St. Paul power trio The Blind Shake was already a pretty good band before it hooked up with Michael Yonkers, the psychedelic guitarist whose long-buried 1968 debut, Microminiature Love, was finally released in 2003 by Sub Pop, giving him a long overdue cult renaissance. The combination of Yonkers and his much younger brethren has been electrifying, both on last year’s Carbohydrates …
Month: July 2009
The late crime novelist Donald E. Westlake was notably protective of his most prominent fictional creation, the hard-as-nails master thief Parker, who starred in more than two dozen books written under Westlake’s major pseudonym, Richard Stark. Though the Parker books were adapted into films seven times, including the acclaimed Point Blank, Westlake insisted that the filmmakers …
Zak Sally shifted his attention largely to graphic art after leaving Duluth slowcore trio Low in 2005, focusing on writing and drawing Recidivist, Sammy The Mouse, and the forthcoming Like A Dog, as well as running the small press La Mano 21, which releases books by artists like John Porcellino and William Schaff. While often dreamlike and full of wild invention, Sally’s …
Given the remarkably polished pop songcraft that Pictures Of Then exhibit on And The Wicked Sea—not to mention that the songs from their 2007 debut, Crushed By Lights, got airplay on MTV’s The Real World and The Hills—it’s hard to imagine that the next CD-release show the Minneapolis quartet plays will be at a venue as small as the Uptown Bar; here’s a band …