8 Great Triangle Bands Bonanza

Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill artists to get props this Friday... expect the usual backlash, of course...

By Fred Mills

For the past five years our good friends over at the Raleigh, NC, daily newspaper The News & Observer have been sponsoring their "Eight Great Local Acts" blowout in which they spotlight eight (duh) deserving bands from the Triangle - Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill - and give ‘em their due. The intention, of course, is to help draw attention to the toppermost of the poppermost, and anyone who's ever lived in the Triangle area will tell ya, there's a lot of damn talent lurking on the various college campuses, haunting the Comboland clubs and shacking up in the wilds of Chatham County. (The latter was where, each summer, yours truly harvested some positively primo bud during my 1974-83 Triangle tenure... but I digress.)

 In the past, the N&O's calls have been pretty dead on. Among the picks that clicked: Rosebuds and Valient Thorr before anybody heard of them; Jason Michael Carroll, who later hit #1 on the country charts after he got his record deal; a bluegrass band that went on to get a gold record in Norway, of all places (Chatham County Line); and a few last year that subsequently became semi-large buzz bands (Bowerbirds, Bon Iver associates Megafaun).

As N&O pop critic (and BLURT contributor) David Menconi puts it, they're awfully proud of the whole deal, and it's also a true "labor of love for [a number of people] that put in their own time to get it done, especially the photographers and multi-media people."

Ah, multimedia: this year's eight picks will be unveiled in the newspaper this Friday, Feb. 6, so plan on pointing your browsers to www.newsobserver.com/great8  later this week. While you wait, you can also view a thrill-a-moment trailer for the event elsewhere on the site. The sights! The sounds! The furies! See if you can figure out from the clip who the eight bands are...

There will be a slew of online content at the papers site, including live performance clips, "where are they now?" updates on the previous five years' picks, and more. Also, there will be a "Great Eight" show the following Friday, lucky Feb. 13, at Chapel Hill's Local 506 venue.

Meanwhile, what would a local-scene awards/honors-type thing be without some local controversy to boot? Go HERE to catch up on all that... another one of the alternative weekly versus the daily paper pissing matches, natch. The reader comments after the editorial are priceless, although someone should have added that with all that's been going on in the print media world, the dailies and the weeklies are essentially interchangeable nowadays, unlike, say, ten or even five years ago. Plus the fact that ANY coverage of local artists - extensive, subjective, whatever - is a good thing no matter from what corner it comes.