Matthew Everett

Knoxville’s music community took its second big hit in 2012 when Ed Corts died on Jan. 30.

The winter doldrums are over and local musicians are coming out from hibernation.

The appeal of Pogo is impossible to ignore but hard to describe. A big part of Walt Kelly’s genius lies in plain old expert craftsmanship. His skill was such that his hand almost became invisible.

The Dirty Guv’nahs have just wrapped up recording sessions in Nashville for their upcoming, still-untitled new album, due out sometime this year.

In performance, Dumb Lunch’s stumbling beats take on a darker aspect, as the music collapses into a vortex of noise, volume, and 21st-century underground shock theater.

Knoxville doom quartet Wampus Cat takes is name from the mysterious wampus cat of Cherokee mythology and Appalachian folklore, a foreboding half-woman, half-feline harbinger of death.

Knoxville Films and veteran television producer Melissa May have teamed up for a year-long film project to showcase Knoxville.

Wallace Coleman’s unlikely blues education began in East Tennessee.

An interesting fact, according to banjo aficionado and hillbilly fashion plate Matt Morelock: His namesake music store on Gay Street has actually done better business since its owner quietly slipped away to paradise last fall.

The eccentric downstairs bar/restaurant/music space at 4620 Kingston Pike, previously home to Velvet and two iterations of a club called 4620, is getting another makeover this month.

By the usual pop-music standards, Cleveland’s Rocket From the Tombs barely even counted as a band during its first incarnation, from 1974 to 1975. The group never officially released any music at all, never recorded anything beyond a handful of ...

The everybodyfields' fairy tale story took a harsh detour into real life in 2007.

It’s good news that members of Knoxville’s music community can organize a three-day benefit for one of their own as quickly as Waynestock 2 has come together. It’s just too bad that they have to.

The local high-school alt-rock band Ergo We Play has already outstripped most of its peers simply by staying together long enough to write and record two songs. The band has an even bigger opportunity next month

Knoxville Jazz Orchestra pulls out all the stops on this smooth and swinging disc of holiday standards, which will fit nicely next to A Charlie Brown Christmas and Christmas With the Rat Pack in anybody’s seasonal CD collection.

Further evidence of the Dirty Guv’nahs’ level of local celebrity: Before we even had a chance to report on it, the band’s Kickstarter campaign to pay for a new album has already surpassed its goal of $20,000.

On the Fifth Street Saints’ first EP, Reason to Run, slickly produced by Travis Wyrick, singer/guitarist Eddie Self adopts Metallica frontman James Hetfield’s barking grunt, and both the band’s groovy rhythms and guitar solos owe considerable debt to Hetfield and ...

Carl Story (known as “The Father of Bluegrass Gospel”) and his Rambling Mountaineers were stars on WNOX in the 1950s. Yet Story is a shadowy figure in Knoxville’s music history, remembered vividly by those who were there to see him ...

When Thomas Tallant, Mark Kiser, and Kevin Lay began playing early music together in 1991, they had no idea that their jam sessions would quickly evolve into Knoxville’s longest-lasting professional early music group.

Sound Off continues on Wednesday, Dec. 7, as the third round of contestants face off against each other and in front of a panel of judges at the Square Room for a spot in the finals in March.

Local composer and prog-rock mastermind Johnny Newman may have outdone himself when he hired metal veterans Yanic Bercier and Steve DiGiorgio to perform on his new album.

Local weirdo hip-hop trio Dumb Lunch’s second album is just as woozy and psychedelic as its predecessor, Royal Blunts, released earlier this year.

Puscifer, the third band fronted by Maynard James Keenan, after the multiplatinum post-grunge art rockers Tool and the singularly platinum A Perfect Circle, is complicated—a side side project, you might call it.

Some of the best Hellboy adventures of recent years have been Mignola’s collaborations with underground fantasy legend and Heavy Metal veteran Richard Corben, particularly the 2010 one-shot Hellboy in Mexico, in which Hellboy joins a team of luchadores to drink ...

Looking for a way to burn off some of those Turkey Day calories? Try one of these three after-Thanksgiving events.

Ex-Dixie Dirt singer/guitarist Kat Brock, after a move to Nashville and several years of solo performance, returned to rock-band mode this summer.

