Matthew Everett

The line between rock music and dance music has become blurred in a way it hasn’t been since the rave scene of the early 1990s, with acts from all over the pop-culture spectrum working hard to erase whatever distinctions are ...

Tom Parkhill, artistic director of the Tennessee Stage Company, can think of plenty of reasons to explain why the company’s next big undertaking is a downtown celebration of the life and works of Tennessee Williams.

As an award category, “most improved” is a mixed bag—while it acknowledges hard work, it also counts on some previous lackluster performance. Still, college-radio bible CMJ’s recent recognition of WUTK as the most-improved station in the country is a big ...

The band has been quiet for the last few months, but fall is shaping up as a good rebound for Jonathan Sexton and the Big Love Choir.

The Harry Potter franchise may have reached its official conclusion with this summer’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the final film in the series based on J.K. Rowling’s best-selling wizarding books, but local rapper LiL iFFy isn’t ...

The German Bear Family label is famous for its deluxe box sets of classic country music, and the company has just released—with considerable help from local musicians, fans, surviving family members, and archivists—the definitive collection of recordings by bluegrass pioneer ...

The London-based alt-rock band the Boxer Rebellion, led by Maryville native Nathan Nicholson, has canceled its upcoming North American tour, which included a stop at the Square Room on Nov. 10.

Most of the early reviews of Lydia Loveless’ new album, Indestructible Machine, describe the Ohio singer/songwriter and her band as some kind of combination of punk rock and country music. Loveless herself thinks the “punk” part of that equation understates ...

A disquieting electronic album built around the life and death of a single animal.

After nearly a decade of increasing complexity, Atlanta master heshers Mastodon sort of dial it back on their fifth album.

Manhattan’s was an Old City institution. So Randy and Jenny Boyd, the owners of Boyd’s Jig & Reel, the new Scottish pub that opened in the old Manhattan’s space a few weeks ago, kept their updates subtle.

Pat Gubler, a veteran of the now-defunct New York avant/psychedelic-folk group Tower Recordings who performs and records as P.G. Six, has gradually updated his sound over the course of a decade and five solo albums.

These two new reissues capture some of the band’s peak moments since reforming in 2001.

The third season of the Square Room’s Sound Off competition, a six-month battle of the bands that pays off with studio time and an AC Entertainment gig, is ready to go.

Yung Life’s debut album, after a number of singles and EPs over the last year, is a 40-minute synth dream.

Local indie rockers Madre have called it quits, bringing to an end their three-year run as one of the bright young bands on the Knoxville scene

A benefit show for local cyclist Steve Hancock, who was seriously injured this spring in a bike accident, is in the works for this weekend.

Local prog-rock band Luminoth—who just played the Vans Warped Tour’s Atlanta stop in August—has been selected to play the touring Uproar Festival’s Indianapolis date this weekend.

The jazzy, jammy trio Robo and the Passing Tones demonstrates an interesting range on its adventuresome, if not altogether successful, debut album

This new EP from local quartet the Gentleman Conspiracy covers a lot of ground in just 16 minutes.

Part of the reason for this tour is to reintroduce Bhowmik as a solo performer. Though she’s still working with Tigers and Monkeys, she has just released her first solo album, and it’s been a perfect excuse to hit the ...

Initially part of the brash wave of young British writers (along with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman) who turned American comics upside down in the late 1980s, Morrison has played both sides of the comics game during his 30-year career.

For American men of a certain age group and demographic (i.e., mine), Conan the Barbarian ranks alongside Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Chris Claremont’s early ’80s run on Uncanny X-Men as one of the defining pop culture ...

The Royal Bangs are the kind of band music critics like; their synth-heavy power pop, with traces of soul, punk, New Wave, and ’80s production values, is totally in tune with the sound of the new millennium. The band also ...

Two decades in the making! Months of planning! Weeks of anticipation! Forty bands! Metro Pulse’s astoundingly epic 20Fest is almost here, and most of the details—like who is playing where, and when—have just about been sorted out.

Steve Wildsmith, the entertainment editor for Maryville’s Daily Times, hasn’t been shy about his enthusiasm for Blount County local boy-done-good Nathan Nicholson, who now lives in London and fronts the rock band the Boxer Rebellion. So Wildsmith was plainspoken earlier ...

Back in 2008, we noted that the Oscar ceremony’s traditional tribute to Hollywood figures who had died that year didn’t include Brad Renfro, who died that January from a drug overdose. We also noted that we weren’t the only ones ...

