We’re back with our weekly Manic Presents Redscroll Blog! Here’s all the exciting announcements from this week! Just announced at College Street Music Hall – Reel Big Fish and Bowling for Soup on (6/26), Kurt Vile and the Violators on (7/26), and The Moth Mainstage on (9/26)! At Wall Street Theater in Norwalk – Conor Oberst on (7/19)! At Space Ballroom – Dirty Projectors on (5/26), Spirit Adrift on (6/9), Blonde Redhead on (6/12), Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses) on (6/21), Juice on (8/16)! Don’t forget to grab your tickets today!
This week’s show schedule begins TONIGHT (4/18) with Memphis alternative soul artist Citizen Cope at College Street Music Hall! The jam-packed weekend continues Friday (4/19) with Japanese psychedelic rock band Acid Mothers Temple returning to Space Ballroom! On Saturday (4/20)Hatebreed celebrates their 25th Anniversary at College Street Music Hall and Toronto noise-rock group Odonis Odonis at Space Ballroom! On Monday (4/22) Brooklyn indie rock band Gladshot comes to Cafe Nine as part of our weekly Manic Mondays series! Lastly, on Wednesday (4/24) we have Classic DEEP PURPLE performed by Glenn Hughes at Wall Street Theater in Norwalk! These are DO NOT miss shows – hope to see you there!
CONTEST TIME! Enter for a chance to win a pair of tickets to Rubblebucket at Space Ballroom on (4/28) and two copies of “Sun Machine” on CD!
Enter here: https://forms.gle/
Keep an eye out for more announcements and we’ll see you back here next Thursday!
Upcoming Shows…
TONIGHT – Thursday (4/18)
Citizen Cope
$35-$50/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: Citizen Cope is both a person (singer/songwriter Clarence Greenwood) and an acoustic-driven band. Born in Memphis and raised in Washington, D.C., Greenwood is the leader of the group, and he steers the band’s soulful sound by serving as keyboardist, guitarist, lead singer, DJ, songwriter, and producer. Greenwood first broke into the music business by appearing on albums by Maryland-based rapper Basehead(1993’s Not in Kansas Anymore and 1996’s Faith), and he used that momentum to issue his first Citizen Cope album, Cope Citizen, in 1992. Greenwood spent the rest of the decade donating songs to several independently issued compilations — including 1997’s Settling the DC Score and 1999’s Anti-Racist Action Benefit — and appearing on the soundtracks to movies like Eat Me and Clubland. He also performed on Lazy K’s 1997 album Life in One Day and inked his own deal with Capitol Records.
Although Greenwood recorded an entire album, Shotguns, during his time with Capitol, the label never released the record and he was eventually released from his contract. Dreamworks took the opportunity to sign him in 2000, and Citizen Cope’s self-titled album was released two years later. The bad luck continued, however, as Greenwood felt the label mishandled his record. Using an advance from Arista, he bought his way out of the Dreamworks contract and settled into a partnership with his new label. The Clarence Greenwood Recordings hit shelves in September 2004 and received considerable attention, with the track “Son’s Gonna Rise” even appearing in a GM Pontiac commercial. The band remained with Arista/RCA for the release of Every Waking Moment two years later, but Greenwood had grown tired of the boundaries presented by any record label. Accordingly, he released The Rainwater LP himself in 2010, although the band’s fusion of blues, folk-pop, and laid-back hip-hop remained intact. Greenwood returned two years later with a mellower, more laid-back sound on 2012’s One Lovely Day.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2zIIyc6
Friday (4/19)
Acid Mothers Temple w/ Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Mountain Movers
$15/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Formed in 1995 by Makoto Kawabata at the same time as the Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective. The group released its debut album in 1997 on PSF Records (Japan), and it was selected as one of the year’s best albums in the The Wire magazine (UK). In 1998 the group played their first tours of the US and Europe. Since then the group has released a huge number of albums on labels from many different countries. As of 2017, the group has released around 80 albums. Every year since 1998, they have toured extensively in the US and Europe, and more recently have started performing around Asia and in Japan too.
