The morning after seeing Toronto’s Metric, I had a brief water-cooler conversation with a co-worker who had caught the band the last time they rolled through town. “I’ve always been surprised how quickly that band blew up,” he said. “It seems like they got huge almost overnight.” I nodded in agreement, having seen them fill a 1,200-capacity club the night prior. After giving the matter some thought, however, I realized that Metric’s rise to the…

2001 was a good year for Radiohead clones. Muse released their second album, Origin of Symmetry, to the fanfare of British rock critics. Coldplay finally attained mainstream success in the United States. And Travis cemented their international popularity with the Nigel Godrich-produced The Invisible Band. Meanwhile, in Denton, Texas (about as far away from Oxford as you can get), five jazz students at the University of North Texas released an EP under the name Midlake….

Story and photo by DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya Much like their indie pop forebears — the Smiths, Belle & Sebastian, the entire roster of Sarah Records — Austin act Voxtrot has a thing for self-contained singles. As a matter of fact, they’ve taken their own sweet time releasing a full length, opting instead for a series of CD-Rs, 7-inch singles and EPs over the course of the last four years. As with the aforementioned…

By DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya It’s about an hour before The Pipettes are set to take the stage at the Black Cat and by rights, the band should be exhausted. This is the second gig on their first major North American tour and having flown in from their hometown of Brighton, England only a few days prior, you’d think that the band would be succumbing to the effects of trans-Atlantic jetlag. Unlike the dozing…

Post and photo by DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya “It’s just not fair,” my friend said to me as we stood and watched multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird perform at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin. “How can one guy be so talented?” Admittedly, it does seem a bit unfair: Bird holds a degree in violin performance, is an accomplished guitarist, knows a thing or two about the glockenspiel, has a soaring voice that often recalls…

By DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya We here at DCist have noticed a rather disturbing trend recently. More and more often, it seems, touring bands are skipping over the District in favor of our neighbor to the north, Baltimore. It makes sense if you think about it: Baltimore has a burgeoning arts scene, a variety of music venues and a seemingly disproportionate reputation for housing a large number of twentysomething scenesters (not that we’re short on…

By DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya Earlier this week, DCist reminded you that the Kennedy Center would be handing out free tickets to its 10th anniversary shows — including a performance by indie heartthrob Sufjan Stevens — on Saturday morning. At the time, 2300 tickets seemed like a lot and we reassured you that “there should be plenty of opportunity for those interested to grab a ticket.” As it turns out, we here at DCist (along…

By DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya Much like the similarly canonized Robert Johnson, Brian Wilson is an American icon for whom mythology has contributed as much to his legend of being a “musical genius” as his accomplishments have. The five years spent in a bedroom, the lost (and eventually found) masterpiece Smile, the strange, drug-induced happenings at an L.A. mansion in the 1960s and a long history of mental illness add up to something that…

By DCist contributor Mehan Jayasuriya I have to admit, I was a little concerned when I first showed up at the Black Cat on Saturday night. The crowd was pretty thin, folks seemed more interested in shoe-gazing than the band on stage and there wasn’t a raised fist or pointing finger anywhere in sight. This certainly isn’t the kind of scene that I’m used to seeing at a hardcore show; the last time I saw…

By DCist contributor Mehan Jayasuriya Having never been to a film screening at the Black Cat’s backstage before, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I showed up on Monday night. As I found out, I was in for a night of uncomfortable zebra-print chairs, chain-smokers in linen pants and a seven-year old film on DVD, projected onto a pull-down screen. So yeah, exactly what I should have expected. The…