Features / Music

As we've done every year since 2004 (except, for some reason, in 2017), SPB's hard-working staffers have beavered away around the clock to deliver you a set of lists to help you review the year just finished. Not a list of our favorite albums—you can peruse that here—but all kinds of other things we discovered in 2023. Read on to … Read more

It's been a long year, right? You may well find yourself examining the last twelve months and trying to remember what music got released so you can include it on your "2023 best of" and still look cool. But—disaster! You can't remember anything! Thankfully, SPB has got you. We've reached out to our friends in the music community: bands, labels and … Read more

By Matt Hutchison -- A Jesuit school might not be what the general population would consider a thriving spot for underground music culture, yet that’s part of the allure of KXLU 88.9 FM. Entering the radio station’s cluttered, vinyl-stacked, and sticker-tacked fourth floor production area is like stepping into another world outside the sleek white, palm-tree-lined idyllic confines of Loyola … Read more

With a lineup of 300-ish bands playing throughout town over a 3-day period, there's a lot to discuss about The Fest, an annual celebration of punk rock that takes place in Gainesville, FL in late October. At FEST 21, the headliners included GWAR, Lucero, Dillinger Four, Thursday, Descendants, Tim Barry, Screaming Females...the list goes on. Yet, as I made the … Read more

It's the most wonderful time of the year! The air is crisp and the nights are drawing in, which for many of us means an increase in horror movie watching and thinking nothing of spending our hard earned cash on new spooky furnishings. The abundance of halloween decor is tempting us all to fill our houses with more candles, plastic … Read more

For most of the 21st century, The Fest has conquered Gainesville, FL for a long weekend near Halloween. With hundreds of bands playing each year, spread across multiple venues, there’s something for anybody interested in punk-leaning, independent music from headlining main stage acts outdoors to up-and-comers playing in small bars where it’s dark all day long. FEST 21 features a … Read more

You have three options, and not to get personal or anything, but do you have ADHD? Do you have attention problems? Don’t worry about it: I can’t sit through a twenty minute meeting either. If you’re the sort of person who plays on your phone, while watching a movie, while cleaning the house, go for option one or two. They’re not … Read more

It's time, once again, for Only Death Is Real to make an appearance. This is the twenty second edition of the column and I'll be honest with you, writing is becoming harder each time. Sitting down to purposefully do something is difficult, opening the laptop seems to get scarier and just hitting the keys and trying to say something cohesive … Read more

No, this is not like the movies, ok. I am not going to a restaurant and do a lot of impressions. I am just stealing a catchy title for my column. As you might remember from my last column, I was in the middle of a big renovation project. We had a vacation booked that caused us to miss the completion … Read more

I'm slowly running out of things to say in these intro pieces. Do you read them? Do you need to know why I chose these particular records or are you happy to dive in and discover? Barbelith – Deathless Master (Self-Released/Third House) Nearly ten years after Mirror Unveiled was released, Barbelith are slowly making their way back with Inner Eternal in 2021 and now Deathless Master in 2023. … Read more

How's 2023 been for you, so far? Good? Average? Pretty rough? Don't worry – the kind folks at SPB have got you. We've crunched the numbers, broken down the boundaries, and—more importantly—listened to all of the music released in 2023 thus far. Alright, most of the music. Armed with this knowledge, we've whittled down the list of new albums into … Read more

Welcome back! I hope you don’t mind the mess this time. I dislike it when people say this when you enter their house, as it usually means their house is ten times cleaner than mine. However, this time my house really is a mess. We are in the midst of a big renovation as we speak so everything is dusty … Read more

For the twentieth edition of this column, we are doing something slightly different. Why? Well, to be honest, my listening habits have taken a detour of late and instead of diving into a million different things, I am concentrating way too hard on a handful of releases. And these two have stood out the most over the last month or … Read more

There is a place, once a year, where we can all come together, Fest with others who believe that only music has the answer, and then at the end, go back to our homes reveling in another amazing Fest and hoping that feeling of belonging can last to the next one. Loren Green had a lovely idea for an article -- … Read more

It is when browsing through a boatload of year’s end lists that I begin to suffer from a strange form of FOMO. It is not so much the fear of going to miss something, but the fear of having missed something. Although I enjoy browsing those lists a bit too much to actually call it a fear. It is perhaps … Read more