The group has performed in collaboration with many musicians including psychedelic originators Gong and Guru Guru, Simeon (Silver Apples), Nik Turner (Hawkwind), and the Occitanian trad sinder Rosina de Peira. Japanese collaborators have included Afrirampo, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), Maso Yamazaki (Masonna), Seiichi Yamamoto (Boredoms), Jun Kuriyama (The Ox), and many others.
To begin with the group had a floating line-up with contributions from many members of the AMT Soul Collective. But as tours became more frequent, the group began to coalesce around a core touring line-up. Other bands were created with Acid Mothers Temple as part of their name (AMT & The Cosmic Inferno, AMT SWR, AMT & The Space Paranoid, Acid Mothers Gong, Acid Mothers Guru Guru, etc.), but AMT & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. has continued to function as the mothership and main lineage for all our activities.
In 2016, 21 years since the group’s founding, there was a major shift in the line-up and “Next Generation” was added to the name. We now view the first 20 years as chapter one in our story, and we are now turning the page to start chapter two. The current touring line-up is: Makoto Kawabata (the sole original member), Hiroshi Higashi, Mitsuko☆Tabata, Nani Satoshima, and Wolf.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2xStuH5
Saturday (4/20)
Hatebreed w/ Obituary, Terror, Cro-Mags, Fit For An Autopsy
$22-$29/All Ages/Doors at 5:30PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: An institution can be relied on. Its foundations don’t shake due to the winds of change or tides of trends—no matter how volatile, omnipresent, or tenuous.
With steadfast determination, drive, and dedication, Hatebreed cement themselves as one of heavy music’s strongest institutions on their seventh full-length offering and very first for Nuclear Blast worldwide, 2016’s The Concrete Confessional. Since 1994, the Connecticut quintet—Jamey Jasta [vocals], Chris Beattie [bass], Wayne Lozinak [guitar], Frank Novinec [guitar], and Matthew Byrne [drums]—has risen to the ranks of hardcore and heavy metal elite with a GRAMMY® Award nomination, main stage slots on festivals, and countless fans worldwide. 2013’s The Divinity Of Purpose earned their highest entry on the Billboard Top 200, bowing at #17 with impressive first-week sales in excess of 17,000. When it came time to return to the studio after two years on the road, Jasta and his cohorts clung to the bedrock on which their legacy stands firm.
“There’s nothing better than loud amps in the face, cranked up riffs that hit you right in the chest and lyrics that spark a new thought and give you a charge,” he declares. “That’s our musical DNA. We could just be who we are. We don’t need to incorporate whatever the trend is. We can just be Hatebreed. There are some new highlights to the game, but you know it’s us.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2FIyvJh
Saturday (4/20)
Odonis Odonis w/ Public Memory, Reduction Plan
$12/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Odonis Odonis, the project of Toronto’s multi-instrumentalist Dean Tzenos Hollandaze (Fat Cat, 2011) concocted a furious sound bred out of juxtaposing surf guitar from the 1960s and dark-punk outbursts from the 1980s, like Dick Dale jamming with alternatively Big Black or Joy Division, a strategy best embodied by Ledged Up. However, that strategy also yields melody, as the old-fashioned voodoobilly of Busted Lip and the vintage psychedelic-pop of Handle Bars prove. If Blood Feast winks a bit too obviously at mainstream U2-esque arena-rock, and the hypnotic lullaby Seedgazer is too mellow to truly engage, a case of unrestrained madness fuels the pounding gargatuan (but way too brief) White Flag Riot and the gloomy garage rant of New World. Eccentric nuances pop up everywhere in the brutal and raw arrangements, bestowing a sense of maximum instability onto the songs.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2S0iGyG
Monday (4/22)
Gladshot w/ Skating, Dangerous Animals
FREE WITH RSVP/21 and over/Doors at 7:00PM
Cafe nine – New Haven
INFO: Considering they’ve already worked on everything from a “dystopian rock musical” (Barcode) to songs that scored TV shows on TNT, ABC and MTV – and after wrapping up a live set on WFMU’s Goddamn Dave Hill show where they lit up Dave’s message board and then went on to headline a sold out NYC show – it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that Debb Andrews and Mike Blaxill are at the peak of their creative powers on the new Gladshot album These Are Vitamins. Released in fall 2017, its their second effort with super producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile, Waxahatchee), who continues to perfect the push-and-pull dynamics Mike and Debb perfected on their last EP, Maxwell’s Cool Demon.
