Welcome to Staff Trax (formerly Check Out This Jam!!!), the weekly feature here on DC9 where we shed some light on the music we’ve been enjoying of late, regardless of the touring or album release schedules that tend to bear the focus of most of our coverage. Also, it’s a…

One of the finest surprises of last year was the release of We Were Promised Jetpacks’ debut album, These Four Walls. With a disc that exhibits lifting melodies and popping beats, this Glasgow four-piece became a band you had to urge your friends to hear. It wasn’t just some simple,…

Welcome to Check Out This Jam!!!, the weekly feature here on DC9 where we shed some light on the music we’ve been enjoying of late, regardless of the touring or album release schedules that tend to bear the focus of most of our coverage. Also, it’s a chance for you…

Welcome to Check Out This Jam!!!, the weekly feature here on DC9 where we shed some light on the music we’ve been enjoying of late, regardless of the touring or album release schedules that tend to bear the focus of most of our coverage. Also, it’s a chance for you…

Motion City Soundtrack comes to Dallas supporting its newest record, My Dinosaur Life, in what will most definitely be a packed show. No surprise there: MCS has a sound that is very friendly to the Warped Tour audience, even if it isn’t strictly for those crowds. Rather, this five-piece is…

Welcome to Check Out This Jam!!!, a new weekly feature here on DC9. The idea’s pretty simple: It’s a chance for us writers to shed some light on the music we’ve been enjoying of late, regardless of the touring or album release schedules that tend to bear the focus of…

Saturday night marks the EP release show for the very promising Dallas-based four-piece Maleveller. Playing the Double Wide alongside fellow heavy Dallas acts True Widow and Big Fiction–in a show brought to you by Parade of Flesh–this is a gig that we can pretty much a guarantee will rock your…

The Crash That Took Me might be a part of a new “art pop” imprint on Idol Records, but Chlorine Colored Eyes isn’t a drastic step away from what the band has done before. In many ways, this record is a logical follow-up to the band’s debut, Orchestrated Kaleidoscopes. And…

A few years ago, downstairs at Sons of Hermann Hall, the wooden staircases and walls started to shake as two bands in the room above played a song that sounded like something off of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Four guitars played one bendy riff at top volume, and drums pounded…

Looking at an extended hiatus from The Foo Fighters, bassist Nate Mendel considered a couple of options. He considered playing again with The Fire Theft, a band he was in with vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Enigk and drummer William Goldsmith, or Sunny Day Real Estate, the acclaimed band he played in alongside…

Going on 20 years together as a band, Strung Out has been able to make its metallic pop-punk work wonders. Already claiming seven full-lengths, two non-LP collections, one live album and two EPs, the band is promoting its latest release, Agents of the Underground, with its current string of tours…

The last time The Get Up Kids played the DFW area, they were second on a four-band bill at the Nokia Theatre. Just a few years before that, the band headlined (and packed) the original Door and the Ridglea Theater. But, sadly, for those who remember how powerful and impressionable…

Comparisons to post-rock bands like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky are easy to make when listening to This Will Destroy You’s music, but don’t let those comparisons fool you into thinking that this band is anything like, say, Ozma aping Weezer, for example. “In the tour bus with us,…

Last year, at our 20th annual Dallas Observer Music Awards, there was a distinct theme of tradition behind all the festivities. And rightfully so: 20 years is indeed a long time. Countless great acts have passed through and risen up in Dallas during that time period. But there’s just something…

Dissing the Warped Tour and its primary audience is about as moot as criticizing Nickelodeon for catering to a younger audience. Fifteen years in, the Warped Tour still has a reputation for being a fairly priced, all-you-can-digest buffet of bands. From Underoath to Dance Gavin Dance to Bad Religion, there’s…

Though they started off as a duo, don’t think that Viva Voce is just another one of those bands that rock critics get all excited about because there’s apparently all this sexual tension in not having a bass player. Not even close: The husband-and-wife team that leads this four-piece trade…