Live music has an especially welcome ring these days. Check out these shows

It's been a heavy week in the news, so we took a break for a few minutes to gather recommendations for Seattle-area live music events to check out. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm reached out to Michael Rietmulder, music writer and critic at the Seattle Times.

MoPOP’s Sound Off 2022

This is one of my favorite annual events. It’s been the premier showcase for young Seattle artists, introducing the next generation to the music community.

This is the third and final showcase this year. There’s a pop artist named Emma Wang, a producer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Ashkenazy, and a composer and guitarist Trevor Eulau.

They used to have a competition element to it, a battle of the bands style format, but they've since done away with that, which is totally fine because at its heart this is really a community building event.

Naked Giants and Enumclaw at Neumos

Former Sound Off alums, garage rockers Naked Giants are for my money one of the best live rock bands in town. I think one thing that's cool about this show is it's a great double bill with a band called Enumclaw opening. They’re a young band out of the Tacoma area that came out of nowhere last year and was kind of the breakout band from our area in 2021.

The Dip at the Showbox

They're a seven-piece band with a really vibrant horn section that mines the sounds of vintage soul and rhythm and blues music, putting kind of a forward spin on it. They're headlining the Showbox, which for a Seattle band is kind of a rite of passage. They're an incredible live band, and they managed to keep the momentum going during these two tricky years. It's cool to see their career continuing the momentum that they built before the pandemic.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.