Tonight

Our good friends The Red Lions will be opening up for the Avett Brothers tonight at Revolution Hall in Troy. The show starts at 8pm and will set you back 18$ if you don’t have a presale ticket but this is going to be an excellent show and worth the money. The Avett Brothers were in town last Fall and they really know how to put on a show.

Friday (July 4th)

After doing some research it appears that Blotto, arguably Albany’s most famous band of all time is playing (a reunion?) at the fireworks at empire plaza. I haven’t heard much else about that but I may well go see if I can’t check that out.  They are billed as going on at 5:45pm.

Also tomorrow night you can find Palatypus with Red Haired Strangers and Happy Balky and the Good Liven at the Lark Tavern at 10pm once you are done watching all the fireworks.

Saturday July 5th

Catch one of our favorite local bands, Beware! the Other Head of Science, with the Shoe gazing Severe Severe and the Problem with Dragons, who according to myspace is made up entirely of storm troopers. 8pm 5$.

Lastly while we are talking about local shows, All Over Albany posted a couple of great videos from the Sgt Dunbar & the Hobo Banned show last weekend at the Grand Street Arts Center. Go check them out (both the blog and the videos).

Songs for the Sake of CDFI

The Capital District Federation of Ideas is a wonderful little space and group of people headquartered in a once abandoned little store front at 383.5 Madison Avenue. Recently in an effort to help CDFI raise money to continue being awesome, their good friend Harith from The Rev Records put on and recorded (with the help of Bryann Hamill) an excellent show of twelve local bands. Then he released record and named it after something scribbled on one of the tables at Point 5, Brontosaurus : Human (thats pronounced Brontosaurus is to Human , which if you were wondering is 8:1, I measured).

Mp3s and Videos after the jump.

After a redesign and relocation the Three B3nson Music blog is back in a functioning state. You will now be able to find daily updates about all things music related that we like. Be sure to reset your RSS feed or bookmarks to our new location.

There is a lot going on musically in Albany these days. Actually, there probably has been for a while, but I worked a lot of stupid jobs and was kind of missing out on it. Mercifully, I don’t work for any stupid jobs anymore, so I can go see lots of people play lots of instruments and it’s a good time.

About two weeks ago, I went to a free show at the Muddy Cup. Some of the bands that played are well known and good so I won’t waste space going into it here. However, one band definitely worth mentioning that I hadn’t seen before that night is The Luxury Flats from Hudson, NY. They have a mellow-ish indie rock feel and they sounded great live. I really liked the vocals a lot, this band is very listenable. Also, some of them had the sweetest facial hair I have seen in a while (but that really has nothing to do with anything).

So, why am I going to remember February 15th? Two reasons: 1) I rode my bicycle into a moving vehicle (don’t worry, the injuries were negligible) and 2) I saw Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over The Sea” covered in it’s entirety with an exuberance that I like to think Jeff Magnum would have approved of.

Ok, so the reason I hit a moving car on my bike was a mix of being cut off, riding much too fast in slush, and the brakes not working properly. After hitting the car and exchanging a mixture of “wow I’m really surprised but ok!” gestures with the people in the vehicle, I hopped back on my bike and rode to Valentines. There was no way I was going to miss this.

About two months ago, I had a phone conversation with a good friend of mine. After talking about the usual silly things that people talk about on the phone (like stuff you’re doing with yourself and whatever happened to that recipe you said you would give me?) somehow our mutual disillusionment with music these days came up. While I won’t go into this issue on here, one of the end results was me asking him whether he had been to any good shows lately (which is one of my favorite ways to listen to music these days) he mentioned seeing an act called “Best Friends Forever.” Chuckling initially at how much their name made me think of fifth grade, I hopped on the old myspace and gave this Minneapolis based band a listen.