Kristen sits on a backless bench in the hallway of a classroom building. It’s dark outside and the hallway is barely lit. All you can hear are the handfuls people loudly roaming through the building, filing into classrooms for meetings. She looks completing unfazed by the conversations around us, and looks confidently prepared to discuss her show, Swag Swag Like Caillou.
Photo credit: Jeff Lombardo
Last night I had the honor of being graced by the presence of Queen Bey herself. Hitting Nashville as part of her Formation World Tour, the show was nothing short of spectacular; there were fireworks, pools of water, and instantaneous costume changes throughout the course of the performance.
Last Friday, I got the opportunity to see my favorite band, St. Lucia, perform for the third time. When I say favorite band, I mean more along the lines of obsession, so this concert was something that I had been waiting for since the last time that I saw them in November 2014. I saw them open for Foster the People in 2013, and something about their tropical, 80’s-like vibes just got to me, and I fell in love with their colorful, vibrant music.
Coming off of the Yeezus tour, it was hard to imagine where Kanye West would take his live performance vision. How do you top a giant mountain, pyrotechnics, models, and even a visit from Jesus? Simple: make the stage fly.
Riding fresh off the success of his Blank Face LP, published just two months ago, Top Dawg Entertainment heavy hitter Schoolboy Q played to an absolutely packed Marathon Music Works last night, with Pro Era poster boy Joey Badass opening. Bucket hats abound.
Roosevelt is a one man project by producer/DJ Marius Lauber of Cologne, Germany. He’s been making music for over 3 years, and recently French powerhouse label Greco Roman, picked him up. His debut album, Roosevelt, was released this August.
Well folks, he’s done it again: Keaton Henson has released an album somehow more depressing than his last….. but, like, in a good way.
(Source)
It’s been written to death now, the story of Preoccupations (fka Viet Cong) and their name change. In short – amid a storm of cancelled shows and controversy, Viet Cong had to change their name, so they landed on Preoccupations. What’s clear, though, is that the controversy did nothing to knock them off their course of making fantastic, classically post-punk records.
Two nights ago I’m sitting at my desk, dead eyed, and I open innumerable Chrome tabs in avoidance of my paper that’s due the next day. I decide to refresh my Vanderbilt gmail inbox for the sixth time, something that traditionally needs to be done after I scroll through my entire Facebook feed. It turns out that neither of the two WRVU DJs I’ve reached out to earlier in the day is able to meet up this week for an interview. I get it. It’s a busy week and I only gave them a few days to clear their schedules for me.
So I think in my head, “What if I interview myself?”
Over this past weekend a couple of us on the e-staff got together to clean out WRVU’s office. Full of dust, old CDs, and old promotional t-shirts, this needed to be done. So on Sunday morning we banded together with a roll of paper towels, some all-purpose cleaner, and a truly impressive number of trash bags. WRVU is over forty years old at this point, and with time inevitably comes a series of knick-knacks and souvenirs that someone just can’t bear to get rid of. That’s where we came in. Over the course of several hours, we excavated the desks and shelves of WRVU’s office, unearthing a startling collection of items in the process.
We all have that friend who talks incessantly about how they relate to Twenty One Pilots on a spiritual level, then ask you if you’ve heard “that new one from Suicide Squad.” They appear to listen to “Chocolate” by The 1975 on a loop on Spotify, with a brief intermission of Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.” They drone on about how they are literally obsessed with Imagine Dragons and can’t wait for fall just so they can play “Sweater Weather” on their new record player as they down their third Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL if you’re edgy).
By Linzy Scott This year’s Bonnaroo was my first time ever going, so it’s safe to say that I had no idea what to expect and no standards to measure…
I was justifiably skeptical in my approach Marathon Music Works for Miike Snow’s return to Nashville after their three year hiatus to pursue personal projects. My sentiment was further warped upon waiting in line to receive my ticket and photo pass, when I was eavesdropping on a woman behind me that was ‘desperately in need of a sitter.’ It was in that instant that I was struck with the realization that I was utterly companionless, afloat in a sea of financial-independence. The late-twenty to late-thirty-year old crowd filled up all the space around me and I buckled in to receive whatever was coming my way.
