A Few Good Shows: 3/29/13
March 29, 2013
Spring hasn’t fully sprung, but it’s trying really hard. But don’t let the weather dictate what shows you check out this weekend, because you’d be missing out on something good. Here are my picks:
FRIDAY:
Cheap Time, Fast Girls, and Thelma & The Sleaze @ The Stone Fox. 9pm $5
Charles Walker & The Dynamites album release @ Mercy Lounge. 9pm $12 adv/$15 DOS
Penicillin Baby, Elk Milk, Shy Guy, and Golden Spurs @ Springwater. 9pm $5 21+
SATURDAY:
Roy Ira, w/ Phantom Farmer @ FooBar too. 9pm $5
Stone Fox Garden benefit show ft. William Tyler, Reid Magette, and Stephen Molyneux @ The Stone Fox. 9pm $5, free if you bring something to donate to the garden.
Suggested:
Garden Center/Hardware Store Gift Cards
Top Soil/Compost
Lumber for Raised Beds
Screws (~3in)
Garden Tools
Seeds, Starters
That’s it! Quality over quantity this weekend. Have a great one!
East Nashville Beer Festival 2013: my picks
March 26, 2013
This year’s East Nashville Beer Festival was a complete success! I headed over with Lauren and a few bandmates and friends on Saturday ready to be amazed, and amazed I was! This festival has become one of my favorite days of the year, and Saturday did not disappoint. Lauren has a full review of everything over at Old Red Boots, but here are my top picks, with more personal insight:
Top 5 beers at ENBF 2013:
1. Kentucky Ale: Bourbon Barrel Ale
This is consistently my favorite bourbon barrel aged beer. You get a nice woody, oaky bourbon flavor up front, then a subtle hop character comes through, finishing with a lingering bourbon sweetness. It’s a symphony of all the right flavors.
2. Starr Hill: Psychokilter
Easily one of the best Scotch ales I’ve had. This beer is all about the malt- as it should be- but isn’t overly sweet. Robust and somewhat earthy. Color me impressed!
3. Calfkiller: Classic Spider
Calfkiller has burst onto the TN brewing scene in the past few years with a vengeance. All of their beers are fermented with the same Belgian yeast blend, which gives it a distinctive fruity note that says “this is Calfkiller!” Classic Spider was a special blend of their Brown Recluse and a stout, aged in a bourbon (or maybe it was whiskey?) barrel. I’m not sure if this will become a regularly produced beer, but I wouldn’t mind if it did!
4. Rivertown: Roebling Porter
This is a vanilla & espresso infused imperial porter, and it might as well be liquid dessert. It’s chocolatey, sweet, warming and simply delicious. It’s one of their flagships, too! Sadly, Rivertown doesn’t distribute to TN. Update: turns out Rivertown DOES distribute to TN- you can get them at Craft Brewed!
5. Yazoo: Hop Project #70 Dry-hopped with Stella hops
Yazoo is known for their creative Hop Project series, in which they use the same malt bill, but different varieties of hops at different boiling schedules for each batch. #70 is the latest batch and (from what I was told at the tap) for this cask they dry-hopped it with a unique Australian hop variety called Stella. As I understand it this was a special cask that Yazoo made for the ENBF, but Hop Project #70 used Stella hops during the boil as well, and is available in retail stores now.
Honorable Mentions:
Deschutes: Black Butte Porter and Northwest Pale Ale
Deschutes is an Oregon brewery that sadly hasn’t made it to TN yet, so I was unfamiliar even with these two flagship beers. The Black Butte Porter has a slightly nutty character that you’d expect in a nut brown ale, but yet it’s a porter! The Northwest Pale Ale stuck out to me because they backed away from the assertive hop bitterness that most APA’s are known for, and went for a well-balanced pale ale with a nice hoppy aroma.
Left Hand: Smokejumper Imperial Porter
Reactions to this beer amongst my peers were mixed. For me it was a fine smokey, bacon-y porter. I’ve not met a smoked beer that I didn’t like and this was no exception. Some in my group thought it reminded them too much of a campfire, while others wanted more bacon flavor.
Straight To Ale: Hellfire Quadrupel and Monkeynaut IPA dry-hopped with Citra
This Huntsville brewery produces some fine beers. Their Belgian-style quadrupel, called Hellfire, was warming, earthy, and robust. They also had a special cask of their Monkeynaut IPA that was dry-hopped with Citra hops. The tropical fuity aroma was simply blissful!
