Books

BYT Weekly: What We Read, Thought, Felt

Brandon WetherbeeMarch 16, 2018

There are no good video game movies but there are good Roxane Gay comic books ...

Books 04 min read

A Study in Intimacy: Sally Mann @ National Gallery of Art

Svetlana LegeticMarch 5, 2018

Get close....

ArtBooks 04 min read

BYT Weekly: What We Read, Thought, Felt

Marissa RubensteinMarch 2, 2018

You've made it! You survived the week! Here's what to take with you......

BooksMisc 05 min read

Your Best March

BYT at largeMarch 1, 2018

31+ ways to avoid lousy Smarch weather ...

ArtBeerBooksChicagoEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVFunny StuffMusicNYCRestaurants & BarsSports(?) & FitnessStaying InStuff To Do In DC 036 min read

“Dumb Blonde” Honored by Library of Congress

Brandon Wetherbee and Nicholas KarlinFebruary 27, 2018

“We have to love the differences.”...

BooksCute StuffGiving BackPhotos 15 min read

Your Best February

BYT at largeFebruary 1, 2018

The following contains 28+ picks to have your best February....

ArtBooksFeaturedFilm & TVMusicRestaurants & BarsSports(?) & FitnessStuff To Do In DCTheatre & Dance 039 min read

Your Best January – 2018

BYT at largeJanuary 2, 2018

Choose to have a better 2018. Start today....

ArtBeerBooksEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVMusicRestaurants & BarsTheatre & Dance 032 min read

DC Dream Jobs: Don Henderson, Book Buyer @ National Gallery of Art

Kaylee DuganDecember 20, 2017

"We’re kind of a hidden treasure."...

BooksDream JobsFeaturedInterviewsPhotos 020 min read

Best Books of 2017*

BYT at largeDecember 20, 2017

Our criteria isn’t about books that were released in 2017, but rather books we read in 2017 that we think made us better people....

BooksFeatured 036 min read

Holiday Staples Guide

Kaylee Dugan and Nicholas KarlinDecember 11, 2017

Keep this last minute holiday staples on hand and you might just survive the season....

BooksFeaturedGuidesStyle & Shopping 112 min read

A Handy Guide To: Holiday Markets & Pop-Ups In DC

Josh Waldman and Samantha CooperDecember 8, 2017

Deck the halls with pounds of money...

ArtBooksEat & DrinkMusicStyle & Shopping 05 min read

BYT Gift Guide 2017: Holiday Stuff

BYT at largeDecember 6, 2017

Holiday - ish...

BooksFeaturedStyle & Shopping 016 min read

BYT Gift Guide 2017: Gifts For Interesting People With Interests

BYT at largeDecember 6, 2017

Hobbies are good for you...

ArtBooksEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVMiscMusicPhotos 022 min read

BYT Gift Guide 2017: Gifts For Him

BYT at largeDecember 5, 2017

A little something for all male-identifying human beings in your life...

BooksFeaturedStyle & Shopping 010 min read

BYT Gift Guide 2017: Gifts For Her

BYT at largeDecember 5, 2017

A little something for all female-identifying human beings in your life...

ArtBooksEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVMiscMusicStyle & Shopping 017 min read

Your Best November

BYT at largeNovember 1, 2017

The best of this month - handpicked for you, by us....

ArtBooksEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVMusicTheatre & Dance 035 min read

Filter Events

08sep(sep 8)10:00 am22(sep 22)1:00 pmOn-Location Photography: DC’s Public Sculpture and Architecture10:00 am (8) - 1:00 pm (22) S. Dillon Ripley Center

17sep(sep 17)10:15 am05nov(nov 5)1:00 pmIntroduction to Watercolor10:15 am (17) - (november 5) 1:00 pm S. Dillon Ripley Center

19sep7:00 pmCar Seat Headrestw/ Naked Giants • Don Babylon7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to ‘Cute Thing’, dancing their asses off as ‘Bodys’ climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. ” I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: ” I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”

You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasy is a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.

“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those ” apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.

This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

He’s not alone no more.

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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19sep7:00 pmHyukoh 24 Tour - North Americaw/ Inner Wave7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

20sep7:00 pmThe Buttertonesw/ Wild Wing7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Last year the Buttertones put out Gravedigging, but on their newest Midnight In A Moonless Dream, they’re digging deeper and discovering something dark. If Gravedigging felt like an oversaturated spaghetti-western desertscape, Midnight is much more biting—music made for the swampland that spit out Australia’s mad Scientists, or for the Mickey Spillane night city where the Cramps met all those garbagemen and werewolves. Or maybe the Buttertones are heading for an even more primal place: “Show more teeth / Bite your way in,” sings guitarist Richard Araiza. “You’re back in the jungle again!”

They’d started in 2011 as a trio of music-school misfits. Araiza, bassist Sean Redman and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån all wanted to pursue something more than boring industry adequacy, and soon locked together their current five-piece line-up with sax player London Guzman and guitarist Dakota Boettcher. With Gravedigging, they leapt from backyard parties to back-to-back tours, including their first trip to Europe, and scored a Coachella slot for 2018. It was a year that made them sharper, stronger, even more sophisticated. And when they were ready to record, they were ready to do things differently.

