Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven
9:30 Club 815 V St NW, District of Columbia 20001
Event price: $25
Cracker has been described as a lot of things over the years: alt-rock, Americana, insurgent-country, and have even had the terms punk and classic-rock thrown at them. But more than anything Cracker are survivors. Cofounders Lowery and Hickman have been at it for a quarter of a century -- amassing ten studio albums, multiple gold records, thousands of live performances, hit songs [...] and a worldwide fan base -- that despite the major sea-changes within the music industry -- continues to grow each year.New Roman Times is perhaps Camper Van Beethoven's most musically accomplished and conceptually ambitious effort to date. The album -- on the band's own Pitch-A-Tent label, the same imprint that issued much of Camper's seminal '80s work -- is a vivid, emotion-charged song cycle that merges the group's sense of musical adventure with a fanciful rock-opera storyline that's rife with parallels to America's current political landscape.