French Broad: 13 Rebels ESB
One of my favorite styles of beer is a classic English ESB, or Extra-Special Bitter. I was familiar with French Broad but hadn’t tried their ESB. 13 Rebels was an enjoyable and worthy example of the style. Well-balanced and very session-able, as an ESB should be.
Least Favorite Beer:
New Belgium’s surprise quadrupel.
I unfortunately didn’t take note of exactly what this beer was aged in or what was supposed to be special about it. It was a quad that had (I think) been aged in some sort of wood barrels. What I do remember though, is that is was too blatantly alcoholic up front. There are 10, 11, even 12% ABV beers that still manage to not allow the boozy alcoholic flavor to overrun the character of the beer. This one though, just screamed “BOOZE” at my palate. That being said, New Belgium is one of the finest, and also largest craft breweries in the nation. Everything about them pretty much rules.
Happy drinking and I’ll see you next year at ENBF IV!
A Few Good Shows: 3/22/13
March 22, 2013
Before I get into the show picks for this weekend, I must point out a bit of wonderful local rock news: Hotpipes have returned! Above is the cover art for their long-awaited new album Dust, which will be released via YK Records on May 7th. The band is “now Jonathan Rogers and Dan Sommers” according to their website. They’ll also be playing an album release show at Mercy Lounge on Sat. May 11th with Echo Group, with the band rounded-out by an all-star cast of local musicians including Dave Paulson, Jerry Pentecost, and Keith Lowen. Both of these bands wear their Walkmen influences on their sleeves, so this billing makes perfect sense. Bravo, fellas! Glad to have you back!
Now for my show picks:
FRIDAY:
QuicheNight, The Lonely H, and Buffalo Clover @ The 5 Spot. 9pm $5 21+
Goodbye June w/ Jonathan Sexton @ The Basement. 9pm $7 21+
SATURDAY:
Warm Soda w/ Ben Spinks Supermelt and Study Hall @ The Stone Fox. 9pm $7
Alanna Royale w/ Milktooth, Heavy Sole, and Photo Ops @ Mercy Lounge. 9pm $FREE
Hurts to Laugh, Bang OK Bang, and The Bad Dudes @ FooBar. 9pm $5
SUNDAY:
Peach Kelli Pop w/ Dirty Dreams and Fox Fun @ The Stone Fox. 9pm $5
Frightened Rabbit and Twilight Sad @ 3rd & Lindsley (sold out). 8pm
That’s all for this weekend! See you at the ENBF!
It’s Craft Beer Week!
March 20, 2013
This week is Nashville Craft Beer week! I was too busy to post about this earlier in the week, but better late than never. As you should well know, it culminates in the long sold-out East Nashville Beer Festival this Saturday, but there are also lots of good tastings, tap takeovers, and beer dinners happening all week long. The full calendar of Craft Beer Week events is over at Rhizome Productions, so check it out and find what sounds interesting. I was at Craft Brewed last night for the Straight To Ale tasting and Brooklyn Surprise cask ale tasting. There are several tastings tonight, tomorrow, and thursday so go taste some good beer. And if you don’t have a ticket to the ENBF, check out Craigslist. I believe there are some for sale there. Good luck, and happy Craft Beer Week!
A Few Good Shows: 3/15/13
March 15, 2013
It’s the Ides of March! Be careful out there. I mean, Google Reader is officially dead… that might as well be a sign of the apocalypse, right?
It’s not nearly as insane as last weekend, especially with a crop of our best local bands being away at SXSW, but there are still a few good shows to check out this weekend in Nashville- here are my picks:
FRIDAY:
R. Stevie Moore, Action!, and Bad Friend @ The Stone Fox. 9pm $7
Hello Walls, Anchor Thieves, Pageant, & Tim Chad and Sherry @ The End. 9pm $5
QDP @ The 5 Spot. 10pm $1 21+
SATURDAY:
The Million Sellers and Adam Therrien @ That’s Cool. 7pm $5
YEAH! Rock Block Showcase @ The Rutledge. 2pm $10 All Ages. For more info checkout the Facebook event.
SUNDAY:
Maserati, w/ Conestyle and Fragments of God @ Exit/In. 9pm $10
That’s all for now. Have a great weekend!
