pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog — music . media . web. culture

Kid Sister – October 21st @ Holocene
If you keep the company of music fans, you likely have friends who boast of seeing a band/artist before they could sell out stadiums, catching them in some half-empty club and providing them with bragging rights for years to come. Friends, I’m here to tell you, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor with an artist before the world catches up to her. The artist in question is Kid Sister (pictured). This hip-hop beauty from the Chicago-area has already made friends with folks like Kanye West (who contributed a verse to her ode to “Pro Nails”) and was already nominated for a BET Award in 2008 (for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist). Amazingly, though, Kid Sister has yet to blow up big time. This will most certainly change once her pulsing, club-ready debut album Ultraviolet hits the streets next month. So before she starts packing out the Roseland, she’s going to heat up Holocene this coming Wednesday. If you want to say you saw her when, you should be there.

CONTEST: Pampelmoose has two tickets to Kid Sister’s show at Holocene that we want to give away to one lucky reader. All you need to do is leave a comment to this week’s Pampelmoose Picks and we’ll pick a winner at random. Make sure you leave us a valid e-mail address (which is, as always, for our eyes only). Contest ends at 1pm PT on Monday, October 19th, so don’t dilly-dally!

The Cartographers – October 19th @ Valentine’s
This L.A. duo creates the kind of wobbly, winsome electro-pop that often feels like it would be best suited streaming out of the single speaker of an AM transistor radio in 1981. There’s a sunny quality to their chiming guitars and floating melodies, which befits a band from a temperate climate, but it is equally suited to the wet, steely grey skies of the Northwest.

BLK JKS – October 19th @ Mississippi Studios
Just as dozens of groups from the U.S. are reflecting back the sounds of African music on their originators, plenty of young artists are making similar moves, finding inspiration for their polyglot music in our Stateside rock and hip-hop. One of the most exciting and vital groups to come from this school is South Africa’s BLK JKS. While still keeping the thrusting polyrhythms that have long marked the music of their native land, this young quartet fills out their sounds with guitar sounds pulled from the worlds of indie rock and the syrupy layers of modern hip-hop production.