The Postal Service (Band)

Music Festivals Remain a Man's, Man's, Man's World

The Alabama Shakes' Brittany HowardAs we round out the end of the week, all of the festival hangovers from the full-blown fuckery at FPSF have subsided and we're all a bit less foggy, it's time to look back at the festival in a slightly different light. Let's put aside the rants about overpriced wat ... More >>

Free Press Summer Fest: The Festival's Biggest WTF Moments

Know Your City During Matt & Kim, Kim had the crowd in her pocket... until she accidentally called them "Dallas." She immediately recognized her terrible faux pas and recovered by telling a story about how once she was having sex with Matt and called him by the wrong name. She said that afterwards " ... More >>

The Postal Service at Free Press Summer Fest, 6/1/2013

The Postal Service Free Press Summer Fest June 1, 2013 Back in 2003, a magical group of musicians came together to create a standalone project. Their little experiment became Give Up, one of the most beloved indie records ever. They never toured this record, but its fanbase continued to grow. Ever ... More >>

Iggy & the Stooges at Free Press Summer Fest, 6/1/2013

Iggy & the Stooges Free Press Summer Fest, Eleanor Tinsley Park June 2, 2013 The official closing band on Saturday at FPSF was the Postal Service, but for those of us who know how much even mellow indie-rock like the fare played by Ben Gibbard et al. owes to Detroit madman Iggy Pop, he and his Stoo ... More >>

Free Press Summer Fest: Saturday's Best Acts, 6/1/2013

Alabama Shakes I went into this expecting to enjoy the set by Alabama Shakes, but I didn't realize how it was going to set the tone for the rest of my day. I arrived under the overbearing sun, and struggled to catch glimpses of Japandroids. Festival frustrations threatened to make a bad scene. But ... More >>

UPDATED Free Press Summer Fest: This Year's Toughest Schedule Conflicts

This weekend's Free Press Summer Fest at Eleanor Tinsley Park is officially (way) sold out, so our readers who don't have passes at this point are sadly now forced to test their skills at the "secondary market." For those of you who are already in, this week Rocks Off will be bringing you our staff ... More >>

Broken but Unbowed, Baroness Pushes Forward After Horrific Bus Wreck

Of all the bands rolling into town from all over the planet this week for Free Press Summer Festival, no one had to come farther to get here than Baroness. After the alt-metal squad set out to conquer the world last year behind the excellent double album Yellow & Green, a horrific bus crash in Bath, ... More >>

Free Press Summer Fest: Acts We'd Rather Skip This Time

This weekend's Free Press Summer Fest at Eleanor Tinsley Park is officially (way) sold out, so our readers who don't have passes at this point are sadly now forced to test their skills at the "secondary market." For those of you who are already in, this week Rocks Off has been bringing you our staff ... More >>

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: The Soundtrack (With Endnotes)

One of Time magazine's Top 100 English-language novels of the last century, the late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a gargantuan book. Its cutting, comedic views cover a broad swath of American life, but focus on family dysfunction, chemical dependency, depression, entertainment saturation ... More >>

The Best Things at Coachella This Year, Weekend Two

Ed. Note: This is the final post of our piggyback Coachella 2013 coverage, with an eternal debt to our friends at LA Weekly and OC Weekly. The Visual Stimulations for People Who Were High Coachella's art installations -- the ones designed to impress you while you're high, aka all of them -- were pa ... More >>

The Best of Coachella, Weekend One

Ed. Note: Rocks Off proudly presents to our readers coverage of Coachella's first weekend courtesy of our sister papers LA Weekly and OC Weekly. Karen O's Outfit Karen O's wardrobe on Friday night was bad-ass. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman appeared on the main stage in a technicolor cape draped o ... More >>

Raw Power

Iggy & the Stooges headline the fifth Free Press Summer Fest.

FPSF Adds Dozens More Acts, Many Locals

After the 2013 Free Press Summer Festival headliners leaked Wednesday night, this morning the festival sent out an email with a few dozen more names, including many local performers. Rewind: Free Press Summer Fest '13 Announces Postal Service, Stooges, Cat Power, TV On the Radio, Social D, Geto Bo ... More >>

Top 10 Educated Guesses for Free Press Summer Fest

Tomorrow, we will know who will be playing the fifth annual Free Press Summer Fest June 1 and 2 in Eleanor Tinsley Park. We know this because Monday, our rivals over at the Houston Chronicle revealed that they will have an exclusive announcement of the FPSF lineup sometime Thursday, thanks to what w ... More >>

Free Press Summer Fest '13 Announces Postal Service, Stooges, Cat Power, TV On the Radio, Social D, Geto Boys, Calvin Harris, etc.