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/MSSS
Fuck yes! That’s all I can think right now about the awesome news that came from NASA a few hours ago. The Curiosity rover has found evidence in samples of rock gathered a few weeks ago that Mars once had an environment suitable for microbial life. The rover drilled out samples from inside a rock in an area dubbed “Yellowknife Bay” by mission scientists. Those powder samples where then analyzed by specialized instruments on board, and the results showed that sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, and carbon are all present in the rock. The range of minerals actually surprised the mission scientists, who weren’t expecting to find quite such a wide range of minerals.
“Were conditions on Mars ever suitable for life?” is one of the core questions the Curiosity mission, and now that question has been answered with a big YES. This is very exciting news, and hopefully there will be even more clues into Mars’ past discovered on this mission. For the full report, check out the press release on NASA’s website.
In other, less-exciting science news, beware of media reports claiming that fossils of diatoms (microscopic plant life) were recently found inside a meteorite. The claims come from Chandra Wickramasinghe, who is a scientist known for outlandish claims that don’t stand up to real scientific scrutiny, and are largely intended to stir controversy. This latest report claims that the fossilized diatoms were found inside a fragment of a meteorite that fell over Sri Lanka in 2012. Except they don’t prove that a) the sample was from said meteorite, or b) that the sample was from a meteorite at all! Also diatoms are EVERYWHERE on earth, and can very quickly contaminate any meteorites that make it to the surface. Thankfully there are skeptics like Dr. Phil Plait out there who regularly and thoroughly debunk such things when they pop up. Head over to his blog Bad Astronomy to read more on how Wickramasinghe’s experiments were flawed, and why his claims just don’t hold water.
A Few Good Shows: 3/8/13
March 8, 2013
Before I get to to our regularly scheduled show listings, I must take a moment to shamelessly plug my band Scale Model’s show Saturday at The Stone Fox. Joining us on the bill is the awesome and sexy Ponychase, as well as the fresh new sounds of Nudity. DJ John Brassil will also be spinning your favorite 80s new wave & post punk between bands. I know, there are a shit ton of good shows happening this weekend, but if you’re not feeling Freaky or Rosey, come see us! The Stone Fox is the best venue of its size in town, and this 80s/synth-heavy bill was custom-tailored to fill the void left by those other big shows. Now for the show listings:
FRIDAY:
Freakin’ Weekend night 2 ft. The Black Lips, Ex-Cult, D. Watusi, White Fence, and Crime Wave @ Exit/In. 8pm $20
HUSTLE III: Nashville’s biggest DJ collaboration, ft. DJs from Y2K, Recognize, Whiskey Disco, The Boom Bap, and Electric Western @ Cannery Ballroom. 8pm $10 adv/$12
Little Bandit, Chris Pickering, Jesse Lafser @ The Basement. 9pm $5 21+
He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister, Shaky Graves, and Paper Bird @ Mercy Lounge. 9pm $10 adv/$12 DOS
Townes Van Zandt tribute ft. Cortney Tidwell, Lylas, Altered Statesmen, Aquariums, and more @ The Stone Fox.
SATURDAY:
Ponychase, Scale Model, and Nudity @ the Stone Fox. 9pm $7
Freakin’ Weekend night 3 ft. JEFF the Brotherhood, Diarrhea Planet, Cy Barkley & The Way Outsiders, OGG, and The Orwells @ Exit/In. 8pm $15
Caitlin Rose The Stand In album release show, with Andrew Combs and Steelism @ Mercy Lounge. 9pm $10 adv/$12 DOS
Gemini Club, Ghosthouse, and Patrick Baker @ The High Watt. 9pm $10
Calicocat, T. Rust, Chloe Sunshine, and King of Prussia @ The 5 Spot. 9pm $5 21+
SUNDAY:
The Zombies w/ The Ettes and Night Beats @ War Memorial Auditorium. 6pm, $25-$40
Freakin’ Weekend Hangover Brunch ft. Jaill, Fletcher C. Johnson, John Wesley Coleman III, Deluxin’, and Weekend Babes @ The Stone Fox. 4pm $3 w/ Freakin’ Weekend 3-day pass, $5 w/out
I told you it’s a crazy weekend! The weather’s gonna be lovely so get out, have fun, and be safe!
Fix The Beer Tax rally next Monday in downtown Nashville
March 6, 2013
I want take a moment to spread the word to fellow Nashvillians/beer lovers about an upcoming rally at the state capitol. As you should’ve heard by now, there is a BIG movement, called Fix The Beer Tax, in our fair state to change our absurdly high beer tax code that has been in place since the 1950’s. Brewers, beer lovers, and politicians alike have all been on the road over the past month or so building support for the Tennessee Beer Tax Reform Act of 2013.
