Seattle’s all-ages concert guide You don’t need fake ID to have fun.

Chris Smith has allowed us to share this entire album! Read on to download individual tracks, or a zip of the entire thing.

In the movie “Walk the Line,” when Johnny Cash first auditions for Sam Phillips and Sun Records he plays a gospel song that Sam Phillips doesn’t like. Phillips asks him to play what he truly feels inside his soul “The song you (he) would play to convince God of his worth.” Upon that remark Cash goes into “Folsom Prison Blues,” with its classic line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” This confession of the soul on tape is the lineage that rapper Chris Smith has on his debut record, an eight-song-mixtape.

Chris Smith hails from South Seattle in a neighborhood where ambition is at a minimum and alcoholism is rampant, or so he would have us believe on his thoughtful first mixtape. Mixtape is an album perfect for nighttime and after-party...

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And we almost let this month get away without an announcement. Here’s what’s up:

Mercurial Sound is working on booking our VERY-FIRST-SHOW! Whoa! The details are in secret (or just not figured out yet), but expect to hear more about it, and set aside some time in your calendar in early June. It will be a very small endeavor, for our first try, but depending on how many of you all show up (and our hits are growing incredibly fast as of late) they’ll probably get bigger and bigger. Tristan is taking charge on most of this one, so email him (t pelton at mercurialsound dot com) with any pertinant questions.

We’ve also met some really great new people this month, particularly on the north end. This site started in the Everett/Lake Stevens area, by high schoolers without any venues to go to, but now Everett has it’s very own venue: The House. Booking shows around there is Mycelial Productions now...

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In 1974 women weren’t supposed to rock. Even after Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin there was still a sense in the music community that women would play pleasant female music while men could be as dirty as they wanted. This stereotype changed in one fell swoop when Patti Smith emerged and released one of the dirtiest, poetic, and enraged pieces of music in the history of women in music. This stereotype changed the day Patti Smith killed a generation of music that came before her.

Patti Smith emerged from the blossoming New York music scene which would eventually become known as the scene that punk spawned out of. This was the music that directly followed The Velvet Underground in New York and saw the rise to fame of such legendary bands as The Ramones, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Talking Heads. Many argue that The Ramones...

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I tell everyone I don’t do album reviews, but our staff rule is that if you review the CD, you get to keep the CD. And since this CD isn’t out until May, and I’ve been begging for it for about a year now, I’m dibsing this one.

Mon Frere’s “Blood Sweat And Swords” may come with a new drummer, new photos, and new press pizzaz, but it brings a solid continuation of the same piercing yet anthem-like, horror-infused rock that fans have been following since they won the EMP SoundOff! two years ago. This album brings out show favorites like “Clever Boi” and “Bulliton” (songs I’ve heard so many times at shows that I found myself singing along to them… the first play through of the album) as well as brand new songs to complete an 11-track CD.

The year and a half since their...

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A double bill like Belle and Sebastian with The New Pornographers is the kind of show indie kids dream about. Shows like this function as a mini-Sasquatch for them(us); one of the few shows of the year with almost 90 percent fan-crossover. With just two bands, there was no room for musical letdowns, no Nine Inch Nails or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to bore and excruciate.

The New Pornographers opened to a packed Paramount Theater, complete with scalpers outside, playing an hour of their melodic power-pop. They opened with the title track from their most recent album “Twin Cinema,” and continued to plow through favorites from all three New Pornographers albums.

Live The New Pornographers are a completely different band than on album. When recorded they function as a complete band, with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and Neko Case taking vocal duty,...

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Four years ago, The Divorce released their debut full length, “There will be blood tonight,” at a packed two show night at the Crocodile Café. Their energy that night was amazing and I left feeling that I had seen one of the next big bands to come out of Seattle. I want to know where that energy disappeared to.

Friday night’s pseudo-show at The Vera Project (I say pseudo because it was really just a live broadcast for The End) was not in the least what I expected. The band jammed for about twenty minutes before the show on new songs with the attitude that they were just practicing in someone’s basement; lead singer Shane Berry even invited the crowd to their normal practice sessions. It turned out that the broadcast was going to be one song at 6:15 and two more at 6:45. But the band didn’t want to stand around for all the time in between so the crowd was treated first to a song from their old album, which revived my old love for the band, then...

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Tennis Pro have offered to post two songs for download on MercurialSound. Both songs are from their excellent album “Cassie’s Junior Varsity Make-Out Squad.”

Tennis Pro - Can’t Help Myself [MP3, 4.7MB]
Tennis Pro - The Director’s Vision [MP3, 4.8MB].

Does anyone know what makes a punk album good nowadays? Is it style? or is it substance? The great debate. “Die, die my darling” vs. “Die for the government.” Well, there hasn’t been much of either lately. In 2005, punk rock and its myriad sub-genres spawned less than a dozen great albums, staggeringly low numbers considering our current socio-political climate. To paraphrase Geo of Blue Scholars, “Punk’s not dead, it’s just malnourished.”

Which brings us to The Briefs, Seattle’s premier punk band, and their latest album, “Steal Yer Heart.” As always, The Briefs have shitloads of style, every note dripping day-glo, every vocal saturated with cynicism. Yet this tme around, their pogo-punk Kool-Ade seems to be layered with genuine desperation. The sarcasm is sharper, the neon glows brighter, more harsh. And it’s still catchier than a British Invasion mix-tape.

“Steal Yer Heart” aims...

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Sometimes musicians embrace their creative side a little too much, recording self-important, eccentric albums that focus on one man’s vision more than musical appeal. Other times musicians are capable of realizing a musical dream within a pop-context, recording an album that sounds unique to them, but also listenable to the music community around them. Head Like a Kite’s “Random Portraits of the Home Movie,” comes from the latter group, sounding like an absolute reverie.

Head Like a Kite is Sushirobo guitarist Dave Einmo’s solo side project. His debut album “Random Portraits of the Home Movie,” on Pattern 25 Records was recorded with the intent of embracing and using-musically super 8 video recorded by his family in the seventies and eighties. While this idea sounds a little eccentric, one would be hard-pressed to realize its intent...

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A fairly new Seattle band, The Royalty, kicked off the show with some heavy songs that featured a mixture of shouted and sung vocals as well as some speaking and singing through a megaphone. Evan, their talented lead guitarist, was heckled and cheered the most of the band members, while vocalist Kevin’s slightly cocky, swaggering style of dance drew its fair share of attention. The band had slight feedback problems during their first few songs, but overcame them and played a handful of songs, introduced by track number rather than by name. Tightening up to get better in synch with one another, the band members fed off of one another and crowd reaction well, grinning in spite of themselves and pointing up to the bar/balcony and down to the movers and shakers on the floor.

A more experimental band, Haram, played next. Before they began, their guitarist warned the lighting technician not to...

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