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Margarita Mix Taste Test

Clarissa Vilondo, Brandon Wetherbee and Nicholas KarlinJuly 24, 2018

We tasted 11 margarita mixes to make your summer sweeter ...

Eat & DrinkEating InEvergreen GuidesFeaturedGuides 015 min read

Freshly Tapped: Allagash’s Little Brett

Phil Runco and Clarissa VilondoJuly 23, 2018

One hop. One grain. One yeast. One incredible story....

BeerFeatured 029 min read

BYT Interviews: Raphael Saadiq

Ruben GzirianJuly 20, 2018

"This project is a compilation of life experiences between family, addiction, and a lot of different things that I purposefully never really talked about or wrote about."...

FeaturedInterviewsMusic 110 min read

BYT DC Outdoor Drinking Guide

BYT at largeJuly 19, 2018

It's the perfect time to drink outside ...

Eat & DrinkEvergreen GuidesFeaturedGuidesRestaurants & BarsStuff To Do In DC 181 min read

"Making a movie about now was definitely my impulse. I did not set out to make a movie about kids. What I set out to do was making a movie about now, and how I was feeling now. This isn’t a story about my younger self."...

FeaturedFilm & TVInterviewsLGBTQ 011 min read

District of Comedy Essential Viewing

Brandon Wetherbee and Matt ByrneJuly 17, 2018

Spend the day with Bernie and Bridget ...

FeaturedFunny Stuff 04 min read

Photos: Unseensters After Hours @ SAAM

BYT at largeJuly 16, 2018

We were watching you....

ArtFeaturedPhotos 044 min read

Tickets to Everything

Kaylee DuganJuly 13, 2018

We can't do these events without you....

FeaturedFunny StuffStuff To Do In DCUpcoming BYT Events 02 min read

18 Books to Read at/in the Water in 2018

BYT at largeJuly 12, 2018

Grow your mind while you destroy your skin ...

BooksFeatured 017 min read

We Taste Tested All the Low Calorie Ice Creams

Brandon Wetherbee and Nicholas KarlinJuly 10, 2018

Fewer calories, better taste? Of course not. That's crazy. ...

Eat & DrinkEating InEvergreen GuidesFeaturedGuides 05 min read

Surveillance, Code Names and the Dark Web with Photography Curator John Jacob

Kaylee DuganJuly 9, 2018

"The whole idea is that it's a piece of engineering done for engineering's sake, the same way we make art for art's sake."...

ArtFeaturedInterviews 07 min read

2018 Capital Fringe Festival Preview

Diana MetzgerJuly 6, 2018

There's something for everyone, from the theatrical neophyte to the know-it-all....

FeaturedStuff To Do In DCTheatre & Dance 24 min read

BYT Interviews: Ben Foster

Diana MetzgerJuly 5, 2018

Leave No Trace's Ben Foster has been in everything and is currently on diaper duty ...

FeaturedFilm & TVInterviews 08 min read

Draft Picks: July’s Best Beer Events

BYT at largeJuly 3, 2018

What is worth your time, hangover, and hard-earned, disposable income this month?...

BeerEat & DrinkFeaturedStuff To Do In DC 019 min read

Your Best July

BYT at largeJuly 2, 2018

Your best month of explosions ...

ArtBeerBooksEat & DrinkFeaturedFilm & TVFunny StuffMusicRestaurants & BarsSports(?) & FitnessStuff To Do In DCTheatre & Dance 040 min read

DC Summer Concert Picks

BYT at largeJune 27, 2018

From Janelle Monáe to Beyoncé, Cher to ICP, Jimmy Buffett in July to Jimmy Buffett in August, a daily concert pick to suit your summer needs ...

FeaturedMusicStuff To Do In DC 042 min read

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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

18sep6:30 pmAlison Krauss6:30 pm The Anthem

18sep6:30 pmAmos LeeCaitlyn Smith6:30 pm Lincoln Theatre

18sep7:00 pmFIDLAR - A North American Tour in 2018w/ Dilly Dally, Nobro7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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

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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7-Session Daytime Course

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

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