Somewhere at the core of Al Olender’s new album Easy Crier is the important of attention. Attention to love. Attention to grief. Attention to memory. Attention to the infinitesimal moments of life as much as the impossibly cavernous ones that swallow us. She doesn’t strive to offer answers or even […]
God is good and it’s understoodhe moves in mysterious ways. M.C. Taylor Back in late 2012, as the leaves shed their false selves, I traveled along the dusty and unpoliced blogosphere, finding a song on my feed with an album cover featuring a red handprint, no artist named, and the […]
In March of 2020, I had tickets to see Third Eye Blind perform in my favorite venue in D.C. – the 930 Club. It sold out immediately and I was so excited to have secured tickets. However, just a few weeks before the date of the show, everything changed, and […]
For the longest time, some music has had this ineffable quality to just make me feel a certain way, to almost change my life, if only for a moment. Miles Gannett’s Meridian did this to me. I first listened to it as I walked around a just-blooming saucer magnolia grove, […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
We here at These Subtle Sounds have been working to navigate the new world we inhabit as best we can, trying to figure out what we can do to keep carrying the music flame. We typically and historically have focused on covering live music – and we’ve certainly written about some livestreams […]
Barry Hannah wrote the sort of short stories that took something nearly prosaic and built it into something surreally shattering, brimming with edges of the grotesque, of a distant kind of humor, but always fundamentally human. “Water Liars” was one of those stories, its closing line, “We were both crucified […]
This past weekend, the newly formed band, Be Well packed the upstairs room at Songbyrd Music House in D.C. The much talked about band may be new to the scene; however, the five members that make up Be Well are deeply rooted in the area’s hardcore punk music scene going […]
Next Wednesday, January 29, the Wood Brothers will be performing at Rams Head Live on their latest tour. They are out on the road in support of their latest album, Kingdom In My Mind, which will be available this Friday, the 24th. We are very excited for the show and […]
Life is so often governed by sea changes, those massive scale events that happen almost suddenly, but the world had never stopped changing under the surface. Mystic Country by Caleb Stine and the Revelations represents a sea change. As ever, Caleb sings directly – you can glean certain information quickly […]
Over the course of two nights toward the end of November, during what is cheekily known as “Pranksgiving Weekend” (November 29th-30th), revered local artist Mary Prankster will return to the stage in Baltimore and Alexandria, Virginia to play her first shows in nearly 14 years. Between 1994 and 2005, Prankster […]
When listening to music, history matters. The singer’s, the band’s. The listeners’, the venue’s. My history with Grace Potter is long, dating back more than a decade, first seeing her with The Nocturnals at the now-defunct Recher Theater in Towson, MD, surrounded by university students and a small haze […]
I have had the pleasure of following David Wax Museum since I saw them perform at Newport Folk Festival 2010, which was a spot they won in a contest. At this point, David Wax Museum had already released two albums and they performed most of these songs at their live […]
As autumn begins to fall, I find myself in an unsteady state, somewhere between the rising dread of lost daylight and the untamed joy of undressing forests and breath-stopping winds. A dichotomy of being that certainly has more shades of gray, but it’s hard to see past the splitting. […]
I have been a fan of Vampire Weekend from the very beginning. I instantly fell in love with the cheerful melodies, playful keyboards, and Ezra’s perfect falsetto. Every time Vampire weekend came to D.C., I made sure to go to their shows. In fact, Vampire weekend was my daughter’s first concert when she was 10 years […]
Music is hope, right? The Steel Wheels, from Harrisonburg, Virginia, traffic in that kind of positive ideology, steering roads on their bicycles and in vans, spreading a kind of honest truth in their music. Which isn’t to say their songs are full of Kumbaya (that’s not bad, either, fwiw), but […]