The cover of Miranda Lambert’s fourth album shows the singer walking away from a vintage car on fire. It’s an update of her arrival on the country music scene back in 2005 with the incendiary honky-tonk firebug revenge fantasy “Kerosene.” ...

Trey Daugherty, the upstart impresario behind an experimental two-person opera adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Diary of a Madman” at the Neighborhood Center in Fourth and Gill earlier this month, already has plans for more work from his avant-garde ...

The apparent success of last year’s A K-Town Christmas compilation of holiday songs by local artists has led the producer and organizer, Kent Oglesby, to prepare a follow-up for this holiday season.

Uncle Acid traffics in occult classic rock, drawing its inspiration from Hammer horror films, the Stooges, the first four Black Sabbath albums, and The Satanic Bible.

Coming just in time for the holidays: an original local production of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the late-’90s Off Broadway hit rock musical about a transsexual rock star and her sad career and love life.

Band competitions are sometimes tough, but the second round of the Square Room’s Sound Off competition was especially hard on Oak Ridge folk-rock group Dark Hollow Band, which broke up in the wake of its last-minute withdrawal from the Nov. ...

University of Tennessee history professor and MacArthur Fellow Jay Rubenstein’s new book, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, is a detailed account of the First Crusade and an analysis of the religious and political conditions ...

The songs here shift from classic honky-tonk and torchy string jazz to rumbling rock ’n’ roll.

It’s not called the Battle of West Knoxville for nothing: the Bearden Bulldogs’ annual showdown with the Farragut Admirals. For years, this game was the biggest match-up on either team’s schedule, and could define a season. But the times have ...

The second album from former Flat Duo Jets frontman Dexter Romweber and his sister, Sara, is a tour through Romweber’s career, from the unhinged punkabilly and psychotic country of his earliest lo-fi recordings to the swinging lounge- and surf-inflected jazz-rock ...

The line between rock music and dance music has become blurred in a way it hasn’t been since the rave scene of the early 1990s, with acts from all over the pop-culture spectrum working hard to erase whatever distinctions are ...

Tom Parkhill, artistic director of the Tennessee Stage Company, can think of plenty of reasons to explain why the company’s next big undertaking is a downtown celebration of the life and works of Tennessee Williams.

As an award category, “most improved” is a mixed bag—while it acknowledges hard work, it also counts on some previous lackluster performance. Still, college-radio bible CMJ’s recent recognition of WUTK as the most-improved station in the country is a big ...

The band has been quiet for the last few months, but fall is shaping up as a good rebound for Jonathan Sexton and the Big Love Choir.

The Harry Potter franchise may have reached its official conclusion with this summer’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the final film in the series based on J.K. Rowling’s best-selling wizarding books, but local rapper LiL iFFy isn’t ...

The German Bear Family label is famous for its deluxe box sets of classic country music, and the company has just released—with considerable help from local musicians, fans, surviving family members, and archivists—the definitive collection of recordings by bluegrass pioneer ...

The London-based alt-rock band the Boxer Rebellion, led by Maryville native Nathan Nicholson, has canceled its upcoming North American tour, which included a stop at the Square Room on Nov. 10.

Most of the early reviews of Lydia Loveless’ new album, Indestructible Machine, describe the Ohio singer/songwriter and her band as some kind of combination of punk rock and country music. Loveless herself thinks the “punk” part of that equation understates ...

A disquieting electronic album built around the life and death of a single animal.

After nearly a decade of increasing complexity, Atlanta master heshers Mastodon sort of dial it back on their fifth album.

Manhattan’s was an Old City institution. So Randy and Jenny Boyd, the owners of Boyd’s Jig & Reel, the new Scottish pub that opened in the old Manhattan’s space a few weeks ago, kept their updates subtle.

Pat Gubler, a veteran of the now-defunct New York avant/psychedelic-folk group Tower Recordings who performs and records as P.G. Six, has gradually updated his sound over the course of a decade and five solo albums.

These two new reissues capture some of the band’s peak moments since reforming in 2001.

The third season of the Square Room’s Sound Off competition, a six-month battle of the bands that pays off with studio time and an AC Entertainment gig, is ready to go.