The Whigs at the Black Cat

The Whigs headlined the Black Cat on Thursday night. After touring with Kings of Leon earlier this year, they’re now finishing up their own North American tour. Despite the heavy tour schedule, they’re getting set to release a new album. The DCist interviewed them before the show and I enjoyed reading about how they’re determining the track listing for the new album:

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I think we have somewhere around 15 or 16 songs that were actually recorded and that is taken from the 20 or so that were demoed. And now we’re trying to whittle down to a more manageable number. We like the idea of a 10 or 11 song record for our personal tastes, we enjoy a record that length.

So how do you do that? iTunes playlists?

More or less. We’re basically just shuffling our songs around on our iPods and computers. Putting them in order and sitting and listening to it from start to finish. It can be kind of exhausting. [Laughs] Each one of us has four or five different track listings and you want everyone else to listen to yours and they want you to listen to theirs and you want to give them the respect that you hope to get. So you have to take your time and give it a chance. But we’re almost there, I think we’ve almost got it. We’re stoked to be at this final phase.

The Features Will Go Big (Get On It)

Nashville’s The Features came through DC’s Black Cat last night and put on a great show. Keep an eye on them — they signed with Kings of Leon’s label this summer and I’m betting that they’ll go big.

Check out this video:

Grand Duchy @ the Black Cat

A photograph from last week’s Grand Duchy show at the Black Cat in DC. Grand Duchy is made up of Frank Black (Pixies lore) and his wife, Violet Clark. More photographs and a brief write-up over at BYT.

Balance [phonetography]

I love the look of these massive mixing boards. I saw this one at the Black Cat during a show from the new Frank Black (Pixies) act.