There is something novel about a nine-piece band (guitar, bass, drums, plus three backup singers and three additional percussionists) in Knoxville performing a ragged but enthusiastic—and funky—kind of worldbeat rock that absorbs inspiration from all over the world but doesn’t ...

As we get closer to Metro Pulse’s 20th anniversary 20Fest, set for 10 venues on Market Square, Gay Street, and the Old City on Friday, Aug. 19, it’s time to announce the official lineup, which is, quite frankly, about as ...

The late, lamented local country-rock combo—guitarist/singers Scott Miller and Mic Harrison, bassist Paxton Sellers, and drummer Jeff Bills—announced earlier this week that they will release a greatest-hits compilation this fall, and then reunite for one more show at the Bijou ...

Writer Ed Brubaker has wrapped up five years of complex storylines—from the Civil War crossover series that pitted Cap against Iron Man to the return of Cap’s World War II-era sidekick Bucky Barnes to Cap’s apparent death and resurrection—to prepare ...

There is considerably more to the Gourds than “Gin and Juice.” The band’s combination of impeccable musicianship, loose arrangements, and traditional influences have earned the Gourds frequent comparison to the Band over the years, a connection made even more explicit ...

The Indiegrrl Music Conference that returns to Knoxville next month is both bigger and smaller than the one held last year in downtown Knoxville. It’s definitely a little different, since its official name is now the We R Indie and ...

Since he graduated from UT in 2009 with a degree in composition and music theory, Johnny Newman has been working on a symphonic metal album called More Than Ever, scheduled for release in August.

The new disc features Oliver on lead vocals, keys, and guitar; Brandon Story on upright bass; Megan Gregory on fiddle and vocals; and Quinn on harmony vocals.

Like most hip-hop albums of the last 20 years, the skits and interludes on this debut recording by the Theorizt are pretty disposable. But the rest of Sword Bearer is strikingly original.

It’s easy to think that there’s something small-town about Knoxville’s performing arts community, but that reputation should be quickly receding

The Clayton Center for the Arts in Maryville is getting in on the summer music concert series business with its brand-new 2011 Friday Nights Live Music Series, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The all-local lineup features Kelle Jolley, Kukuly and the Caravan Jumpers, the Larry Vincent Group, MTN Trio, and Nancy Brennan Strange.

Royal Blunts, the first album by the local electro/hip-hop trio Dumb Lunch, is a dizzy, paranoid scramble of almost-recognizable samples, cheap synths, drug references, and butt jokes. It feels a little dirty and sounds pretty scary—like a bad trip on ...

Two previous EPs seem to have helped Madre get a feel for the studio, because the band’s new debut full-length sounds confident and competent.

The Back Lillies lived out a dream last weekend when they performed at the Grand Ole Opry, joining an elite list of East Tennessee artists who have played at country music’s premier showcase.

It’s been two years since Scott Miller released For Crying Out Loud, the first disc on his own F.A.Y. label after a long run with the bluegrass diehards Sugar Hill. Details are slim—no title or anticipated release date has been ...

Autopsy returns with a reunion album that drummer/singer Chris Reifert repeatedly said would never happen, and if Macabre Eternal is not as good as Mental Funeral, it is still a crushing round of old-school mayhem.

The veteran folk singer Paleface has circled around success for more than two decades without ever getting much of his own. He was friends with Daniel Johnston and Beck before anybody knew who either one of them was; in the ...

The Cheat will play at Pilot Light on Saturday, June 11, with Nashville indie rockers Pujol, for “their first and last show in years."

When Metro Pulse writers write about Scott Miller, they routinely praise his skill as a songwriter, and they don’t usually mean his knack for just the right chord progression or chorus hooks. He’s been described as “a natural storyteller,” “a ...

Frank Copenhaver, the central presence in the rotating cast of musicians and friends that makes up the psychedelic folk group Hurricanes of Love, has chosen an appropriate name for his music project. Copenhaver himself is a force of nature, an ...

Metro Pulse’s series of free happy hour shows at Pilot Light, which kicked off back in April with a set by the local orchestral chamber pop ensemble Shortwave Society, returns later this month with a free performance by the garage-punk ...

Newbury’s greatest claim on our cultural memory is as a cryptic footnote, alongside the equally obscure Jerry Jeff Walker, in Waylon Jennings’ outlaw anthem “Luckenbach, Texas.”