This coming Monday, March 11th there will be a rally held downtown at The Standard (167 Rosa L. Parks Blvd), just a few blocks from the capitol, from 5-8:30pm. Sen. Brian Kelsey, Rep. Cameron Sexton, and representatives from the Tennessee Malt Beverage Association, Anheuser-Busch, other national brewers, and importers will all be present. Join the event on facebook, and if you haven’t already, GO SEND A LETTER TO YOUR STATE LAWMAKERS IN SUPPORT OF THIS BILL! The form is very easy and it only take a few seconds!
Dennis Tito to send a married couple to Mars in 2018, in a spaceship lined with their own poop!
March 1, 2013
Credit: Inspiration Mars
Billionaire Dennis Tito, who is known as the first-ever space tourist, unveiled on Wednesday Inspiration Mars, a plan to launch two people, likely a married couple, on mission to Mars in 2018. The best part: the spaceship in which they travel will be lined with the couple’s own shit! This whole idea sounds incredibly far-fetched, and I even mentioned my doubt of its feasibility last week when the “teaser” press release about the press release made some headlines. It still sounds kinda crazy because of the part about the shit (I’ll get to that in a minute), but they left out one really important detail last week- the couple won’t actually be landing on Mars, just flying around it once in a spacecraft. Actually landing on Mars is really, REALLY, REALLY hard in terms of engineering and feasibility, but just sending a couple of people on a slingshot around it? Not quite as hard. Tito is very committed to making it happen, and is even prepared to fund the first two years of mission development, so this could work. More details on the project can be found in this New Scientist article.
Now, as far as the shit goes… it’s really not as crazy as it sounds. One of the biggest challenges to deep space exploration like this is that the crew members will get bombarded with genetic mutation-inducing cosmic radiation. We’re talking X-rays and Gamma rays, along with the ever-present solar wind of ions. It’s practically a death sentence if you can’t shield the crew from all that, and as it turns out, dried up human waste is actually pretty good at just that! Rather than just jettison it into space, why not seal it up in (fully sanitary, of course) bags and line your spaceship with it to add to the shielding of your spaceship? Astronauts onboard the ISS are already using a reactor system that recycles the water from their urine, and gross as it may seem, this mission will do that AND recycle the moisture from their poop. When you’re going on a 500 day mission to Mars, you have to be very resourceful. For more on the poop shield, see this other article on New Scientist.
In other Mars-related news, unfortunately the Curiosity Rover has suffered a computer glitch which has forced the team to switch everything over to the rover’s backup computer. In short, they will slowly reboot all the rover’s systems from the backup computer, make sure everything checks out, and continue with normal operations. Meanwhile, another team will investigate the problem with the primary computer and attempt to fix it so that it’s operational and can be used in case the backup computer fails. For more, check out this post on Universe Today.
A Few Good Shows: 3/1/13
March 1, 2013
This weekend there are some pretty awesome shows happening in Nashville. No excuses- go out and see some great bands/artists! Here’s what’s interesting to me:
FRIDAY:
Photo Ops album release show w/ Neil O’Neil and Milktooth @ The 5 Spot. 9pm $5 21+
“Future Night” ft. Hanzelle, Fake Brad, and T-Rust, along with a future-themed art show @ Boheme Collectif. 9pm $5
Fanny’s House of Music 4-year anniversary ft. Hobo Rampage and Poly @ Fanny’s House of Music. 6pm, FREE
Canomen, Surfing, Deluxin’, and Dogtooth @ Springwater. 10pm $5 21+
SATURDAY:
Forget Cassettes, Bows and Arrows, Cortney Tidwell, and Coupler @ Exit/In. 9pm $10 (This is also a video filming of the new Forget Cassettes video!)
SXSW Nashville Sendoff party at Mercy Lounge and The High Watt-
Mercy Lounge: The Protomen, Wild Cub, Luella & The Sun, Patrick Sweany, and the Howling Brothers
Hight Watt: Alanna Royale, Magnolia Sons, The JAG, Jacob Jones, and Los Colognes
ALL FREE!
William Tyler, Angel Olsen, and Ri¢hie @ Club Roar (710 Fessey Park Rd.) $5 suggested donation/BYOB. 9pm
Foreign Fields, Natalie Prass, and Boom Forest @ The Basement. 9pm $5 21+
That’s it, have a great weekend!
steve cross loves music and science 