Well, it’s here at last. The trees have donned their leafy green uniforms, the ENO hammocks have found their places amongst the summery shade, and every student is slowly dying a crippling death by means of final exams. This only means one thing for us here at Vanderbilt, and that thing is summer. Before we are set free to our respective internships and summer vacations, we must make it past the hurdles that stand between us and our 14 weeks of relative peace.
As a school in music city, Vanderbilt has an endless supply of great live music venues, concerts, and amazing festivals. I have not been to very many myself, but the ones I have attended – Live on the Green and the CMA Festival – have been very positive experiences. This being said, a large majority of the music festivals that I hear about when I talk to other students include Lollapalooza in Chicago, Illinois, and Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee.
I had no idea who Porter Robinson was when I went to Hard Summer 2015. With other names like ODEZZA, Griz, Big Gigantic, Bro Safari, and Chemical Brothers, it struck me how many kids were wearing black t-shirts with Windings font and carrying “we <3 Porter” signs. Just before his show, I found myself with a group of Robinson fanatics who warned me I was about to have an experience of a lifetime. I smiled, gave a big-festival-hug, and turned toward the stage aglow with the art deco neon of Robinson’s debut album, Worlds.
For some people, salad–especially fruit salad–is really fun to eat. Just search “person eating salad” on Google and you’ll see that 9 out of 10 results feature inexplicably jovial individuals brandishing a bowl of salad in one hand and admiring a tomato or a tuft of lettuce speared on a fork held in the other.
However, as exhilarating as it may be to eat salad, it’s even more fun to listen to it.
Today is April 14th, and that means that school is finally winding down. For our seniors, however, their entire Vanderbilt career is in its final chapter; graduation is only four weeks away, and now WRVU’s graduating DJs only have a few radio shows left. So this week, I thought I’d sit down with a senior DJ and talk about his specialty show, what makes it unique, how he’s managed to keep his shows fresh for four years, and if he has any parting thoughts.
That DJ? Myself.
(Do you know how hard it is to schedule an interview with people this time of the year?! I swear I’m not trying to be self-aggrandizing. I’m simply out of options!)
(Image courtesy of Consequence of Sound)
Since 2011, Teen Suicide, with Maryland singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Sam Ray at the helm, has been fairly consistently lobbing explosive blasts of genre-scattered lo-fi emo/indie pop onto the internet via Bandcamp. Even with all the activity though, and a decent following, the group (mostly the outlet for Ray’s own songs more than a traditional band) “disbanded” in January of 2013, but returned to performing in various capacities by the end of the same year.
Post-rock quartet Explosions in the Sky released their seventh studio album, “The Wilderness” early this April. As a fan and avid listener of their early material, I was skeptical that the group could deliver as engaging and original music as “Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever” or ”The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.” Their soundtrack material in the interim, such as “Friday Night Lights,” and also tracks off of “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,” begin to sound cookie-cutter in their almost melodrama, due only by the group’s early masterful sound.
Just the other day I was making the seemingly endless hike from Kissam to Blair when I put my iPod on shuffle. Yes, times were desperate. My battery was running low and Spotify refused to connect, so I was listening to music that I had actually purchased off iTunes (talk about a throwback.) A U2 song came on and I suddenly realized that the lyrics were speaking to my very soul. You see, second semester senior year is not easy. Whether or not you know what you’re doing after graduation (guess which category I fall in), it’s a confusing and emotional time. But don’t worry, Bono, The Edge and the two other guys are here to empathize with you. The following playlist is a bunch of U2 songs that are a reflection of the struggles of being a second semester senior. Hopefully, this will help motivate you to power through the next month – or at least entertain you as you procrastinate until the bitter end.