Strange Names: Use Your Time Wisely Though Strange Names are now based in New York, many of these songs will be familiar to Minnesota listeners who followed Strange Names here until they moved east last year. Taking new wave to what they call “next wave” is what the band are doing on Use Your Time…

Gabriel Douglas has built his reputation on the churning, heavy-thumping blues rock of the 4onthefloor, whose sound is defined as much by his wild man warrior-bellow vocals as it is by the steady pulse of the four members’ synchronous bass-drum thuds—but a delve into the corners of his catalog reveals an artist with a startling…

You guys, today’s Friday Five is so good. I seriously didn’t think this much awesomeness could fit in five little videos. This is why May is typically one of my favorite months out of the whole musical year: Everyone’s playing shows like crazy, releasing new work, and getting ready to tear through a full summer…

Web of Sunsets: Steel New Days Members of the acid-country trio Web of Sunsets come from many corners of the musical world, but the title track of their new Steel New Days EP centers on a droning jangle. Slowly but surely the song takes flight and before you know it, your feet are far from…

Read Selena Carlson's profile of one of Minnesota's great journeymen musicians, and hear Charlie Parr perform in our studios.

Winona was recently called (on this blog) a town where “music and adventure [are] undoubtedly akin,” where “a day-long trek through the woods [is] incomplete without Bob Dylan’s ramblings, Frank Ocean’s crooning, or Jimi Hendrix’s electric wails played on a mobile-phone speaker.” Then writer Alex Miller talks about a pass-the-err-guitar session out on the beach while…

Dara Moskowitz-Grumdahl stops by The Current's Morning Show to talk about some of the distilleries popping up in Northern Minnesota. "It's almost a boom," she says of the burgeoning industry.

It takes a little navigation, but you can find it on the Duluth Trading Co.’s website. Scroll to the bottom of the site, then click on “about us,” then look at the bottom of the left-hand menu, and there it is: “Apology to Don Henley.” “As many of you know,” reads the statement at that…

Just after the Target in Victoria, British Columbia closed on March 31—along with other Target stores across Canada—a group of employees recorded a cover of Semisonic‘s “Closing Time” for a poignant video that’s now gone viral. (Vita.mn) Don Henley has accepted the Duluth Trading Co.’s apology for an e-mail ad headlined, “Don a henley and take…

Anyone who has seen Venus de Mars perform with her band All the Pretty Horses knows that the veteran punk rock and goth artist isn’t afraid of putting it all out there—at times literally, with only a few strips of electrical tape and a well-placed corset serving as her only stage wear. Her new album, Flesh and Wire,…