(Showbox at the Market) Now that Louisville shruggers Slint have been cinematically documented with the excellent Breadcrumb Trail and made a couple of comeback tours, they no longer have that coveted mystique. That’s okay, because Slint’s influential post rock still careens, crunches, and stirs feelings with startling potency—even though you now know they made a series of cassettes titled Anal Breath. Slint began auspiciously with their 1989 debut Tweez, which truculently combines punk and jazz with low-key smarts. It’s some of the tightest freewheeling music ever. On their 1991 masterpiece Spiderland, Slint harness a heroic, stoic style of song construction that maximizes the sonic and emotional impact of quiet/soft and the loud/hard dynamics. It’s an approach many have attempted, but few have done it with Slint’s distinctiveness and dexterity. This show is recommended for old hardcore fans and newcomers alike. DAVE SEGAL
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Check out Underage’s coverage of Slint here »
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(Neumos) Like an Aaliyah-worshipping Ariel Pink, How to Dress Well (nee Tom Krell) traded in the four-track for a laptop with a shitty mic, creating an enigmatic strain of spectral lo-fi R&B in the process. Riddled with pops, fuzz, and feedback, the songs on records like Love Remains and Total Loss were like memories of middle-school mixtapes for a very particular generation, beats breaking at the seams, and Krell crooning like a bargain-basement Boyz II Men. It was a strategically nostalgic sound, getting millennials’ misty-eyed for urban radio classics of the pre-impeachment ’90s. His latest, terribly titled “What Is This Heart?”, strips away the lo-fi affectations in favor of a straightforward, melancholy synth-pop sound, and while some may miss the fog-shrouded sound design, it’s clear Krell’s got his sights on bigger things.
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(Lo-Fi) Terman Shanks are a new Seattle band (formed earlier this spring) that play an old version of pop punk in a perfectly snotty way—not unlike other Seattle punk alumni, the Briefs. They have a song called “Waste of Space” on a split 7-inch with band Bad Tats that seems like it’d be the perfect song to listen to while bombing around on a skateboard. Hey, speaking of, have you skated the new Jefferson Park Skatepark in Beacon Hill yet? It just opened on July 14. If I thought I could even ATTEMPT an ollie without breaking my goddamn neck, I’d attempt it at Jefferson, while listening to the Briefs and Terman Shanks. KELLY O
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And here’s all our recommended music events—tonight, tomorrow, this weekend, and beyond!