It’s something they’ve been working on ever since the two met at a songwriter collective that performed and critiqued one another’s songs. At the time, Mike and his propulsive guitar were on more of a roots-rock tip, and Debb pulled in pop influences and the serious jazz skills that earned her a National Endowment for the Arts nod and lessons with the legendary pianist Joanne Brackeen (a session player and live performer for such esteemed musicians as Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey, and Stan Getz).
Now Gladshot can be best described as bold garage band, striking a perfect balance between pop and psychedelic music. Not to mention reflecting such varied influences as the Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, AC/DC, Crowded House, Marvin Gaye, and the road-tested records of Cherry Glazerr, Langhorne Slim, and Speedy Ortiz.
“We each generate our own musical ideas,” the pair explains, “then we get together to decide what will be a song. Once it’s written, one of Debb’s favorite things is coming up with keyboard parts—cool ones that meld into the song, the way Nicky Hopkins does on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ or ‘She’s a Rainbow’. They inspire her to keep it all lo-fi and simple.”
RSVP HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2Nukuzh
Wednesday (4/24)
Classic DEEP PURPLE Live Performed by Glenn Hughes
$40-$45/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Wall Street Theater – Norwalk
INFO: Glenn Hughes, former bassist and singer of Deep Purple, known to millions as the ‘Voice of Rock’, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and the current front man for rock super group Black Country Communion is pleased to announce that he will be performing Deep Purple only material with his “GLENN HUGHES PERFORMS CLASSIC DEEP PURPLE LIVE” nationwide US tour in August-Sept. 2018.
The tour promises to be dynamic, a turn-back-the-clocks, two-hour live extravaganza homage to his tenure in MK 3 and MK 4 incarnations of Deep Purple – one of music history’s most seminal and influential rock and roll groups. All tour dates will be announced shortly. With a Facebook following of a quarter million fans.
As well as Glenn on lead vocals and bass guitar, the touring band also features Soren Anderson (guitar), Jesper Bo Hansen (keyboards) and Fernando Escobedo (drums)
Deep Purple took a quantum leap when the then 20-year-old Glenn Hughes was seconded from British funk-rock outfit Trapeze in mid-1973. As bassist and co-vocalist (with David Coverdale), he helped steer the legendary rock group in the progressive direction of Burn (1974), Stormbringer (1974) and Come Taste the Band (1975), while touring the world for three years.
His solo debut album Play Me Out (1977) preceded later albums with Black Sabbath and Gary Moore. The last 25 years have seen a rush of solo work and collaborations for the ‘Voice of Rock’ including mega hit America: What Time Is Love? with the KLF in 1992, appearances with Joe Satriani / G3 and four critically acclaimed top selling studio albums released between 2010 and 2018 with rock super group Black Country Communion featuring Joe Bonamassa, Derek Sherinian & Jason Bonham. Glenn was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 20l6 as a member of Deep Purple.
Taking a page and inspiration from the Blackmore/Coverdale/Hughes/
Classic material from the Tommy Bolin MK 4 period is also featured, including Getting’ Tighter – Hughes’ funk rock extravaganza extraordinaire, plus the brooding Coverdale /Hughes masterpiece You Keep On Moving.
