PWRFL POWER, DOMINIQUE LEONE , and from New Zealand BACHELORETTE ?9pm, $6.00 at the door

Often compared to Jonathan Richman and John Fahey, Kazutaka Nomura is one of the most hyped "Up&Coming" Seattle acts that explores musical possibilities only with a guitar and voice in his own humorous and quirky way. After winning Block Star Contest in Seattle in this year, he played a mainstage slot at Capitol Hill Block Party along with Spoon, Silversun Pickups, and John Vanderslice. His official debut full length will be out on Portland's SLENDER MEANS SOCIETY and NYC's AAGOO on March 3rd, 2008. His music will be featured the national Esurance commercial and CW11/CBS. He has appeared on Washington Post, Wire, Spin, Pitchfork, Timeout New York, etc.

This pairing between Oakland"'s Xiu Xiu and Portland"'s Grouper was conceived for local label Slender Means Society"'s ?Pregnancy Series" of EPs. The idea"'s simple: take two radically different artists and bring them together (?mate them," if you insist) , however unlikely the combination may be. In this case one half is a freak-out prone, heavily [...]

This pairing between Oakland's Xiu Xiu and Portland's Grouper was conceived for local label Slender Means Society's ?Pregnancy Series" of EPs. The idea's simple: take two radically different artists and bring them together (?mate them," if you insist) , however unlikely the combination may be. In this case one half is a freak-out prone, heavily [...]

Parenthetical Girls take things should be emotionally wrenching/overwhelming, and rather than let their song marinate in it until the whole thing's a stew of self-immolation–what the kids call emo–they shove it into a blast furnace, and out comes this shimmering object of music and feeling. Zac Pennington's found his voice on this one, a nasal, [...]

Pitchfork has nothing but love for Xiu Xiu (and rightly so), but this time Portland's Grouper and local labels Slender Means Society and States Rights get carried up in the fan-fest. Yesterday the site gave the Xiu Xiu (pictured below)/Grouper...

In 2004, before the impossibly infectious Paper Television was even a spark in their eye, The Blow released the inaugural album of the Slender Means Society/States Rights Records‘ Pregnancy Series, Poor Aim: Love Songs. It was also the first record with Jona Bechtolt contributing: the series is conceptualized around artistic ‘fucking,' or other odd scenes [...]

Drifting through MySpace seeking something about Portland and something about art; hmm. Three definite conclusions can be made.

• 1. Pretty much everyone in in Portland under 25 is in a band.

• 2. You haven't heard of them or heard their music.

• 3. They couldn't care less.

Boil out the anger, wash away the fear, what did punk rock leave behind? Two lessons, Do-It-Yourself and fuck the hippies. DIY = removing the barriers between the artist and the audience. Fuck the hippies is mostly about rejecting aimless hedonism. Think Ayn Rand with crank.



As the major labels pissed their inventory in a challenge match with teenagers, they made an even more fatal error - they lost their distribution monopoly. The music scene isn't dead - it's more alive, talented and productive than ever before, but the oligarchs are dead and now the kids rule.

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