Manic Presents / Premier Concerts Guest Post:
King Tuff
Welcome to our first Redscroll blog of 2019! We are kicking off the new year right with awesome shows and exciting announcements. Just announced at College Street Music Hall, we have a last minute show with Pete Davidson & Friends on Friday (1/11). At Space Ballroom we have Portland, ME indie band Weakened Friends with support from Well Wisher on (2/28) in the Front Room. And at Cafe Nine, as part of our weekly Manic Mondays music series, we have Brooklyn singer-songwriter Del Water Gap on (2/11); Shoegaze/punk band Elizabeth Colour Wheel on (3/25); Philly neo-soul collective &More (feat. Chilly Mood and Donn T) on (4/1); and Canadian grindcore band WAKE with Unloved on (4/8)!
This week’s show schedule starts tonight with a SOLD OUT show at Space Ballroom with Big Freedia and The Quest Presents. On Friday (1/11) we have a last minute show with Pete Davidson & Friends at College Street Music Hall and Big Ups (Farewell Tour) with Ovlov, Lilith, and Hellrazor at Space Ballroom. On Monday (1/14) as part of our weekly Manic Mondays series at Cafe Nine we have Sun Parade with James Darling and the Nuclear Heartbreak and S.G. Carlson. At Space Ballroom, we have WHY? celebrating the 10th anniversary of their Alopecia album with support from Tomberlin on Tuesday (1/15) and a SOLD OUT show Japanese Breakfast and Hand Habits on Wednesday (1/16). Be sure to grab your tickets and RSVP today because these shows will sell out!
CONTEST TIME! Enter for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the newly rescheduled King Tuff show with Stonefield and Dust Hat on Sunday (1/20); a copy of The Other on cassette, and an autographed copy of The Other on vinyl!
Enter here: https://goo.gl/forms/
We’ll see you back here next Thursday!
Upcoming Shows…
TONIGHT, January 10th
Big Freedia w/ The Quest Presents
$30 ($25 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00pm
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Big Freedia, known as the Queen of Bounce, is a New Orleans-based rapper and ambassador of Bounce music. After dominating the New Orleans club scene for over a decade, Big Freedia is now bringing the Bounce movement to a world-wide stage with her hit reality show, Big Freedia Bounces Back on Fuse TV. The weekly docu-series, now in its sixth season, follows the life of a choirboy turned Bounce rapper and remains the highest rated original series on the network.
In 2016, Freedia was featured on Beyonce’s Grammy-winning single, “Formation.”
Freedia’s first LP, “Just Be Free” was named one of the ‘best electronic releases’ by Rolling Stone and was critically acclaimed in outlets such as Pitchfork, SPIN, USA Today, and Consequence of Sound. Big Freedia has collaborated with artists ranging from Sia, Elliphant, The Postal Service, Matt & Kim, and Mannie Fresh, and Sylvan Esso.
Big Freedia continues to tour over a hundred dates a year with her legendary shake team, who are bring Bounce moves like “the twerk” (popularized by Miley Cyrus in 2013), “the shake” “the wiggle,” “the bend ova,” the “hands on the ground,” to audiences worldwide. Big Freedia is a consistent festival favorite, known to steal the show at Outside Lands, Fun Fun Fun Fest, Bonnaroo, FYF and many more.
In 2015, Big Freedia penned her first memoir, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva! on Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster. The book was hailed in the press by outlets from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork to Out and Bust.
In 2012, Big Freedia made her television network debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! She has also appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly, Watch What Happens Live, NPR’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Marketplace, Ridiculousness, and The Real. Her TV show received the GLAAD Media Award in 2014 and was nominated again for the award in 2015.
Big Freedia continues to release new singles and will releases her sophomore album in 2018.
