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Thursday, December 25, 2025

The Avenue | Music

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Hippies score on debut

By ROBERT HILSON | July 2, 2008

Fleet Foxes isn't your father's Seattle band. The five-piece Puget pioneers avoid flannel, regularly bathe and - here's the real departure - seem genuinely happy to be alive. These guys have aesthetic taste, favoring 16th century cover artwork over naked babies (Nirvana) and mangy farm animals (Pearl Jam). Of greater importance, the group's brand of Brian Wilson-flavored folk lullaby makes more noise in blogs than in stadiums, a telltale sign that they are out of place and time.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

R.E.M. deliver impressive show, prove they can still rock

By ROBERT HILSON | June 18, 2008

"We are young despite the years we are concern/ We are hope despite the times." So sings Michael Stipe on R.E.M.'s classic "These Days," the band's statement of purpose and a tune that had been rattling in my head a full week prior to an early summer gig at the University of California, Berkeley campus. The song rocks, no questions asked, but it's also slightly cringe-inducing, should you picture it played by three middle-aged hipsters - one frumpy (Peter Buck), one bald (Stipe) and one timelessly nerdy (Mike Mills). It also begs the question, are these guys full of it? Twenty years on, are once-ballsy claims now as hollow as one of Buck's signature Rickenbackers? In short, does R.E.M. still matter?

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Old shtick on ‘Weezer’

By ROBERT HILSON | June 11, 2008

Not many guitar heroes make it through their high school years without getting slapped with the dropout tag, so it's even more impressive that Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo gets to flaunt a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. A decade-long stint with the Ivy League's finest must afford one all kinds of vital knowledge, and yet Cuomo still can't wrap his horn-rimmed head around the law of diminishing returns.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Spiritualized in limbo on “A&E”

By ROBERT HILSON | June 4, 2008

British trance-rocker and Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce nearly died in 2005 because of - get this - pneumonia. Go figure. When you've had addiction problems with heroin, landing in the accident and emergency (A&E) ward because of respiratory complications is kind of like tiptoeing through a minefield only to contract tetanus from a rusty nail. Irony aside, the near-death experience yielded "Songs in A&E," a rock 'n' roll record that could very easily be confused for an electric requiem.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Kanye’s Glow in the Dark Tour takes audience to another world

By ANA MONTANO | May 14, 2008

The next few months are the prime time for music lovers to catch a great show. And if you're looking to see one good concert this year, go see Kanye West's Glow in the Dark Tour. This show was surrounded by a halo of hype from the get-go. It received stellar reviews all around, and when Entertainment Weekly gave the show a B+, it got an earful from Kanye who responded on his blog, "What's a B+ mean? I'm an extremist. It's either pass or fail! A+ or F-!"

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Summer guide to the biggest live music tours in Florida

By ADRIAN RUHI | Apr. 16, 2008

For some, summer means no school, endless hours of basking in the sun, and milking your parents for money before you go back to "adult duties" in the fall. For me, though, it means paying absurdly high prices on Ticketmaster to see some of pop music's biggest acts perform extravagant sets in not-ideal-for-live-music venues, like NBA arenas. To help you decide what to check out this summer, here are few of my picks.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

'Walk It Off' never finds its legs

By ROBERT HILSON | Apr. 9, 2008

Blame it on the blogs. Blame it on the fickle keyboard elitists who promised us that Tapes 'n Tapes was the second coming of Pavement, the perfectly refined seed of Frank Black and Kim Deal, the revolution that would reclaim the Minneapolis post-punk high ground long abandoned by the Replacements.

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