MUSIC

RVA's Luggage, the hip hop tag team known as Ben FM and Oxen Johnson, took a break for a while after the release of their first album, Speak Easy Luggage. But they made a triumphant return to the local scene over a year ago now, taking things to a higher level than they've ever attained before with awesome video clips like "2 Up, 2 Down" and...

This Thursday, fans of intelligent, creative music that stays outside the box and avoids run of the mill cliches will find no better place to be within the Richmond city limits than the Canal Club. This Thursday, fans of intelligent, creative music that stays outside the box and avoids run of the mill cliches will find no better place to be...

Planes Mistaken For Stars, Smoke Or Fire, Regents, Family Cat Sunday August 12 at Strange Matter Colorado's Planes Mistaken For Stars have always been a big deal in Richmond, beginning with a house show they played in summer 1997 at the end of a brief tour with City Of Caterpillar, a local post-hardcore group who at the time were just beginning...

Botanist – III: Doom In Bloom/Allies (Total Rust Records) Anybody who has been an avid fan of music in whatever its forms for any substantial length of time might find it hard to be genuinely surprised by anything at this point. There's a lot of impressive, moving, or even technically proficient work out there, but with each spectacular album...

If you didn't attend the GWAR-B-Q this weekend, you missed out. Two stages, free Redbull, hotties left and right, and, of course, GWAR were all highlights of the day. While some people were hoping this would be this year’s Best Friends Day, the organizers did a great job of making the GWAR-B-Q its own entity. Make your plans for next year! Read...

RVA's masters of psychedelic noise-metal, The Catalyst, have spent the past month on the road, bringing their brand new LP, Voyager, to towns all over the United States. Now they're coming home to blast the cobwebs from all of our heads once again, bringing their ridiculously loud and heavy sound back to Strange Matter. RVA's masters of...

It may be easy for a listener to feel like they have Sunn O))) pegged. Their music at first seems like a catalog of heavy metal tropes, isolated, exaggerated, and distended - the slow crawl of their music barely registering on the b.p.m. scale, the extreme volume and almost reverential treatment of the isolated guitar, the monastic cloaks in...

Those who have been following the legal proceedings surrounding the recent arrest of members of Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot as closely as we have no doubt heard that band members Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich received two-year sentences today for the crime of "hooliganism." Despite this terrible...