SOLD OUT
Friday, January 11th
Pete Davidson & Friends
$45 (inclusive of fees)/All Ages/Doors at 6:00PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: Davidson, 25, is the youngest member of the current cast, as well as the first “SNL” cast member to be born in the 1990s. Davidson shot his first one-hour stand up special for Comedy Central in 2016 and was named one of Forbes’ 2016 “30 Under 30.” He made headlines as one of the featured comedians on the 2015 Comedy Central “Roast of Justin Bieber.” Most recently, he can be seen in the Netflix comedy “Set It Up,” and his upcoming projects include Netflix’s Mötley Crüe biopic “The Dirt,” the independent film “Big Time Adolescence” and Paramount Players’ “What Men Want,” set to be released in 2019.
Davidson is from Staten Island, N.Y., and his birthday is Nov. 16.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2scChkG
Friday, January 11th
Big Ups (Farewell Tour) w/ Ovlov, Lilith, Hellrazor
$14 ($12 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Brendan Finn, Joe Galarraga, Amar Lal, and Carlos Salguero Jr. met whilst learning about specifications of Cat 5 cables in New York City. Shortly after, they formed a band. Big Ups blends punk, post-punk, metal, and indie rock into a salty mash that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth. Big Ups released their debut 11-track LP, Eighteen Hours of Static in the beginning of 2014, followed by Before A Million Universes in early 2016, and culminating with this spring’s Two Parts Together. After almost 9 years and 450 shows, Big Ups will give their last performance in Connecticut on January 11, 2019 at the Space Ballroom.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2yAqKPC
Monday, January 14th
Sun Parade w/ James Darling and the Nuclear Heartbreak, S.G. Carlson
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Sun Parade formed in Northampton, Massachusetts, where kids skinny dip in the Mill River and smoke on the tobacco farms on the flood plains. The music scene here is legendary. Even now, touring venues and festivals across the U.S., the Sun Parade lads are most satisfied when their music conjures a Route 9 basement show somewhere along the fold of the map that delivered Dinosaur Jr. and The Pixies — a cellar in which everyone is sweaty and dancing and in love or something like it, and by 3 a.m. the rhythm section is shaking the house and you can’t tell the band from the crowd.
Sun Parade will be on the road through 2017, packing a full-length rock release produced in Brooklyn by Ian Hersey of Rubblebucket. The band has supported Lake Street Dive, Dr. Dog, Born Ruffians, and And The Kids. National Public Radio picked “Heart’s Out” — the title track of the band’s EP — for Songs We Love, and wrote that Sun Parade is “crafting the kinds of traditional guitar-pop songs that people might still be singing 50 years down the road.”
Sun Parade is Chris Marlon Jennings, raccoon-teur, and Jeff Lewis, Mainer, both on guitar and vocals; Karl Helander on drums, vocals, and ambient barking; Max Wareham on bass and astral physics; and Eli Salus-Kleiner, newly at the keys. The band’s personal obsessions and projects range from British folk ballads to Motown; collectively their music is most influenced by the mutineers’ pantheon — Dr. Dog, The Clash, Beastie Boys, Nirvana, The Beatles.
Chris Jennings and Jeff Lewis are longtime collaborators. Jennings (“Cheer Up”) writes by and large in the language of existential howl, wherein life, love and the pursuit of happiness are a highway pile-up with the distinct possibility of dancing. Lewis (“Brain Drain”) is lately spinning ethereal, psychedelic glowing pop benevolence, songs sung into an old Fostex and sent out into the world in strands of metaphysic werewolves and sunshine. The dichotomy between the writers builds a sort of outliers’ love fest, a condition Oscar Wilde once described as living in the gutter with stardust falling on us.
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2Ln2KVr
Tuesday, January 15th
WHY? celebrates 10 years of Alopecia w/ Tomberlin
$18/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO:”I’ll go unknown by torpedo or Crohn’s / Only those evil live to see their own likeness in stone.” It’s the kind of couplet you’d carve into a wall whilst savoring the irony at hand, but when Yoni Wolf spit the line ten years ago he was blissfully, broodily unaware that he and his band WHY? were creating a career-defining album—one so fan-adored that it would go out of print, and so influential that the art-pop heroine Lorde herself would lovingly steal the very lyric quoted above. When it dropped in 2008, Alopecia not only marked WHY?’s evolution from a sonically collaged mostly solo project to a live-recorded powerhouse band of badass multi-instrumentalists. It also minted a genre of one: wryly written, poignantly posed, simultaneously swaggering and heart-rending song-rap that jangles like folk, bursts like psych-rock, and sways like chamber pop. To this day, there is no other group in the known universe that sounds or feels like WHY? does on Alopecia. The album’s 2018 reissue cheekily etches that aural likeness into our musical history.
