blues-based, fire-and-brimstone blast of
Black Joe Lewis railing against life's many trials. Then there's
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Coming into SXSW this year, we spoke with a handful of music nerds that kept mentioning a five-piece out of Lafayette, Louisiana that they were excited about checking out at the conference. The band was
Givers, and, sure enough, they landed on
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"Sparkly, vibrant pop from the South" is how
the Sour Notes describe themselves. The Austin quintet certainly fills all those descriptors: their latest album,
Last Looks, is dreamy in all the right places but with a sly edge that's refreshing to...
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In a recent
Texas Monthly article,
Robert Ellis admitted that his new LP,
Photographs (which came out last week), doesn't fit nicely into a particular genre. "I...
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Erin Ivey organized the
Musical Kaleidoscope Project in 2009, bringing together visual artists and musicians to create art together at
The Long Center. And thinking about what she wanted to...
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Apparently the name
Charles Ray Wiggins isn't appropriate for a rock star.
Raphael Saadiq (née Wiggins), picked up the bass at age six and decided to change his name to Raphael at eighteen after trying out for
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Andrew Kenny hit the Austin music scene running in 1995, fronting underground indie darlings
The American Analog Set. The quartet released six studio albums over the course of a decade and was known for its dreamy, percussive sound augmented by...
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Borrowing from your parents' record collection is a rite of passage for any passionate music lover, but
Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside sound like they were more interested in music from a couple of generations ago. On the Portland quartet's debut...
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Will Johnson doesn't really like to talk about himself. He typically averts his eyes, slumps his shoulders and deflects the attention elsewhere. But there's a lot for Johnson to talk about. He's the frontman for at least a...
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These days it's hard to know when band names are trying to be sincere or ironic (lately you can bet on the latter). A lot of times, family-band names are for show alone. But that's not the case with the
Wheeler Brothers....
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Since 1989, D.C.'s
Slumberland Records has established itself as the go-to label for ear-opening indie pop. Old acts like Stereolab have been lionized for decades, and new ones like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are quickly moving up the food...
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