Deep Purple MK 2 hits Highway Star and Smoke on the Water are also featured, because, as Glenn points out, ‘’I did play both these numbers during my time with Purple and they were mainstays of the live set when I was in the band. As my manager pointed out to me, the first time Smoke on The Water was ever played live at Madison Square Garden was when David and I were in the band in 1974. I love singing Highway Star, too.”
Continues Glenn, “A few years back, I cut a barnstorming version of Highway Star for the Machine Head anniversary tribute album with my good friends Steve Vai and Chad Smith. I’m not playing anything on the forthcoming tour that I didn’t either play live or record in the studio with Purple.”
GLENN HUGHES PERFORMS CLASSIC DEEP PURPLE LIVE is the first time Glenn has performed a show solely of Deep Purple material since his last show with Purple at the Liverpool Empire on March 15th 1976. Not one wallow in nostalgia, hence his extensive and varied career post-Purple, Glenn feels the time is right to acknowledge and pay homage to his past, his musical legacy, and, most importantly, to one of rock and roll’s most acclaimed, influential and successful rock bands.
‘’I can still sing the songs, in some ways even better than I did in the 70’s,” says Glenn. I can still perform them with the same energy that was on the stage back then, too. I feel that the time is right. It’s fun to get back into character of my days with Purple. I’m looking back at my life and I want to remember the good stuff. I’m incredibly excited to perform these songs, as they helped define the genre. I can assure you, the new show is going to blow your mind.’’
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS
Sunday, May 26th
Dirty Projectors
$26/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: THE NEW SELF-TITLED ALBUM does everything we want and expect from Dirty Projectors — but in a way that we never could have imagined or anticipated. In a career of surprising conceptual gambits, unexpected stylistic shifts, and continually changing lineups — this is, as DJ Khaled says, “ANOTHER ONE”!
A PROTEAN, SHAPE-SHIFTING CHAMELEON, Dave Longstreth, the founding member and sole constant Projector, goes where the music is: he builds his band and arrangements around the songs he’s writing in that moment.
‘Dirty Projectors’ is a BREAKUP ALBUM. These songs, coming out of a place of heartbreak & depression, began as private gestures of catharsis & healing. DL couldn’t see any future for Dirty Projectors, much less imagine these as Dirty Projectors songs, until he went to LA, where Rick Rubin urged him that this is exactly what they are.
The ABSENCE OF FEMALE VOICES — notably that of the beloved Amber Coffman — becomes both the subject of the album and the engine of its most inspired leaps: allowing DL to branch out as a producer & arranger, encouraging him to hone his songcraft, and forcing him to focus on his own voice, to revelatory result.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is that Longstreth’s VOICE — one of the most iconic & divisive in music today — has gone from being a sometime-liability to his music’s greatest and most expressive asset. The CHOPPING, LAYERING, SPEEDING UP & SLOWING DOWN of the voice is processing both literal and metaphoric: DL works through the new absence on a course of self-examination, interrogation, reflection. But his natural voice is the great reveal: out of the black hole of loss comes a quantum spark of CONFIDENCE & PURE FEELING.
From the baritone lament of Keep Your Name to the crooning pathos of Little Bubble and the breathless falsetto leaps of Winner Take Nothing, these songs establish DL as one of music’s most VERSATILE, ORIGINAL SINGERs.
The album flexes DL’s tremendous GROWTH & STRENGTH AS A PRODUCER. Classic Projectors trademarks are here — guitar, hocketing, powerful three-part vocal harmony — as a foundation for a new world of insanely fresh drum patterns, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, brass choir, string quartet, piano, modular synth, Kontakt and Arturia patches, all tied together in dizzying next-level arrangements. DL is at the top of his game as one of 2017’s most original producers in any genre.
DL himself remains agnostic about genre and ecumenical in his inspiration. In some ways, the album answers the question Dirty Projectors posed way back in 2009 — before the waves of nu-r&b and Beyoncé quoting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — with STILLNESS IS THE MOVE: what would a post-genre collision of r&b, indie rock and other music sound like? From the SUBTWEET BOP of Keep Your Name to the DIGITAL BENEDICTION that is I See You, this is truly GENRELESS MUSIC that pushes at and expands the edges of what we’re used to hearing.