Revisiting these songs is like catching up with an old, very strange friend—one who obsesses over his mortality, wonders if his ex is some sort of god, identifies as a “lifelong local foreigner,” and does his emotional unpacking in public restrooms*. When Yoni sings that he’s been “faking suicide for applause in the food courts of malls” on album opener “The Vowels Pt. 2,” you aren’t sure if it’s a metaphor about fame or a real thing he did. Our narrator’s odd charm is Alopecia’s most enduring gift. Inspired by Bob Dylan and Joanna Newsom, Yoni packs confessional candor and vivid detail into honeyed melodies. Energized by Lil Wayne and MF DOOM, he seeds self-effacing boasts and mesmeric wordplay within complex rhyme schemes. The result is a swirl of humor, desperation, and beauty that both pulls us into his world and draws out our own proud, wounded inner weirdo. As Yoni coos on “The Hollows,” “This goes out to dirty-dancing, cursing, backmasking, back-slidden pastors’ kids / and all us Earth growths; some planted, some pulled.”
That perspective formed in our hero’s native Cincinnati—born in the basement of his rabbi dad’s synagogue when lil Yoni started making songs on a dusty 4-track, and come of age in a different basement in his college years where, instead of graduating, he teamed with roommate Doseone and pal Odd Nosdam to form the revered avant-rap trio cLOUDDEAD. These family and friends haunt Alopecia—Dose raps on “The Hollows”; Nosdam is namechecked on “A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under”; Yoni’s father and the language of faith appear often—creating layers of narrative for WHY?’s typically deep-diving fans to unpack. By 2008, Yoni was settled in Oakland, adding to the legacy of the Anticon label/collective he cofounded (most notably with his official 2003 LP debut Oaklandazulasylum). Though his brother Josiah Wolf and fellow Ohioan Doug McDiarmid moved west and joined WHY? before 2005’s Elephant Eyelash, they had not yet recorded as a proper unit, or in a proper studio. Hell, Yoni’d never even tried to make his words rhyme before.
You already know that they did all of those things and were rewarded with Alopecia, an album as adventurous as it is accessible, and remarkably fluid. To wit, “These Few Presidents” slides between modes, from upbeat and forced-smile bubbly to seething and slowly roiling. “Song of the Sad Assassin” is a tempo-blind rollercoaster of piano, vibes, vocal percussion, guitar, drum, and bass. And “Twenty Eight” spins a feedback-drenched rap beat, something like the Bomb Squad on acid, on a carousel. WHY?’s mind meld is all the more impressive considering they left their jerry-rigged home setup for Minneapolis’ Third Ear studio, in the winter, and added Fog members Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson to the lineup. Over 20 days, the thermometer never cracked zero. There were hot toddies aplenty, Miles Davis records on repeat, and cramped quarters. In this heady, unfamiliar space, Yoni worried it was all for naught. But while recording “Good Friday,” a brutal breakup song, he caught full-body chills. It wasn’t the blizzard outside.
The Alopecia sessions were so successful, in fact, that they spawned two LPs (WHY?’s fourth, Eskimo Snow, arrived 18 months later). This one was finished in Berkeley and when time came to name it, Yoni chose a word that appears nowhere in the lyrics. He’d recently found a hole in his beard which his old art-hop comrade Slug of Atmosphere identified as alopecia. The concept fit: more than on any other WHY? release, Yoni was uncovering his anger, anxiety, and ambition—celebrating his ugly by wearing his lowest of lows like badges of honor, devising characters to exorcise his inner demons, and arriving at begrudging self-affirmation. There’s a line on “Brook & Waxing,” reprised on “By Torpedo or Crohn’s,” that’s become the loudest shout-along moment at WHY? concerts and the most likely quote to find tattooed in the crowd: “While I’m alive I’ll feel alive / And what’s next I guess I’ll know when I’ve gotten there.” Therein lies Alopecia’s genius: we’ll never get “there,” not in 10 years past or 10 years more, but the beauty is in pushing on.