Moments ago, the lineup for the 2013 Free Press Summer Festival was announced online at fpsf.com. Let's get to it, shall we?

Friday Night: Square and Compass Record Release at Mango's

Square and Compass Mango's January 25, 2013 Sometimes you have to go backwards in order to make progress. In years where dubstep continues to proliferate and Owl City insists on building a genre around a Postal Service record that is now over a decade old, I'm perfectly OK with re-examining the bes ... More >>

Coachella 2013 Takes It Back to the '90s

Coachella, the Only Music Festival That Matters (or so we're told), announced its 2013 lineup late Thursday night, no holograms or Rolling Stones included. Instead, two beloved '90s UK acts whose popularity in the U.S. is spotty at best, Blur and the Stone Roses, headline the first night of the tw ... More >>

HPMA Showcase: The 12 Best Artists of 2012

Rocks Off asked the writers we had covering Sunday's HPMA showcase downtown to pick out one or two of their favorites among the 50 or so performers. SLIDESHOW: HPMA Showcase - The Bands SLIDESHOW: HPMA Showcase - The Crowds Bang Bangz: Bang Bangz set up a mellowed dreamscape for their audience, c ... More >>

Sing Me a Story: Five Rockers Whose Work We'd Like To See On Broadway

Rocks Off has had musicals on the brain lately. Between Once, featuring music by The Swell Season, dominating the Tony Awards and Rock of Ages, featuring music by the cream of the '80s hair-metal crop, hitting theaters tomorrow it's been a pretty good week for musicals that aren't cut from the tradi ... More >>

Bang Bangz

Freelance Whales

10 Uncool Artists Primed For Hipster Rediscovery

Tumblr"Aw, dammit, I grabbed Dad's iPod by mistake. Paul Simon... is that one guy, or two Beatles?" ​Remember emo kids? Only a few short years ago, the nation's venues of the nation were filled with kids in all black, wearing ultra-skinny jeans, eyeliner, white belts, and identical chopped-mea ... More >>

If Your Life Were A Movie, Which Song Would Be The Trailer?

​It started as a whim on Twitter, asking friends what songs would soundtrack the trailer of the movie of their life. Would their life's tale be a rollicking drug-fueled, love-filled adventure backed by the Rolling Stones' "Jumping Jack Flash", or would it be a morose and somber drifting story ... More >>

Houston's 10 Favorite Rainy-Day Albums

Hola, Hermine...​Weather like Houston had this past week seems to make everyone "sad panda" and turn to lusher, less upbeat music. snuggle-rock, dad-rock, beard-rock - music you hear in coffee shops seems to be ruling our city's personal airwaves. As Tropical Storm Hermine trampled through H ... More >>

Last Night: The Cool Tour At Verizon Wireless Theater

Photos by Matthew Keever​As I Lay Dying, UnderOath, Between the Buried and Me, Bless the Fall Verizon Wireless Theater July 27, 2010 Tuesday night, Aftermath witnessed a few things we didn't expect to see: A lot of fans who were extremely drunk before the sun even set, the loneliest mosh pit ... More >>

Aftermath: We Are Not Sorry For Liking LIGHTS And Owl City At Verizon

Photos by Kendra Berglund​Friday night at a sold-out Verizon Wireless Theater, LIGHTS and Owl City put on surprisingly solid performances. We use the word 'surprisingly,' because we fall into the category of people who oftentimes dismiss these kinds of artists as sans-substance pawns of the ... More >>

Idol Beat: Big Mike the Guy To Beat?

Last night's American Idol, in which the top eight guys performed, felt a lot like the girls' episode from Tuesday in the way it clearly defined who should stay and who should go, with one singer standing above the rest as the one to beat. Just as Crystal Bowersox is the best and most interesting ... More >>

American Idol: Big Mike the Guy To Beat?

Last night's American Idol, in which the top eight guys performed, felt a lot like the girls' episode from Tuesday in the way it clearly defined who should stay and who should go, with one singer standing above the rest as the one to beat. Just as Crystal Bowersox is the best and most interesting ... More >>

He Said She Said: Songs We Are Least Thankful For, Part 2

​This was the first year that He Said made a conscious effort to listen to what was going on outside his self-imposed protective bubble of metal and proto-punk. We sort of took it as one of the facets of our job to actually pay attention to the stuff that was going on in the greater sphere in the ... More >>

Pump Up the Volume

St. Louis post-punks So Many Dynamos are ready for battle with The Loud Wars.

Bear Colony

This band borrows from Unwed Sailor, Postal Service and Minus the Bear for some light, but danceable rock

The Western Civilization

Five-piece from the north side heads out on first tour

Vinyl Heads

They're turning to needles, looking for purity