SOUND ADVICE Alanis Morissette with Garbage and Cat Power
Wednesday, Sept. 15 • Riverbend Music Center Alanis Morissette, the big-voiced Canadian who jumped from child TV star to musical phenomenon with 1995’s Jagged Little Pill, was set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her breakthrough album with an extended tour when the pandemic shut things down in 2020. “It’s been a huge social, relational, spiritual, cultural, economic, political fart storm over the last while,” Morissette told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “And, one thing, there’s so many silver linings. It almost feels sacrilegious to bring them up while we are still in the middle of this, but so many themes of expression are available.” The now 47-year-old performer is likely referencing her ironically busy previous two years: the arrival of her third child in August 2019, which was followed in December with the longgestating Broadway debut of a musical version of Jagged Little Pill. She capped things off with her first new album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, which dropped in July 2020. And now Morissette is ready to finally hit the road in celebration of an album that has sold an astonishing 33 million copies worldwide and found listeners singing along to unblinkingly confessional lyrics like, “Is she perverted like me?/Does she go down on you in a theater?” Listening to Jagged Little Pill today, the album’s so-called feminist bombshells somewhat give way to a rush of ’90s nostalgia for a time before the internet was ubiquitous and MTV was still known for music videos (isn’t it ironic?). With that era in mind, Morissette is bringing along a pair of equally expressive women to support the tour: Shirley Manson, the frontwoman of Garbage, and Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power. (Jason Gargano)
BLACKSTARKIDS
Friday, Sept. 17 • MOTR Pub As members of Generation Z continue flooding the workforce while grappling with the existential dread of adulthood, a hunger for early 2000s nostalgia has entered the cultural zeitgeist. Though the silicone bombast of Hyperpop music has successfully reframed those formative years into a fantasia of cybernetic fashion and genre bending, Pop Punk-reviving camp, Missouri-based trio BLACKSTARKIDS offer a more intimate, pastel-toned recollection of the past. Specializing in lo-fi composition and ultra-optimistic energy, they sound like a garage band from a coming-ofage flick or Degrassi episode come to life — in the best way possible. 2020’s SURF, the band’s sophomore effort, is the perfect soundtrack to slacking off on summer days. The band
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Alanis Morissette P H O T O : S H E L BY D U N C A N
fuses Hip Hop and Alt-Rock in a way that feels decidedly less cynical than many of their peers aiming for the same, threading adorably Autotuned choruses through jangly guitar riffs and glistening Synth Pop chord progressions. You can trace a path from BLACKSTARKIDS’ casual vocal delivery to the twee affectations of seminal Indie Rock band Beat Happening, but comparisons to ’90s Conscious Rap collective Arrested Development feel just as apt. WHATEVER, MAN, released later last year, marked the band’s debut with British label Dirty Hit, which also houses The 1975. Though the overall sound hasn’t changed much, their Pop songwriting chops have sharpened, resulting in two excellent celebrityobsessed singles: “FRANKIE MUNIZ” and “BRITNEY, BITCH.” Though BLACKSTARKIDS may not be Pop stars yet, we can still dream about the big time alongside them.
SEPTEMBER 15-28, 2021
BLACKSTARKIDS’ SURF P H OTO : B E D RO O M R E C O R D S
