Matthew Everett

The Valarium may be closing but the show will go on—at least as far as Midnight Voyage, the weekly EDM concert/dance night that has been held at the Valarium’s sister club the Cider House since 2010, is concerned.

The release of the Black Cadillacs’ second album, Run, back in June, seemed like a turning point for the band. The group had improved significantly over its self-titled 2010 debut, in both songwriting and confidence, and the Cadillacs seemed poised ...

Knoxville’s night life will take a big hit later this month when the Valarium closes after five years of business, leaving the city’s entertainment infrastructure without a mid-size club venue.

Time hasn’t always been on Witch Mountain’s side. When the band formed in Portland, Ore., in 1997, its brand of traditional heavy metal was at its commercial and cultural nadir. After recording their debut album, ...Come the Mountain, in 2001, ...

MoogFest, AC Entertainment’s annual (mostly) electronic music festival in Asheville, may have displaced Knoxville’s own Big Ears as the hometown promoter’s out-there music fest, at least temporarily, but there’s no sense begrudging the city across the mountains.

Even among his own eclectic discography, which covers traditional and not-so-traditional bluegrass, acoustic jazz, and blues, Jerry Douglas’ new album is a surprise. The prolific Dobro player/bandleader/session musician, best known for his connections to Alison Krauss and the 1970s hot-stuff ...

As the title indicates, things definitely take a dark turn in Lewis Trondheim’s just-released Ralph Azham: Why Would You Lie to Someone You Love?, the first part of Fantagraphics’ planned translation of his ongoing fantasy mock epic about a wise-ass ...

You’ll notice a few changes tonight at the Square Room’s monthly series of live broadcast roots-music concerts hosted by Scott Miller and Metro Pulse’s Jack Neely.

If Melvins fans have learned anything from the band, it’s that expectations don’t count for much.

Last year, Tim Lee led an acoustic quartet that hosted a month-long series of weekly early shows at Pilot Light called 4X4. The final show in the series featured a guest appearance by local poet and songwriter R.B. Morris, which ...

Not long after Alan Arnette started climbing mountains, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. After she died, in 2009, the technology executive set out on his most ambitious climbing adventure, and hooked it to a campaign to raise awareness ...

In just four years, the Knoxville Horror Film Festival has grown from a weekend of short films and a handful of features into a year-round organization that holds regular screenings of chiller classics, cult favorites, and acclaimed recent horror movies ...

One of the main headliners for this year’s MetroFest music festival dropped out at the last minute, only to be replaced by perhaps an even more treasured local band.

The end of summer isn’t going to bother Christa DeCicco very much. The singer, who has fronted the local swing/jazz/string band Christabel and the Jons, will be long gone from Knoxville by the time winter hits, basking in the sun ...

When Dave Hart accepted the job as the University of Tennessee’s new athletic director a year ago, the program was a mess. The once-proud football team had descended into consistent mediocrity, made worse by having three coaches in three years ...

MetroFest, Metro Pulse’s local benefit music festival, is getting closer, and we’re ready to reveal more details—like the official schedule for the festival, set for Friday, Sept. 28, at venues across downtown and in the Old City.

There are two things you might notice when you hear the folk duo Milk Carton Kids. The first is that they play a very quiet and restrained kind of folk, deliberate, precise, genteel, and even polite. The second thing you ...

Last summer, to celebrate Metro Pulse’s 20th anniversary, we staged 20Fest, a benefit for the Joy of Music School that featured more than 40 local bands at 10 different venues all over downtown and the Old City. This year, Metro ...

Can's new three-disc set, The Lost Tapes, includes previously unreleased material recorded between 1969 and 1978 and traces the band’s gradual development from eggheaded garage band to prog-reggae experimentalists and, finally, a proto-ambient ensemble.

Kevin Abernathy’s last album, Scrap Metal Blues, released last summer, was a bold but slightly uncomfortable mashup of hot-stuff guitar heroics and country-ish classic rock. His new disc, Some Stories, available this week, is a step way back, to twangy, ...

Few writers could make stopping the end of the world as much of a downer as Moore does here.

Guardian Alien's debut album, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, released this month on Thrill Jockey, is a gigantic effort, one long 40-minute composition featuring hyperkinetic drumming, synthesizer, guitars, incantatory vocals, bass, and shahi baaja, a kind ...

The early Cannibal Corpse catalog—songs like “Bloody Chunks” and “Skull Full of Maggots”—throbs with the same juvenile prurience that animates Evil Dead II and classic EC Comics. The best Cannibal Corpse songs are an unholy commingling of genuine dread, sonic ...

Local piano/chamber-pop diva Christina Horn, the driving force behind the band Hudson K, stakes out new territory on the new song “The Knife,” an atmospheric, electronic-pop anthem with anxious, insistent rhythms, styled, maybe, after the Eurythmics or Peter Gabriel.

