The luminous, blinking cocoons that have been rumored to grace the stages of Purity Ring’s live shows — as boasted by the lucky ones who have been able to get tickets to these consistently sold out performances — glowed with aqua-blue precision at Bottom of the Hill on Labor Day.

It was one of those elusive evenings the music gods hand craft. Every member of the crowd seemed to be in on this magical energy, knowing that sonic-satisfaction was promised to each and all by the end of the night. The Potrero Hill venue bustled with unanimous glee as the audience waited anxiously, gratefully, for the Halifax-Montreal-based duo to bring elegant live justice to its prodigious debut album, Shrines.

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A wave of nostalgia rolled fierce last night through the Regency Ballroom. It was everywhere – on stage with the Desaparecidos, a reformed group of five accomplished Omaha musicians, who seemed to lean on one another for comfort during noisy breakdowns, bending backward and lurching forward while playing all the tracks off their one album together, Read Music, Speak Spanish (Saddle Creek Records, 2002). It was in the rapturous, screaming crowd, mosh-pitting past its prime, and pumping skinny fists to the beat. And up on the balcony, it rose on my arms in the form of an endless series of goose pimples. Nostalgia sans irony. Read more »

With a lineup jam packed with hip-hop artists from all across the genre’s increasingly diverse spectrum, Rock the Bells last weekend at Shoreline Amphitheater came and left Mountain View in a two-day flurry of generational hops.

The logistics: 35 acts from over two decades of hip-hop covering two stages in the span of a weekend. With just about any song, regardless of era, available via the web, this type of generational shuffling in music is becoming a normalized impulse. Read more »

Bromance was in the air Sunday night as Braid took the stage at Slim’s. The on-again, off-again band recently reunited after a seven-year hiatus just in time to play its 600th show, and the members seemed genuinely grateful for the opportunity. On the final stop of their West Coast tour, these Illinois post-hardcore trailblazers thanked their fans by playing through their beloved and influential 1998 album Frame & Canvas in its entirety. Read more »

By Dillon Donovan

Reunited after having first toured together 30 years ago, KISS and Mötley Crüe having joined forces once again unleashing their mighty sound last night at the Sleep Train Pavillion.

If Mötley Crüe was indeed intended to be the opening act it was hard to tell; its set length was just two songs longer than KISS and witnessed by a much more frenzied audience being pushed to the limit thanks to the druid-style carnival theme the band has been working with for ages now.

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