Recently in concert announcements Category

Just in case you missed him at MoogFest in Asheville last weekend, Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh DJ/producer who mixes and matches samples from classic rock and Top 40 and goes by the name Girl Talk, is coming back to Knoxville. He'll be at the Valarium on Jan. 24; ticket details haven't been announced yet. (News about his new album is also expected soon.)

Chris Buckner wrote about Gillis back in 2008.

The Knoxville Horror Film Festival is officially over, but you won't be able to tell this weekend: the same group that organized the fest at Relix Variety Theatre in Happy Holler last weekend is hosting a two-hour recap at the same place on Friday night, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m., followed by a screening of black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, which will in turn be followed by a performance from Knoxville black-metal band Argentinum Astrum.

Lee Gardner reviewed Until the Light Takes Us here.

Admission to either the recap or the UTLTU screening is $5, or it's $8 for both.

Devo has canceled its scheduled performance at MoogFest this weekend after guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh had his right thumb sliced open by a piece of glass, according to a press release from Devo's label.

Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Cassale will still attend the AC Entertainment-organized festival in Asheville to accept the Moog Innovation Award on behalf of the band.

Details after the jump.

The Johnson Swingtet is one of Jack Neely's favorite local bands, as you can tell from his 2008 feature on them. They've changed things up quite a bit since then, so the new CD, which the Swingtet is officially releasing this weekend, will be a welcome introduction to the band's new lineup and its new interest in Western swing.

The Swingtet's celebrating the release of Volume 1 (oddly enough, the follow-up to their 2008 self-titled debut) on Friday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. at the Laurel Theater in Fort Sanders. Admission is $10-$12.

It might be a surprise to their fans, but everybody doesn't like Mumford and Sons, the exceedingly popular young English folk-rock band (think Coldplay meets the Decembrists) that sold out its Nov. 8 show at the Valarium in a matter of days.

The story making the Internet rounds is that Mark E. Smith, the curmudgeonly lead singer and mastermind for British postpunk legends the Fall, revealed his contempt for the band in an interview with Australian mag The Brag. The full interview isn't available online, but the Quietus offered this excerpt, which reveals Smith to be (surprise!) kind of a bastard, but is also pretty funny:

"We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said 'shut them cunts up' and they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said 'that's the Sons of Mumford' or something, 'they're number five in charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers."

We reported back in April that the Tim Lee 3 had a busy summer ahead of them, mainly because they would be recording a new album at studios in North Carolina, Arizona, and Mississippi.

They apparently got really busy at those sessions--the new album, Raucous Americanus, the follow-up to the band's 2008 disc Good2b3, is an old-fashioned double album. It's due out next month, and the CD-release show the Lees have planned for Patrick Sullivan's on Friday, Nov. 12, is appropriately big: a premiere of the band's video for the song "Get There First," DJ sets from Nathan Moses and Graham McCorkle of the Vaygues, and an opening set by Angela Faye Martin, a North Carolina singer/songwriter the Lees have befriended since playing a local show with her earlier this year. And, of course, a long set of the Tim Lee 3 playing songs from the new album, and probably some old favorites. 

Today's the big day for middle-aged metal fans: Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax at the Civic Coliseum. (For once it's the perfect venue, the place where some of us saw our first heavy metal and hard rock concerts back in the '70s and '80s.)

You can read my story about Anthrax here, but I also got a last-minute interview with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo that couldn't make it into the print edition. (Lombardo, one of the most influential drummers in metal ever and an undisputed master of the double bass, left the band way back in 1992. Slayer soldiered on through the 1990s with a string of replacements, but their reunion with Lombardo for Christ Illusion (2006) and World Painted Blood (2009) has been considered a significant return to form. So here's a transcription of my conversation with him, after the jump. (Bonus: Read John Sewell's 1999 interview with Slayer's Tom Araya here.)

New Year's Eve in Knoxville used to be Scott Miller Night. Even after the dissolution of the V-Roys in 1999, Miller kept up his annual Dec. 31 gig for several years. It's still going, in fact, but this year he'll be in Maryville, at the Shed, while the Dirty Guv'nahs take the coveted spot at the Bijou that night.

That pretty much cements the Guv'nahs as the most popular local band right now (as if three consecutive Best Band awards in Metro Pulse's Best of Knoxville voting hadn't already done that). It's too late to say you saw them when..., but there's a preview of the New Year's Eve show this Friday at the Bijou, with the band celebrating the official release of its second album, Youth Is in Our Blood. The Black Cadillacs are opening at 8 p.m., and a few tickets are still available.

Tickets for the New Year's Eve show are $20 and go on sale on Friday, Oct. 1.

The lineup for the second edition of the Square Room's Sound Off competition has been set, with 25 bands making it through the first round of cuts. The first night of the contest, on Wednesday, Oct. 2, at the Square Room, will feature the Ibiza-style soundscapes of electronic trio Arpetrio, alt-rockers Johnny Astro and the Big Bang and Pegasi 51, and R&B/funk ensembles Soulfinger and Dishwater Blonde. The winner of that set, based on judges' scores and audience response, will move on to the final round in March.
 
The other 20 bands will face off against each other in similar sets on the first Wednesday of each month through February, with the winners playing against each other in March. The remaining bands who made it to the cut-off round are the Big Deuce, the Black Jack of Ballarat, Bone Prophet, Brimstone Treehouse, Elliot Collett, Dave Dykes and the Grateful Heart, Jason Ellis, the Fontinelles, the Gentlemen Conspiracy, the Great Great Pines, the Hotshot Freight Train, Lions, Danielle Madison, Madre, Davis Mitchell, Gene Priest and the Cardinal Sin, Rally, Silver Jubilee, Skytown Riot, and the Theorizt. Oh, and Todd Steed is going to emcee the series.
 
The overall winner gets studio time at Rock Snob Recordings, custom merchandise, an opening spot on an upcoming AC Entertainment concert, and up to $500 in gear. 

If you don't want to drive all the way to Asheville to see Big Boi as part of AC Entertainment's MoogFest, all you have to do is wait. The rapper, one-half of the duo OutKast, who just released his long-long-long-awaited solo album Sir Luscious Left Foot, will perform at the Knoxville Civic Coliseum on Friday, Nov. 12, to close out his current tour. No details on tickets yet.