While we’ve talked plenty in recent months about how on-point Deep Ellum has been of late, there’s one thing that we haven’t necessarily seen that much of: Impromptu live music inside bars. Okay, there’s plenty of live music in neighborhood bars, but the busking keeps mostly to the streets. Not…
Halloween is over, but so what? Pull those costumes back out and get ready to party again next month because the Dallas Observer Music Awards are coming to The Bomb Factory on Wednesday, December 9. You might want to leave your white lighters at home, though, because the theme for…
For Friday the 13th this week, you actually might be in luck — though maybe we just jinxed it. Chance the Rapper (please, say “The Rapper”) and the Elm Street Tattoo Festival kick off the weekend, with the latter extending all the way to the Lord’s Day because tattoos know…
Cheap Trick With Ian Moore and the American Fuse The Bomb Factory, Dallas Saturday, November 7, 2015 When Cheap Trick usually comes to town, they have to stick to the hits. Whether they’re playing Billy Bob’s or opening for Aerosmith, the set list doesn’t veer too far from the songs…
Untapped Festival With Flaming Lips, Dr. Dog, Pharcyde and more Fair Park, Dallas Saturday, November 7, 2015 As the Flaming Lips began its headlining set during Saturday night’s Untapped Festival in front of several thousand beer and/or music lovers at Fair Park, it seemed as though the most ambitious annual…
Parquet Courts With Party Static, Sin Motivo and the Noids Rubber Gloves, Denton Thursday, November 5, 2015 Parquet Courts were the indisputable Homecoming Kings of Denton when they played the infamously divey Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios last night. The past year and a half has seen the former Dentonites get…
Chvrches With Masionair The Bomb Factory, Dallas Thursday, November 5, 2015 Not all synthetic pop music is on point, but in 2013 when Chvrches (pronounced churches) released their EP The Mother We Share into the world, they immediately became Euro synth-pop darlings, booking major music festivals and venues ever since…
Another week, another bit of oddball Erykah Badu news for the world to ponder. The Dallas soul queen has been especially busy of late, dropping a remix of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” and performing a run of “one-human” (not to be mistaken for one-woman) shows at The Black Academy of Arts…
The age of 14 was a pivotal year for Dallas rapper Lyrical.She had a poem published after winning a poetry contest, recorded hip-hop music for the first time and met her father for the first, and only, time — and even then it was an accident. It was a year…
Bentley Green is not a kid rapper; he is a serious hip-hop artist who happens to be a kid. After putting out YouTube videos that millions of people watched when he was 6, he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Maury Show. After appearing in a few commercials…
What did you do for Halloween this year? If your answer is anything other than, “Partied with the Coathangers,” then you probably Halloweened wrong. Unless, of course, your answer is, “Partied twice in with the Coathangers,” or maybe, “Partied in Uptown.” (Okay, just kidding on that last one.) The Atlanta…
Pretty much any festival of note in North Texas has undergone serious changes in the past couple years. Some have returned after being gone for a bit (35 Denton), while some are taking a break this year (Index Festival), and others have simply gone away (Suburbia). As for Untapped Festival and…
As music snobs well know, music awards shows generally don’t do the best at showcasing a genre’s most promising talent. If anything, they’re prone to rewarding the same boring, mainstream pap that makes record executives millions of dollars every single year. This year’s CMA Awards, though, looked particularly promising. Among…
White privilege has a central part of the rap music consciousness from the very beginning. At least as long as “The Message,” if not longer, depending on how far back you want to go. So, particularly in the politically charged days of 2015 when an album like Kendrick Lamar’s To…
The Red Rocker looks out of place wielding a customized toy guitar at the Moon Tower, a small bar off Cherry Lane in southwest Fort Worth. Wearing a red and black striped Mad Hatter hat, a black metal band T-shirt and a red, black and green checkered kilt with a…
The Foxymorons are barely a local band. Only one of the two members live in North Texas. In fact, what Fort Worth’s Jerry James and San Diego’s (by way of Nashville and Dallas) David Dewese have together may not even be an actual band. Depending on how one defines a…
With the 27th annual Dallas Observer Music Awards just around the corner — in fact, voting is open right now at 2015musicawardspoll.dallasobserver.com — we will spend the next several weeks highlighting some of the nominees for this year’s awards. And when we say these artists are the “Best,” don’t just…
More than a week after “Back to the Future Day,” when Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to October 21, 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, Bob Moseley is still getting calls about his custom-built DeLorean Time Machines. Perhaps you’ve seen them at car shows or on Moseley’s…
When Ron C was a teenager, he started making big bucks selling drugs in South Dallas. But he also learned how to rap and started writing lyrics that accurately depicted his street life. He applied the business skills he learned from being a drug dealer into successfully selling records independently…
It’s been a big month for pop music in Dallas. A lot of that has had to do with homegrown talent, thanks to no fewer than three artists with local ties all making it to the top of the Billboard Top 100 chart: In back-to-back weeks, Selena Gomez and Pentatonix…
R. Kelly Verizon Theatre, Grand Prairie Saturday, October 31, 2015 Catching R. Kelly in concert at this stage of his career, now 29 years in, is a complicated affair. After all the legal troubles and accusations of sexual misconduct, the Chicago R&B singer continues to do what he’s always done:…
Josey Records had a hell of a first year. The massive Farmers Branch record store opened with a DJ booth and art gallery; then they quickly added a stage with a state of the art sound system and a second location in Kansas City. But at the one-year mark they…
