A fair amount of notable acts have emerged from the Australian music scene over the past couple years. From the likes of Cut Copy, Tame Impala and Empire of the Sun, Australia’s taste continues to be at the tip of listener’s tongues. Judging by the recent buzz created by Melbourne’s Little Red, there’s seemingly another name to add to that list.
Late last year, Midnight Remember arrived from Little Red and turned some heads. Little Red has since signed with True Panther Records, home to lovely Delorean, Girls and Tanlines, who …

Chad Valley – Now That I’m Real (How Does It Feel) from Lucy Bridger on Vimeo.
Seattle Scenester got a chance to catch up with Chad Valley, the emerging New Wavist from the ever-so-thriving Oxford scene. Chad Valley (Hugo Manuel) has put out two EPs in the last year and has become quite the name drop in the blog world. Hugo is the lead singer of another notable Oxford band, Jonquil. Above is a gem from his latest EP, Equatorial Ultravox. Chad Valley will be playing at The Crocodile with Active …

Sonny Smith and his friends (and backing band) The Sunsets are working their way back to Seattle to play The Funhouse on Tuesday, June 28th. Sonny brings his innocent, lovey dovey doo-wop songs from San Francisco on the first leg of their US/CANADA tour with The Sandwitches. Seattle’s Seapony, who Seattle Scenester has seen on several accounts, will be opening for the show.
Sonny and the Sunsets have kept mouths fed for the past couple years. In 2007, The Sunsets, a rotating group of Bay area kids well known in the …

Every college band’s dream is to escape the inebriated house party circuit and make some music for the greater ear. The New Division, originally a dorm room project by frontman John Kunkel, has done exactly that. In 2007, Kunkel created a four-piece out of California Baptist University, keeping the name and the synthy influence. Kunkel has continued to be the brain child of much of the writing and sound while his mates have aided in their great live shows, playing out of Riverside, California. Over the past three years, The …

This coming Monday, the unambiguously non-extinct Dodos are going to be flying their way to Capitol Hill for a show at Neumos (here I would normally apologize for an entire sentence  fueled by puns, but since we’re talking birds, I am totally unapologetic). The Dodos are out of San Francisco and just released their fourth album, No Color, last month. Doors open at 8, so you’re probably well off arriving by 9 to catch the openers, Philadelphia’s Reading Rainbow…

You’ve probably heard them on KEXP if you haven’t heard them elsewhere, as they’ve been playing in Seattle for years now. The Lonely Forest hail from our very own Anacortes, Washington, nestled in the San Juan Islands. They are currently signed to Death Cabber Chris Walla’s Trans Records, and it’s no surprise – their cleanly produced songs and reverberating piano riffs definitely suggest Death Cab for Cutie’s most recent couple of albums. In 2006, they won the battle of the bands at Seattle’s Experience Music Project’s Sound Off! contest, thrusting …

Hooray! Last week, the Sasquatch Music Festival, one of the two big Washington music festivals, finally announced their band lineup and launched a brand-spankin’ new website. The site is clean-cut and under control – perhaps to a fault. The festival, which takes place on Memorial Day weekend of every year (since 10 years ago, way back in 2001), looks a lot like a held-back version of its California counterpart, Coachella. While we’ve got some fantastic headlining standards like Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, Wilco, …

Classic, idiosyncratic 90′s band Cake is performing at the Moore tonight, Saturday the 12th, and it promises to be a pretty great show. Though it’s a seated affair, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to bouncing along with the music or dancing whatsoever, Cake should manage to keep the crowd awake with their rattlesnake-like donkeyjaw and their loudly-expressed, introspective lyrics. Cake is supporting their latest album, Showroom of Compassion, which managed to top the Billboard 200 in the week of the album’s release.

On August 20th, the Casiokids came to Seattle to rock out the Vera Project. Mission accomplished! Hailing from Norway, the Casiokids are known for their surreal and fantastical shows, positively more upbeat than the cold winters of Scandinavia might suggest. In fact, I think the whole Scandinavian seasonal affective disorder claim may be far less credible than the Nordics want us to believe. The last time I was at Vera was to see First Aid Kit, the Swedish sisters that famously covered the Fleet Foxes, and they also kept things …