The Knoxville-based death-metal band Whitechapel continues its campaign to establish itself atop the genre’s new generation.

Over the course of six albums, Blitzen Trapper’s style has been gradually streamlined. Eric Earley’s shambling experimental and psychedelic tendencies have been sharpened and focused, with a more direct emotional connection. The touchstones on American Goldwing are mid-period Wilco, Neil ...

A quick rundown of some upcoming local music releases.

It may have been a while since you last saw the Dirty Guv’nahs, the roots-rock sextet who currently stand at the pinnacle of Knoxville’s local music scene. The band rarely performs locally anymore, and when they do it’s a marquee ...

There’s a new movie version of one of Knoxville’s most emblematic and enigmatic music-history stories, but, according to the current release schedule, you’ll have to drive a few hours (and wait another month or so) to see it on the ...

It’s conventional wisdom that Kirby is one of the most important comic-book artists of all time, and probably the single greatest superhero artist ever.

From the gutter opera “The Streets” to the hippy-dippy folk-rock of “Forever Together,” or the gospel-tinged Southern rock of “Freedom” to the ELO-inspired “Holy Touch,” The Church of Rock and Roll is an unashamed, passionate blare of smartly dumb pop-rock.

Lists are a sucker’s game—irresistible bait for music nerds and Internet trolls, and the lowest-common-denominator form of music journalism. Magazine editors pose breathless but unanswerable questions (“What/who is the best album/band/song/guitarist/etc. ever?”) and then either deliver the most boring, canonical ...

Concerts get canceled and rescheduled all the time. But Richard Lloyd’s recent cancelation of his scheduled show at Pilot Light tonight with the Tim Lee 3 is especially worrisome in light of recent news that the former guitarist for the ...

In January, local Beat troubadour/folk-rock singer/songwriter R.B. Morris’ pairing with the Streamliners Swing Orchestra—a long-unfulfilled dream for Morris—surprised music fans. Now it seems like it might become a local tradition.

Flex Mentallo is a brilliant, thrilling, dizzying story about imagination and fiction, in addition to being a rousing psychedelic adventure story that forecasts Morrison’s bewildering and incomparable mainstream epic Final Crisis, from 2008

Harrison and company’s rural roots show through on their new album, but the songwriting and production tilt toward classic power pop and old-fashioned ’70s and ’80s radio rock.

The band is opting for a handful of out-of-the-way locations on this tour, which will be preceded by similar shows in the U.K. and Ireland in June. The good news for East Tennessee Mumford fans is that one of those ...

Both Exmilitary and The Money Store have offered reviewers a seemingly unlimited supply of influences and reference points to chart, analyze, and argue about: noise rock, Public Enemy, industrial dance, dubstep, Suicidal Tendencies, Gang Gang Dance, Def Jux, Dalek, even ...

This new, revised version of Alan Greenberg’s 1976 book collects fragmentary, dream-like scenes from the period—starting with his first meeting with Herzog at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975 and concluding with the final shoot for the film, in Ireland—plus ...

Singer Kym Hawkins is moving to New York in the fall to begin a graduate poetry program at Sarah Lawrence College. Until then, though, the band plans to play as much as possible to support their brand-new EP, Buffalo!.

Husky-voiced adult-alternative hunk Erick Baker is preparing to release his second album, Goodbye June, due out on June 26.

The recent English-language publication of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea (Universe) should have been a moment of triumph for European comics in America.

We’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: The Bijou Theatre is one of the best things about Knoxville, a glorious venue with history, top-notch acoustics, and surprising intimacy, even in the back corners of the balcony.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine, now 50, is still provoking outrage these days, but from an altogether different direction than he used to. For the last decade or so, Mustaine has openly discussed his born-again religious faith, which seems to have ...

Here’s the new single from Knoxville metal band Whitechapel: Chugga-chugga-chug-growl-shriek-high-pitched tweedly guitar part-chugga-chug-repeat.

We’ve already dropped a couple of hints about Still Wanna Fight, the forthcoming album from Mic Harrison and the High Score: “Sometime this spring” was about as precise a projected release date as we could pin down. Until now, that ...

Gary Mitchell is moving ahead with his long-held ambition to transform the parking lot south of the Valarium into a large outdoor venue for concerts and festivals.

There can’t be many situations more frustrating than the one in which Yoshikazu Ono finds himself in the new documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Men’s Health magazine has named WUTK one of the 20 Coolest College Radio Stations in the country in its most recent issue.

Local government is making an effort to fill the vacuum left by the end of the Sundown in the City series of free concerts, which AC Entertainment canceled this year.