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Thursday, November 21, 2024

The Avenue

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Hippies score on debut

Fleet Foxes isn't your father's Seattle band. The five-piece Puget pioneers avoid flannel, regularly bathe and - here's the real departure - seem genuinely happy to be alive. These guys have aesthetic taste, favoring 16th century cover artwork over naked babies (Nirvana) and mangy farm animals (Pearl Jam). Of greater importance, the group's brand of Brian Wilson-flavored folk lullaby makes more noise in blogs than in stadiums, a telltale sign that they are out of place and time.


Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

R.E.M. deliver impressive show, prove they can still rock

"We are young despite the years we are concern/ We are hope despite the times." So sings Michael Stipe on R.E.M.'s classic "These Days," the band's statement of purpose and a tune that had been rattling in my head a full week prior to an early summer gig at the University of California, Berkeley campus. The song rocks, no questions asked, but it's also slightly cringe-inducing, should you picture it played by three middle-aged hipsters - one frumpy (Peter Buck), one bald (Stipe) and one timelessly nerdy (Mike Mills). It also begs the question, are these guys full of it? Twenty years on, are once-ballsy claims now as hollow as one of Buck's signature Rickenbackers? In short, does R.E.M. still matter?


Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Old shtick on ‘Weezer’

Not many guitar heroes make it through their high school years without getting slapped with the dropout tag, so it's even more impressive that Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo gets to flaunt a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. A decade-long stint with the Ivy League's finest must afford one all kinds of vital knowledge, and yet Cuomo still can't wrap his horn-rimmed head around the law of diminishing returns.



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