A lot can be said about those who hustle. Hustle, you might ask? You know, the kind of energy and drive that pushes some folks past the rest of us. Those who cut their teeth and cut them again and again because settling for good enough is never, well, enough. Motion City Soundtrack (MCS) embody this…

Neil Young‘s high-end Pono music player, backed by the most successful Kickstarter campaign ever (measured in terms of number of supporters), hits select retailers this week at a price of $399. Young appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show to talk the player up. He dismissed questions about whether there will be room for the new…

This past weekend my girlfriend and I made a quick road trip to catch the last day of the David Bowie Is exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, after watching the associated documentary. I came away with a wealth of new insight into the chameleonic pop star, but the fact that really stuck in my brain…

Who are Taggart & Rosewood? They made a mysterious debut this past summer at the Totally Gross National Party, playing music that sounds altogether new yet also strangely familiar. That sense of familiarity comes because the two masked men are no strangers to local music fans: they’re superproducer Ryan Olson (Poliça, Lizzo, Marijuana Deathsquads) and…

In 1980, the Sony Walkman cassette player revolutionized music listening, turning it into a mobile, personal experience. The Walkman has largely lost its cachet in the MP3 era—eclipsed by the iPod and iPhone—but Sony is aiming to bring some of the Walkman’s mojo back with a high-end player. The Walkman ZX2, set to launch this spring,…

After sitting empty for a year, downtown St. Paul jazz venue the Artists’ Quarter has reopened its doors under the new name Vieux Carre. It is now owned and operated by Minneapolis’s Dakota Jazz Club. The beloved basement club was named after New Orleans’s historic French Quarter; the name is meant to translate to “old quarter” in honor of the…

Burn Fetish It’s a new year, and local noise-rock trio Burn Fetish are starting the year off with the release of their Animal EP. Calling Burn Fetish a noise-rock trio is as close to a concise description as you can get. There are bluesy roots on the track “This Party Tastes Like Pepsi-Cola,” but if the Animal…

Jack White, Drake and AC/DC will headline the 2015 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, whose lineup was announced this afternoon. Also on the bill for the April 10-19 festival are Alt-J, Alabama Shakes, Father John Misty, Florence and the Machine, Ryan Adams, and the War on Drugs. Minnesota artists are absent from this year’s lineup.…

Tongue-in-cheek tweets by Kanye West fans stirred a minor panic among Beatles fans who thought that some young tweeters actually didn’t know who Kanye’s latest collaborator—Paul McCartney—is. Both The Mirror U.K. and Good Morning America stirred the pot by reporting on the the story. “WHO IS PAUL MCCARTNEY?” read a GMA feed. “KANYE’S FANS DON’T KNOW THE BEATLE.” Maybe…

We know our local music scene is huge—but just how huge? We asked Dave Loomer of MN Live to help us get a quantitative handle on haps in the Twin Cities music scene last year: how many shows, how many releases, how many new bands. The Current’s Nate Ryan has presented these data in the form…