DL cites Karl Ove Knausgård, Joni Mitchell, and Drake as his most passionately explored writers of the last few years, and there’s a new DEPTH & LYRICISM in this suite of richly complex songs. Self-reflection and fantasy helix together in DETAILED LAYERS OF STORY: rife in ambiguity, raging with doubt and ambivalence, labyrinthine in their self-contradiction. Considering this range, the NARRATIVE UNITY of the album is astounding. Dirty Projectors is known for concept albums — from the collaboration with Björk, ‘Mount Wittenberg Orca’ (2010), to the glitch opera ‘The Getty Address’ (2005), to the Black-Flag-reimagined opus ‘Rise Above’ (2007). And now ‘Dirty Projectors’ is the most TAUT, UNIFIED, CONTINUOUS ARC of storytelling yet — beginning with the anger and self-recrimination of “Keep Your Name” and ending with the forgiveness and reconciliation of “I See You.”
DL has made a breakup album before: his first album, the rare and out-of-print ‘Graceful Fallen Mango,’ from 2001. Fifteen years later, Dirty Projectors is arriving where you began and knowing the place for the first time. The significance of it being a self-titled record is clear: ‘Dirty Projectors’ is both A HOMECOMING AND A REDISCOVERY. Time is a spiral, and this is an astounding, vivid, immersive piece of music — YOU JUST GOTTA HEAR IT!
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2HvH61h
Sunday, June 9th
Spirit Adrift w/ High Command
$14 ($12 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: While Spirit Adrift made many take notice with their debut album “Chained To Oblivion”, it is on “Curse Of Conception” their stellar second album, and first with new label 20 Buck Spin, that the band has taken a giant leap forward in songwriting prowess, production and confidence. From the Metallica / Priest like opening moments of ‘Earthbound’ to the epic closing of “Onward, Inward”, Spirit Adrift are aiming sky high with burning focus and peak vigor.
The aforementioned ‘Earthbound’ is a standard bearer for album-opening songcraft, leading into the colossal title track, a grungy and twisting radio-ready crawler. ‘To Fly On Broken Wings’ & ‘Graveside Invocation’ continue to show that any of the eight tracks on ‘Curse Of Conception’ could stand as featured singles. Throughout the duration brick heavy riff assembly, somber southern atmospherics and grand melodies entwine flawlessly into perfect metallic majesty, exemplified succinctly and totally in the instrumental ‘Wakien’ for example.
With a host of fantastic albums released by their contemporaries lately, Spirit Adrift has taken their craft to an ascendent new level on ‘Curse Of Conception’ earning their rightful place among the top tier of modern metal bands clawing their way above and beyond the underground scene. Now more than at any time metal has become the lifeblood of rock music and Spirit Adrift offer ‘Curse Of Conception’ as an embodiment of that perseverant vitality.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2G2LrrO
Wednesday, June 12th
Blonde Redhead w/ Ludovic Alarie
$35/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: BLONDE REDHEAD, a New York based art-rock trio
Not many bands can handle very long careers and never stop evolving and actually, keep on exploring, from record to record. Blonde Redhead deserves a place in this category. In 25 years, the acclaimed New York based trio went from the noise rock of the early years to the refined dream pop of “Misery Is A Butterfly”, passing through the sensual electronic textures of “Barragán” in 2014, before reaching the melancholic romantic sound of “3 o’clock” EP..
Formed in 1993 by Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace, the band challenges itself with each recording situation and the results have been stunning every time. Their music is always inspired by the same emotions, but their tastes and the ways they choose to execute those emotions are constantly evolving.