*really, there are no fewer than six bathroom scenes on Alopecia; can you find them all?
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2INrrwc
Wednesday, January 16th
Japanese Breakfast w/ Tomberlin
$18/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: “The title Soft Sounds From Another Planet alludes to the promise of something that may or may not be there. Like a hope in something more. The songs are about human resilience and the strength it takes to claw out of the darkest of spaces.”
Michelle Zauner wrote the debut Japanese Breakfast album in the weeks after her mother died of cancer, thinking she would quit music entirely once it was done. That wasn’t the case. When Psychopomp was released to acclaim in 2016, she was forced to confront her grief. Zauner would find find herself reliving traumatic memories multiple times a day during interviews, trying to remain composed while discussing the most painful experience of her life. Her sophomore album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, is a transmutation of mourning, a reflection that turns back on the cosmos in search of healing.
“I want to be a woman of regimen,” Zauner sings over a burbling synth on the album’s opening track “Diving Woman.” This serves as Zauner’s mission statement: stick to the routine lest you get derailed, don’t cling to the past, don’t descend. In fact, ascend to the stars; Zauner found artistic solace removed from Earth, in outer space and science fiction. “I used the theme as a means to disassociate from trauma,” she explains. “Space used as a place of fantasy.”
And yet, Soft Sounds From Another Planet isn’t a concept album. Over the course of 12 tracks, Zauner explores an expansive thematic universe, a cohesive outpouring of unlike parts structured to create a galaxy of her own design. In the instrumental “Planetary Ambience,” synths communicate the way extraterrestrials might, and on the shapeshifting single “Machinist,” which Zauner has been performing live for over a year now, she details the sci-fi narrative of a woman falling in love with a machine. “It’s pure fiction,” she explains, “But it can map onto real relationships in a relevant way.” The track, which begins with spoken-word ambience, moves into autotune ‘80s pop bliss and ends with a sultry saxophone solo, perfectly marries the experience: there’s a perceptible humanity in mechanical, bodily events.
Within its astral production, much of Soft Sounds From Another Planet stays grounded. “Road Head” is the last chest compression in attempt to resuscitate a doomed relationship, while the penultimate track “This House” is an acoustic dirge that honors Zauner’s chosen family. The baroque pop “Boyish” has a haunting, crystalline clarity that recalls the pathos of a Roy Orbison ballad, while “Body is a Blade” embraces the dark intimacy of Zauner’s Pacific Northwest heroes Elliott Smith and Mount Eerie.
With help from co-producer Craig Hendrix (who also co-produced Little Big League’s debut) and Jorge Elbrecht, (Ariel Pink, Tamaryn) who mixed the album, Zauner recontextualizes her bedroom pop beginnings, expanding and maturing her sound. The sheer massiveness of the big room production on Soft Sounds From Another Planet introduces listeners to a new Japanese Breakfast. Zauner’s familiar, capacious voice will serve as their guide.
“Your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing,” she sings. “Knuckled under pain you mourn but your blood is flowing.” There’s discernible pain in the phrasing, Zauner recognizing limitation, a lack of control, but then subverting the feeling, creating her own musical language for confronting trauma. Where Psychopomp introduced the world to Japanese Breakfast, Soft Sounds dives deeper. It builds space where there is none, and suggests that in the face of tragedy, we find ways to keep on living.
SOLD OUT
SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS
Monday, February 11th
Del Water Gap
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Del Water Gap is the solo project of songwriter S. Holden Jaffe. Jaffe currently resides in Brooklyn, New York and is inspired by “romantic encounters and dimly lit rooms.
