Under the Radar Magazine

Camera Obscura

Jul 01, 2006 By August Brown Summer 2006 - The Dears

If you’re in a Scottish band and the gray, miserable weather of Glasgow in late Fall bums you out, there are few options for feeling better. If you’re Stuart Murdoch, you fill notebooks with stories of funny little frogs and goateed baseball catchers until the sun comes out again. If you’re Mogwai, you turn your amps up until your ears bleed and you can’t feel much of anything. But if you’re Tracyanne Campbell of sweet-tempered sweater-rockers Camera Obscura, you simply skip town to make a record in Sweden. More

Grizzly Bear

Jul 01, 2006 By Gary Knight Grizzly Bear

“You haven’t made it until you’re in the Winchester Daily Gazette,” says Ed Droste. The 27-year-old singer/guitarist and founding member of Brooklyn-based Grizzly Bear is explaining what fame is, according to his parents. Despite the band having been written about in some of the world’s biggest music publications, which have taken notice of Grizzly Bear’s experimental and elegiac folk, Droste’s mother and father are holding judgment until their son is featured in the local New Hampshire paper. More

Cate Shortland

Q&A with the writer and director of Somersault

Apr 02, 2006 By Chris Tinkham Cate Shortland

Cate Shortland didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a filmmaker or rubbing shoulders with international celebrities at the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s where the Australian director found herself two years ago when her feature-length debut, Somersault, premiered as a selection in the festival’s Un Certain Regard, a category that favors new talent. More

Tangiers

Romantic Anti-Romanticists

Apr 01, 2006 By Gary Knight Tangiers

Last October, Tangiers released their third proper LP, The Family Myth, a smart and subtly humorous collection of jagged, tense pop, featuring twelve rolling, hook-laden, off-kilter melodies, jangly guitars that alternately rip and sparkle, and a rhythm section that is no-apologies bombast More

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Apr 01, 2006 By August Brown Spring 2006 - The Raconteurs

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ debut full-length Fever to Tell sounded like a high school yearbook. It’s a loud but uncertain art-punk screed, full of black humor and wicked riffs but with little ambition. Singer Karen O’s squeals and moans and beer-slinging are sex-crazed without being especially sexy. It’s aggressive and commanding but only hides the band’s insecurities about what they really have to say. It’s a portrait of young artists caught in the middle of growing up. More