With Kazu and Amedeo on guitars and vocals, Simone on drums, and Takahashi on bass, the band’s chaotic, artistic rock caught the attention of Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who produced and released the band’s debut album, Blonde Redhead, on his Smells Like Records label in 1995. Shortly after the album’s release, Takahashi left the band. The remaining members continued as a trio, releasing a second album, La Mia Vita Violenta, on Shelley’s label in 1995.
For their 1997 release, Fake Can Be Just as Good, recorded for Touch & Go, the trio was joined by guest bass player Vern Rumsey from Unwound. By 1998, the band eliminated bass and scaled back to guitars, drums, and vocals for In an Expression of the Inexpressible. Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons and the Mélodie Citronique EP followed two years later.
The song “For the Damaged Coda” released on the album Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, was used in an episode of Rick and Morty series and gained over 33 million views on YouTube.
The band’s first album for 4AD, Misery Is a Butterfly, was released in spring 2004. For 2007’s 23, the group opted for a mix of dream pop and delicate electronic textures. Three years later, Blonde Readhead delivered Penny Sparkle, a more stripped-down, even more electronic-leaning set of songs the band recorded in New York and Stockholm with Alan Moulder, Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid. In 2014, the band returned with Barragán, featuring production from Drew Brown (Beck, Stephen Malkamus, Radiohead).
The band revisited its early days in 2016 with the Numero Group box set Masculin Feminin, which collected Blonde Redhead and La Mia Vita Violenta along with demos, singles, and radio performances from that era. That year also saw the release of Freedom of Expression on Barragán, a collection of Barragán remixes including contributions by Deerhoof, Van Rivers, Nosaj Thing, and Connan Mockasin.
Blonde Redhead returned with new music in 2017 in the shape of the EP 3 O’Clock, which they released on their own Asa Wa Kuru Records.
The band is now working on a new album, while Kazu Makino is going to launch her first solo project.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2Cq9oqU
Friday, June 21st
Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses) w/ Fred Abong
$20/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Influential songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Kristin Hersh, leader of the indie rock band, Throwing Muses and the noise rock power trio, 50 Foot Wave, is on the road with her highly acclaimed Fire Records release, “Possible Dust Clouds.” The touring trio is a hard hitting super group: Fred Abong, bass player from Throwing Muses (who opens solo, promoting his new ep, “Pulsing”) and Rob Ahlers, drummer of 50 Foot Wave. These electric trio shows are loud, tight and intense, featuring material from across Kristin’s thirty year career.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2IqqqJj
Wednesday, June 26th
Reel Big Fish & Bowling for Soup w/ The Zambonis
$27-$32/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO:
Reel Big Fish: Bio Reel Big Fish was one of the legions of Southern California ska-punk bands to edge into the mainstream following the mid-’90s success of No Doubt and Sublime. The band was distinguished by their hyperkinetic stage shows, juvenile humor, ironic covers of new wave pop songs, and metallic shards of ska. The group cultivated an underground following that broke into the mainstream in summer 1997 when their single “Sell Out” became a modern rock radio and MTV favorite. Their appearance in the movie “Baseketball” as the halftime band also gained them more fans and helped the band’s popularity to grow. Still fronted by original lead singer and songwriter Aaron Barrett, they continue releasing albums and touring relentlessly, playing more and more countries and bigger venues all over the world.
Reel Big Fish recorded its self-released debut album, “Everything Sucks”, in 1995. “Everything Sucks” became a word-of-mouth underground hit in ska-punk and college circles, which gave the band enough leverage to sign with the indie label Mojo Records.
The label’s president, Jay Rifkin, and former Oingo Boingo bassist John Avila co-produced “Turn the Radio Off”, which marked Reel Big Fish’s first album for Mojo. “Turn the Radio Off” was unleashed in August 1996, and over the next year, the group continually toured in support of the album’s release, expanding their fan base all the while. In spring 1997, the single “Sell Out” began receiving heavy airplay from several influential modern rock stations in the U.S., which soon translated into MTV support for the song’s quirky video. By summer, the song had become a moderate modern rock hit, and the album had charted in the Top 100.
