When I went to see YACHT, a couple years ago during the Treasure Island Music Festival, it was playing outdoors in the afternoon, and it seemed like the wrong time and place. Last year at the Fox, the conceptual electropop band seemed stifled by the combination of the large venue and sparse crowd, and also mired by the same lackluster audio conditions that made headliner Hot Chip sound like it was playing underwater. But Saturday at Slim's, on my last night of Noise Pop, it seemed just...

Fuck, I've wandered into the Goldilocks cliché. Read more »

When I first saw Sacramento's Death Grips — about a year or so ago at 1015 Folsom — they had to work especially hard. The room was half full and Stefan Burnett made up the difference, jumping down into the crowd and taunting it into action. The intervening time before a repeat performance was longer than expected (Death Grips suddenly canceled their last scheduled tour to finish their second album of the year) and at Slim's Monday the crowd seemed prewound, eager to see the sold-out show, jockeying for position near the front, and admiring freshly purchased t-shirts showcasing the attention-baiting cover art for No Love Deep Web. 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 »