thekman (Curator)

For a band moving from Tallahassee, FL, to Portland, OR, it helps to have influences ranging from The Avett Brothers to Talking Heads.

Recent transplants to the Rose City, the Damn Dirty Apes were great enough to come into the KBOO studios and grace our late-night listeners with their Rock, Blues, Psychedelic fusion.

KBOO is happy to offer the night's proformance in its entirity, here at the Free Music Archive.

In a city and an age where most pop is slanting towards minimalism and meticulously crafted apathy, the Portland band Dirty Mittens is a monstrous force of breezy pop goodness.  With an ever-growing line up of guitars and horns and keyboards backing Chelsea Morrisey’s powerhouse of a voice, the band floods the stage with catchy, danceable hooks and hopelessly romantic lyrics.

I first saw the Dirty Mittens when they killed with the opening set at the 2009 PDX POP NOW music fest.  It brings me great pleasure to release that performance now, under Creative Commons, with the Free Music Archive.

There are many ways to generate press and mythos for a band, but one of the most drastic might be to win a fistful of national awards from your home country of New Zealand, and then promptly jump ship for a small, little known town in the Pacific Northwest.

That tactic seems to be working for the now Portland based Rock/Dance Pop band, The Mint Chicks. The self described "troublegum" band has been taking advantage of their newfound relative obscurity to mix up their style with a new level of experimentation, and wow unexpecting audiences with their wild live shows.

The easiest things to do when listening to Pedro Rousseau’s one-man band out of Nantes, France--besides rocking out--is to make comparisons to Nine Inch Nails.  And while the influences are clearly there, Fresh Body Shop really comes into its own with its latest release, The Ugly Army.

The album takes all the industrial sounds and dark lyrics you might expect from a Trent Reznor release, and mixes them up with the varied beats and innovative arrangements of some of the best one-man composers.

And, as with all of Rousseau’s FBS work, the album is released under Creative Commons.

Probably the best aspect of The Taxpayers is that's it's damn near impossible to tell what they're going to do next.  Where as most bands see the words Folk Punk as a genre, this band from Portland, Oregon, seems to take them as an open-ended, Beck-like license to strip two vast histories of sound down to their barest essentials, and mix them back together into super-catchy, genre-bending anthems about failed revolutions, and lives well wasted, that demand to be shouted out at a drunken live show in your neighbor’s basement.

Also: they have a song called Zombie Lesbian Stripper Cops.