Midnight was made in two flash sessions at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio with Gravedigging producer Jonny Bell, whose genre-smashing record collection and appetite for experimentation made for a perfect match. (He’s really a guru, they say.) What was supposed to be a six song EP during the summer of 2017 bloomed into a full-length by the end of that December. Midnight was like a trust fall, the band says—leap of faith after leap of faith, cut to tape as it happened by a tight and tour-tested band. On this album, they’d decided, everything would be new—not just new sounds, like their first-ever string section, but new ways of working together and writing together. They worked on trust and instinct, by feeling instead of thinking. If it worked, they’d keep it, and if it didn’t, they’d burn it and move on. Gravedigging played like the soundtrack to a good heist movie, but Midnight was like the true story itself—a perfect and intricate crime, executed by a crew of professionals under cover of night.

On the vicious “Winks and Smiles,” the spirit of sax and violence that powered cult-classic L.A. punkers the Deadbeats suddenly comes to life; on the starked-out “You and Your Knife” and fog-and-smoke follow-up “Brickhead,” you’ll hear the cryptic echoes of Suicide or Bauhaus. It’s music made for dancers but also for doomed romancers, and you’ll hear it best on the pocket symphony “Eros,” which closes the album with Lynch-ian vision and power—here Araiza sings with almost startling passion, and if you don’t linger on the idea of graveyard angels in perpetual embrace, it’s a love song for the ages. This is the strong stuff, the kind that comes in an unmarked bottle and burns when it hits.

“It’s the darkness that brings us together,” laughs Guzman—in person, this is a band who prefer comedy to tragedy, even if they do claim to spend hours listening to Smiths records all day. But there’s still a tension and even a sinister new dimension on Midnight that the Buttertones never quite had before. Like lead single “C4,” which ignites like something from a New York no-wave song, with slashing sax and ferocious drums and a piano riff falling of a cliff before Araiza fights through the noise and gunsmoke, and what’s the very first word on the whole album? “Bang!” he shouts—and that says it all.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$15

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20sep7:00 pmCar Seat Headrest - First Night Sold Out! Second Night Added!w/ Naked Giants, Don Babylon7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

He’s not alone no more.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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20sep7:00 pm9:00 pmFree Weekly Bingo w/ Union Market7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Union Market

21sep5:30 pm6:30 pmNats Night Out5:30 pm - 6:30 pm Due South

21sep6:00 pmPortugal. The ManLucius6:00 pm Merriweather Post Pavilion

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Everything You Need To Know About Portugal. The Man’s New Album.

Well, we’re two full months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material sliding down a mountain of used needles into a canyon full of rat feces. But hey, it’s not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album coming out called Woodstock.

PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man’s biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album’s trajectory.

First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. “What’s taking so long to finish the album?” John’s dad said. “Isn’t that what bands do? Write songs and then put them out?” Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John’s dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.

Second, fate stuck its wiener in John’s ear again when he found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.

It wasn’t easy and there was the constant threat that the band’s record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there

Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about? Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single “Feel It Still”) that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, “Hey, this pile is fucked up!” And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.

Fronted by the enchanting Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, and backed by their counterpart bandmates Dan Molad and Pete Lalish, Lucius have drawn acclaim for powerful songs showcasing taut hooks, along with their mesmerizing stage presence and bold visual aesthetics. The New York Times described Wolfe and Laessig’s vocals as being “especially gorgeous,” while Rolling Stone says Lucius is “powerful enough to knock you over.” The band released their second album, Good Grief in 2016, and much like their debut album Wildewoman, it earned them high praise from influential critics such as Pitchfork, NPR, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.

Aesthetically, while their resemblance onstage seems uncanny with matching outfits and hairstyles, offstage, they don’t bear the same resemblance at all. When Lucius takes the stage, what you see and hear is two voices coalescing into one stressing, agile sound. They sing in an arresting unison, doubling their high, clear voices and creating a third sound that is as unnerving as it is lovely, like two mirrors, creating an infinite number of reflections that reveal as much as they obscure. The band’s distinctive play on duality showcases Jess and Holly’s powerful voices at the center, bolstered and surrounded by the mathematically precise drumming of Dan with the graceful chiming of Pete’s guitar. Together the quartet create a sound the New Yorker calls “seemingly impossible with flawless grace that brings delicate beauty to even the most bombastic moments.”

Since 2017, Jess and Holly hold duties, contributing what Rolling Stone describes as “sweet, soulful, and smothering” vocals to Roger Waters mammoth arena-conquering Us Them tour, performing over 160 shows around the world.

And yet 2018 finds Lucius together for an intimate sold out acoustic tour and the release of an accompanying 10-track acoustic album, NUDES. A collection of songs chosen specifically to showcase their soulful, powerful voices and gorgeous harmonies, NUDES includes three new songs, four from the band’s back catalog, and three covers. The album also features sit-ins from Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters (on “Goodnight Irene”) and Wilco’s Nels Cline (on “Million Dollar Secret”).

Time

(Friday) 6:00 pm

Location

Merriweather Post Pavilion

10475 Little Patuxent Parkway Columbia, Maryland, 21044

Cost

$45 – $75

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7-Session Daytime Course

Monday, September 17 to November 5, 2018 – 10:15 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

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