Aug 14, 2014
By Benjamin Plotkin
Winter 2002 - The Divine Comedy
For this Throwback Thursday we revisit our 2002 article on Death Cab For Cutie. It was our first interview with the band and appeared all the way back in issue #2 of the magazine. We are posting it in honor of yesterday’s announcement that guitarist Chris Walla is leaving the band. Death Cab For Cutie were one of the bands we knew we had to interview when we started Under the Radar. The interview was conducted in honor of the band’s third full-length album, 2001’sThe Photo Album, and 2002’s The Stability EP. The lineup at the time was Walla, singer Benjamin Gibbard, bassist Nick Harmer, and drummer Michael Schorr (current drummer Jason McGerr took over in 2003 in time for their next album,Transatlanticism). Under the Radar’s co-publisher and co-founder Wendy Lynch Redfern did a photo shoot with the band at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles around the time of their soundcheck. Walla was happy enough with the article that he wrote us a letter to thank us, which we ran in the following issue. Later Walla would write a regular column for us for many years titled “Chris Walla Explains It All.” Read on as Benjamin Gibbard and Chris Walla discusses never taking a sick day, avoiding day jobs, the emo tag, their early recordings, and hints of The Postal Service. More
Aug 13, 2014
By Austin Trunick
Web Exclusive
After nearly two decades of development, the big screen adaptation of The Giver opens in theaters this week. At the film’s New York City press conference, actor Jeff Bridges explained what led him to picking up the film option for Lois Lowry’s beloved, award-winning children’s book about a boy growing up in an egalitarian dystopia. More
Aug 13, 2014
By Melody Lau
Web Exclusive
Molly Rankin and Kerri MacLellan were childhood friends before they were bandmates, growing up together and both playing the fiddle. More
Aug 12, 2014
By Austin Trunick
Slowdive
While Slowdive‘s early singles rode in on waves of distortion that saw the band lumped in with the rest of the shoegaze pack, by the time they released their 1991 debut album, Just For A Day, they had delved into a more ambient territory that set them apart from their peers. We asked founding members Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell—who share guitar and vocal duties in the recently reformed band—to tell us about the artists and albums that helped shape Slowdive’s sound. While they acknowledged the influence that classic rock groups such as The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and The Byrds had on their music, the bands that most heavily informed their sound were practically their contemporaries. More
Aug 11, 2014
By Austin Trunick
Slowdive
Slowdive‘s reformation after decades of silence is a moment that many of its fans—and, at points, the band itself—never saw coming. The reunion was spurred by an offer from Primavera Sound, the annual music festival in Barcelona, Spain. More
