Author: Shane Danaher

Describing A Weather’s music as “intimate” is a severe understatement. The band’s whispered vocals and calming cyclical guitars are the absolute epitome of all that is worthwhile in the confessional landscape of the bedroom troubadour.

Craig Finn has an awful voice. It’s shrill, pinched and lodged irrevocably in his upper nasal passages. All in all, his vocal range is probably less than an octave, and most of his lyrics aren’t so much sung as they are barked over the competing guitar crunches of his band.

“I think we constantly try to simplify, that’s our goal,” says Chelsea Morissey, and she means it. Her band, Dirty Mittens, while just two EPs into their career, have already mastered the oft-ignored rock-and-roll axiom of “Keep it simple, stupid.”

Danny Delegato is 18. It has been less than a year since he graduated from Cleveland High School, and next month his band, The Hugs, will embark on a U.S. tour supporting the internationally acclaimed Walkmen.

A fixture of the Portland music scene for several years running, Plants have become known as the town’s premier source for haunting soundscapes and meticulous minimalism.

Eskimo and Sons, all of whose members’ ages fall below 21, is making the most ballsy folk music to come out of this city in a long while. The band is pushing its “quiet and pretty” aesthetic into some exciting new territory, and Portland is abuzz. And rightly so: What were you doing when you were that age?

Somewhere in the mid-80s the definition of “pop” as a musical genre underwent an interesting metamorphoses, facilitated mostly by a scraggly, bookish group of kids who enjoyed creating music heavy in hooks and light in labored professionalism.

Despite its reputation as the nation’s indie-rock mecca, it has always seemed that Portland’s music scene allows for many more stylistic voices than are widely recognized.