It’s not easy playing trance-y electronic music to a festival crowd but, fuck it, Topher Horn gives it a go anyway at the New Dodge on Saturday night, the last night of the Hamtramck Music Festival just getting rolling. There’s nothing wrong with the sounds, it’s just so relaxed, chilled, that punters start chatting and it quickly becomes background music when it deserves more. Great music, wrong time. Psalm add a bit of energy, but still retain the chill factor. A former member of Prussia is performing this dark spin on R&B, and the result is soulful and moody, and a tad angsty. Crucially, the tunes are huge. Over at the Painted Lady, between Topher Horn and Psalm, Pendejos rattles through a set of garage-y punk rock, the sort of band you could imagine filling the gaps at CBGBs or Bookies back in the day. Didn’t stay long, but the band impressed. I wandered over to the Polish Village Café to see the Junk Food Junkies but everything was so off schedule that the first band, Five Pound Snap, was still on. Bit disappointing, but FPS held its own with some rowdy alt-rock. And then it was over the Baker’s […]

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University of Michigan Dearborn will host “Street Art City Detroit: Graffiti, Urban Renewal and the Formation of Identity,” a panel about Detroit street art, at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25 in the CASL Building, Room 1030. The panel will feature speakers Freddy Diaz (graffiti writer), Matt Eaton (Library Street Collective), Erik Howard (The Alley Project) and Tom Stoye (photographer) as well as moderators Nadja Rottner and Liz Rohan. To complement the event there will be a free bus tour to Detroit from 11:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 29. The tour will explore graffiti sites, led by Adrian Orrnsby. The bus leaves from the front of the CASL building at 11:00 a.m.; RSVP to Jonathan Larson or read more here. If you want to see real, amazing urban art, don’t miss this chance.

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Detroit made a list of America’s Top 15 Apartment Boom Towns, according to a study by SpareFoot. SpareFoot used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, factoring in  total apartments per person population growth, housing affordability, per-capita income and more. Here’s the full list: San Jose, CA Austin, TX Houston, TX Grand Rapids, MI Nashville, TN Dayton, OH Portland, OR San Francisco, CA Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Oklahoma City, OK Seattle, WA Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN San Antonio, TX Des Moines, IA Detroit, MI Detroit is one of the cheapest places to rent in the country, considering its size — it’s the eighth lowest out of the top 100 cities by population, according to Crain’s.

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The downtown Royal Oak Barnes & Noble will close its doors April 5, nearly five months after a local software company announced it would move into the the bookstore’s second floor space with help from a $375,000 state incentive.  The store has a sign out front confirming the date, along with announced sales on some items. It’s unclear how employees will be affected by the move, or if a liquidation is planned. A general manager deferred additional comments about the closure to Barnes & Noble HQ, which did not immediately return requests from Metro Times. In December, Royal Oak-based software company Vectorform, announced it planned to hire 75 additional employees and move its headquarters across town to the bookstore’s location at Fifth and Main. The state incentive for the $2.24 million expansion stems from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. “It’s really a great coup to attract them as an office tenant downtown,” Royal Oak City Manager Don Johnson told  The Oakland Press last December. “They’re exactly the kind of firm we want. They’re bringing a lot of well-paid technical workers … the type of workers who will spend a lot of time in Royal Oak retail shops and Royal Oak restaurants.” Barnes & […]

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It should come as no surprise that the Metro Times had a presence at the Hamtramck Music Festival on Thursday night. This is significant event, perhaps the most significant music event in March. We’re delighted that it’s happening, delighted that March has a festival to celebrate the end of hibernation, and delighted that the first night, at Small’s, went off without a hitch. In fact, we managed to navigate our way around the place without being spat on once (to our knowledge), and with no insults aimed in our direction. Result. The music was entertaining. Pupils has former Marco Polio & the New Vaccine man Steve Puwalski in its ranks, and he’s pretty much picked up where he’s left off, performance-wise. Musically, the electronic noises have been replaced by a full band, including a violist who makes some truly beautiful, terrifying noises. Puwalski claimed that the band wrote the songs a week before the show. It’s probably true too – the man is a non-conformist machine. Kickstand Band played next, a band that has sounded great on record for a while. The live performances are catching up. They still look a little stunned, like they’re surprised to be up there […]

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Detroit Red Wings forward Daniel Alfredsson showed some serious spirit this week when he took a stick to the face that knocked out several teeth, then nonchalantly picked them up off the ice and returned to play in the third period.

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