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2LrSCuN
Thursday, February 28th
Weakened Friends w/ Well Wisher
$18/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Common Blah is the debut full-length by Portland, Maine’s Weakened Friends. Founded by songwriter Sonia Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman, and drummer Cam Jones in 2015, the trio is a low pressureoutlet for emotionally volatile music. Engineered and produced by Hoffman and perfected over the last year, the record broadcasts heavy feelings amid screech and feedback with little more than a fuzz pedal to clog up the signal chain.
For Sturino, writing in Weakened Friends is more of a physical process than a mental one.
“I have to feel the vibration or sound coming out of my body. I need the physicality to do it, to enjoy singing it,” she says. “People probably hear the vocals and think, ‘she just puts on that weird voice,’ but it’s really just what comes out. It’s my body making that sound.”
Many of the songs reckon with deep mid-20s malaise —with the feeling of being young, stuck, and settling for less. “Sometimes, things look good on the outside,but they’re not working. That’s how it used to be for me. I’d hear, ‘You have a really cool job. You live in a cool city. Your band is cool.’ It was ‘Common Blah’ though because I was miserable. I didn’t care. Now, I’m at the other end of the spectrum. People do something that they think they’re supposed to do when it’s not what they should be doing and it doesn’t make them happy. In a lot of ways, this is the first time I’ve found happiness. I wrote the lyrics about the time before that happiness.”
On Common Blah, Weakened Friends use volume —instrumental and emotional —to reassert a sense of control in a time when daily life has slid out of tune. The album also features guest shredding by peer and kindred spirit J Mascis on the song “Hate Mail.” CommonBlah will be out on CD, LP, and digital download via Don Giovanni Records on October 19th.
TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY 1/11 @ 10AM: https://ticketf.ly/2rJEWlw
Monday, March 25th
Elizabeth Colour Wheel
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Noisy punk / shoegaze / black metal band from Massachusetts.
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2FvQItu
Monday, April 1st
&More (Chill Moody & Donn T)
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Philly’s own, &More (Chill Moody & Donn T) made their debut during Grammy week at The Roots Jam Session at Gramercy Theatre in NYC (Jan 2018). The duo’s single, “My Own Light” appeared in Feb, followed by the official music video which featured Grammy Award-winning spoken word artist J. Ivy.
In a few short months, &More highlights included opening for former First Lady Michelle Obama at The Liacouras Center (Philadelphia), appearing on the Emmy Award-winning PBS tv series, Articulate , performing on The Chill Moody Music Stage as part of the Wawa Welcome America celebration, and rocking WXPN’s (88.5 FM) XPoNential Music Festival.
Icing on the cake? Powerhouse rockers Low Cut Connie (lauded by Rolling Stone for one of The Best Albums of 2018) invited &More to join their tour in Fall 2018 (which included country and Americana singer-songwriter Ruby Boots.)
Up next, forthcoming winter single, “WHOA!” by &More, and the official music video, featuring the legendary Chuck D leading into the release of their Ethel Bobcat album (Mar 2019).
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2rLPqB3
Monday, April 8th
WAKE w/ Unloved
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: When it comes to grindcore, few bands these days can top the overwhelming barrage of wrath and aggression unloaded on the listener/spectator by Calgary’s WAKE. In a career spanning a mere seven years, this Canadian unit of aural assassins have brought terror and war to crowds all over the northern hemisphere, destroying venues across Europe and North America on multiple occasions, and establishing themselves as an infamous and unstoppable killing machine when it comes to performing live. In this sense the band’s name seems to perfectly match their nature within the live environment: leave nothing standing – level everything in an endless wake of terror and destruction. But WAKE are far from being only and aural cataclysm restricted to the live environment, quite the opposite, as the band has released a string of albums and splits that speak for themselves, and are just another horrifying statement of the violence and sheer aggression which nests inside the soul of this band.
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2GbYVnl
**Tickets are available for all these shows in the shop (cash only for ticket sales) without the online fees. **