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I'm curious about various cities local music scenes. The prevalent style of music, the kind of venues, how alive it is, just whatever.

I'm in Boise, Idaho right now. Our music scene is pretty much fantastic right now. Most of the best venues are >21 bars, but we have an old historic movie theater that puts on lots of amazing shows. Some of my friends have gotten big time record deals recently. TEENS, and Youth Lagoon (who just got on Fat Possum and is releasing an album) most prominently. There is a great local rock, post-rock, and noise scene here. My best friends have an amazing post-rock band and I'm putting together a shoegaze/post punk band at the moment. We are really conducive to creativity and seem like a small Portland right now.

How do the musical winds blow where you hail?

Here it's alright.

Difficult to get shows if you're as antisocial as we are.

Most of the bigger acts are pretty derivative of the fairly awesome Redneck Manifesto and the not as awesome And So I Watch You from Afar. Pop punk and all that is pretty big. Kings of Leon ripoff acts are a penny a dozen. The Festivals are also pretty hard to get onto unless you know someone or sound like the Alt. Rock that plays on Irelands "hard rock" station.

The Joinery is a venue curated by a few heads (that we're playing at soon, happily enough) that I've seen some pretty awesome stuff in. Weird experimental solo bass clarinetists and noise rock wonderbands.

I don't want to play standard Alt. Rock or stuff I've heard a lot before, or post-rock really, so we find it trickier than most, but we're trying to amend that, new Album out very soon and all that, stuff we hope will help us get on a few bills.

The majority of stuff is indie and hardcore. Neither of which I'm really into much. Lots of "scene" garbage. I hate "scene".

Bad metal bands. Seems like a lot of metalcore.
Cover bands, tribute bands.
Bad metal tribute bands.
And of course the myriad of pop rock.
Sometimes you see cool reggae bands though.

There was a jazz lounge here, but it went down in like three months.
If you go to Chesapeake it's like drowning in a sea of Dimebag guitars.
One time I saw an ad on Craigslist where some guy wanted to start a doom/shoegaze/noise band...it was a glorious day indeed.

The word dismal comes to mind...

Olympia Wa use to have a good scene back in the 90's but at some point it just died... there are very few real places to play, and most of those have been jamafied [I blame neo-hippies]. Traditional music like blues, folk, roots, ect takes up the majority with a few rock and punk bands [crust mostly]. There are tons of players though and that is the real prob [we have 6+ music stores in town] We need more venues! Other them house shows which is the thing 'round here... But... the good thing is is that Oly is centrally located between Seattle/Tacoma and Portland.

Fort Collins, CO

Bad metal bands
bro house music
reggae ska for the pot enthuthiasts
singer songwriter (read "I smoke a lot of pot, have a girlfriend, want to sing about her and I found a guitar in my uncle's closet, next to the stash of porn mags")

in a sense, shitty as hell. So I'm starting to jam with a few bands to make music that doesn't suck, stuff like queens of the stone age. Its gonna be hard to start getting shows, but some of the areas around FoCo (its what the cool kids call fort collins, so I'm a cool kid now) are branching into better forms of rock, and I think it may be following suit. At least I hope so.

I'm in Charlottesville, VA. We used to have an exceptionally vibrant local live music scene, but now there aren't a lot of venues that support local bands- Thanks Coran Capshaw!!!! Local bands can pretty much only play at 2 venues regularly, and they are constantly booked.

My favorite period was when I was a teen- there was a sushi bar here in town that hosted live shows in it's basement, and there was a real sense of community between the various subcultures- all the metal kids, goth kids, and punk kids were going to each others shows, the bands were even doing bills together... it was awesome.

Denton's scene rules. There's always a decent show happening nearly every night of the week, and if anything, there's near infinite houses to play at. Fort Worth has really only one thing going for it in my opinion, and it's 1919 Hemphill, the second oldest volunteer-run DIY venue in the nation. My home away from home, really. Dallas is a vast wasteland filled with unfun, unless you dig playing in Oak Cliff with the hip kids.

Also, if you guys need a show in North Texas, hit me up. I'd love to do something for ya.

Nova / DC here

Cover band's make money
Original band's starve

In NOVA:
1 venue that does mainstream metal
a few independant promoters that actually push shows and put them on
mainly small bar venues that can be hard to get people too

In DC:
Quite a few good venues
a few established promoters that feel their hands are already to full to worry about new bands
street cred and who you know is everything

The scene around here is very indy, we are working on bringing back the doom, and post-hardcore scene's for which DC/VA/MD is known for and I grew up in. It's hard to get people out to show's unless it's a big name headlining. Luckily most of the venue's are getting very specific in the fact that they will only support independant or smaller label bands. There's alot of creativity and talent in the bands just no fan base to get alot of them off the ground. Luckily there seem's to be a resurgence in the band's the created the scene here getting back together after many years, so hopefully our scene is on the up and up!

p.s. if you need shows in the northern va / md area hit me up and i can point you in some good directions!

jfrey wrote:The majority of stuff is indie and hardcore. Neither of which I'm really into much. Lots of "scene" garbage. I hate "scene".

We've had a couple bands from Boston come through Dayton recently and they've all been pretty good. Last one I saw was Pretty & Nice. They fucking rule.

Ancient Astronaught wrote:Cover band's make money
Original band's starve

This. I think I've said this before, but if you can play Margaritaville and Brown Eyed Girl, you have gigs for life around here.

When I was in high school it was ska punk and hardcore. Now it's power pop and scene bands. Nothing worth talking about.

we just did this thread a couple weeks agoooooooo.

my scene is just me and my hipsters friends making pretty noises and stuff.

There is nothing here but a mythical progressive metal band (I say mythical as I have never seen them play anywhere, never heard anything they have done, or know what they are called.), a cycle of guys that play acoustic shows mostly and one actual band that I have never seen play anywhere. Part of my, I've never seen them play is probably the fact that I'm not old enough to get into the one real venue in town.

Things are pretty good here in Dayton, surprisingly. The city itself is a giant shithole but there are some excellent bands around. There are a lot of different kinds of bands as well. We're an indie rock band but we've played with metal bands, americana/roots/country bands, hardcore bands, punk bands of every kind, Merzbow-like noise bands, blues bands, and just about everything you could imagine. And they've all been awesome.

Apparently there's a pretty big "-core" scene here but they have their own separate thing going on. We don't interact with them much.

I live outside of Pittsburgh, and there's no need to get into all the shitty butt-rock bands that permeate my hillbilly surrounds, so we'll stick to Pittsburgh. We have lots of mathrock/metal courtesy of Don Cab, Token Black Guy, Tabula Rasa and Knot Feeder. Lots of dirty, sludgy (though not like Atlanta sludgy) mathy groove hardcore from the likes of the code orange kids and girlfight. We also have girl talk if you dig that stuff though he's not been around town as of late, and Black Moth Super Rainbow, if you can get passed the 3-feet of pretension that surrounds most of the audience. Mostly it's deathcore/metalcore/scenecore and white people trying to be a tribe called quest. To be completely honest with you, since Mr. Roboto's closed up shop a few years ago I haven't kept up with the local scene all that much.