Ryan Moloney

Palm breaks boundaries with label debut "Rock Island"

Craving a band’s next album when you’re only on the fourth track of their newest is a strange feeling. Rarely can a record be so instantly captivating, engaging, yet unfulfilling. It’s like the meal before Thanksgiving dinner; it satisfies you for now, but the real prize has yet to come.  Rock Island is the best Thanksgiving lunch you’ve ever had. The record is Palm’s first full length LP through Carpark records, and their most accessible work to date - which is not to say that the band is compromising its sound for streaming numbers or festival billings. It's still littered with the abrupt time changes, frenzied drum patterns, and off-the-wall guitars that make their previous releases so good, but this record is a clear step forward for the band on all fronts and its most intriguing aspect is that it feels like it’s a sign of much greater things to come.

Review: The National explores electronic with little success

There comes a time in many artists’ careers where they decide to go electronic. Without fail, that album’s pre-release hype discussion centers around the question of whether or not it’ll be this band’s Kid A, Age of Adz, or Yeezus, drastic reinventions from some of this era’s most critically acclaimed artists. Most often it’s not.  It generally signals an artist desperately trying to kindle the dying embers of their creative flame. For some, it opens a whole new world of possibilities like it did last year for Bon Iver, who went full bleep-bloop with heavy use of synths, auto-tune, and a track list that looked closer to Wingdings than it did English. On their seventh record, The National are the latest to dip into the electronic well.

A Look into Sasquatch Music Festival 2017

Following what many longtime festival-goers considered to be a lackluster showing in 2016, veteran fans were cautiously optimistic about Sasquatch!’s 2017 iteration. Towards the end of last year, they announced that renowned, reclusive R&B star Frank Ocean would be one of the upcoming year’s headliners, a promising booking that appeared to signal an impending rebound. But the momentum stagnated in January, as all mentions of Ocean disappeared across Sasquatch!’s social media pages, and the lineup was nowhere to be seen. In due time, Sasquatch! sent an email announcing that the festival lineup would be released the upcoming Monday at midnight — a curious decision, as it would seemingly make more sense to release the lineup when fans and publications were actually awake for the announcement.

A crowd gathers as the sun sets over the Gorge Amphitheater. The three-day Sasquatch Music Festival takes place annually in George, Washington on Memorial Day weekend.