In 1998 the song “Take on Me” from the “Baseketball” motion picture soundtrack was released as the promotional single for the movie and once again found the band in regular rotation on rock radio and MTV in the USA.
Bowling for Soup: Bio There’s a song on Bowling For Soup’s 2014 Greatest Hits Album (Songs People Actually Liked: Volume 1) – “20 Years, That’s A Lot Of Beers”, a lighthearted autobiographical sprint through all the things the band had achieved together in their first two decades. It’s a song full of fun and camaraderie, which sums up Bowling For Soup perfectly; they have always felt like your friends as well a band, and of course, they are the band you can wave to! Well, you can add a whole load more beers to that, because as the band approach their twenty fifth anniversary in the coming Summer of 2019, the world of Bowling For Soup is a very exciting place to be a part of. Natives of Denton, Texas – which may now hold the record for town or city named dropped in the most songs by any band ever thanks to “BFS,” Bowling For Soup’s unique brand of hooked filled pop punk music has gone all around the world and back again. Songs such as “High School Never Ends,” “Punk Rock 101,” “1985” and of course the Grammy nominated “Girl All The Bad Guys Want” resonate as much today as when they were written and are proving extremely popular in the modern streaming world.
Finding their niche back in the 1990’s would be tough when the musical climate was in serious shift. “We were just the stereotypical, small town guys with nothing else to do – starting a band to keep ourselves out of trouble” recalls frontman Jaret Reddick looking back. There was certainly no trend to follow, every other band seemed to be genre jumping to try and catch “the next big thing” without knowing what “the next big thing was,” leaving the members of Bowling For Soup with no option to just go out and have fun. Brought up on a heady diet of 80’s John Hughes Movies, LA Hair Metal, Steve Martin comedy routines (which spawned the band’s name) and hook laden punk rock, BFS hit the ground running on the simple blueprint – have a good time and pretty soon, everyone else will join in!
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRIDAY 4/19 HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2IqkoZR
Friday, July 19th
Conor Oberst w/ Joanna Sternberg
$20-$40/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Wall Street Theater – Norwalk
INFO: Conor Oberst joined his first band at the age of 13 and has been releasing music since 1993. Over the next two plus decades, he’s released cassette-only recordings, split 7-inches, and a dozen albums of uncommon insight, detail, and political awareness with his band Bright Eyes, under his own name, as a member of Desaparecidos, as leader of the The Mystic Valley Band, with the Monsters of Folk supergroup, and in Better Oblivion Community Center with Phoebe Bridgers.
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRIDAY 4/19 HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, July 26th
Kurt Vile & the Violators w/ J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr.)
$25-$35/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: Travel can inspire in surprising ways: Kurt Vile discovered as much making his first record in three years, the eclectic and electrifying Bottle It In, which he recorded at various studios around the country over two very busy years, during sessions that usually punctuated the ends of long tours or family road trips. Every song, whether it’s a concise and catchy pop composition or a sprawling guitar epic, becomes a journey unto itself, taking unexpected detours, circuitous melodic avenues, or open-highway solos. If Vile has become something of a rock guitar god—a mantle he would dismiss out of humility but also out of a desire to keep getting better, to continue absorbing new music, new sounds, new ideas—it’s due to his precise, witty playing style, which turns every riff and rhythm into points on a map and takes the scenic route from one to the next.
Using past albums as points of departure, Bottle It In heads off in new directions, pushing at the edges of the map into unexplored territory: Here be monster jams. These songs show an artist who is still evolving and growing: a songwriter who, like his hero John Prine, can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same line, as well as a vocalist who essentially rewrites those songs whenever he sings them in his wise, laconic jive-talkin’ drawl. He revels in the minutiae of the music—not simply incorporating new instruments but emphasizing how they interact with his guitar and voice, how the glockenspiel evokes cirrocumulus clouds on “Hysteria,” how Kim Gordon’s “acoustic guitar distortion” (her term) engulfs everything at the end of “Mutinies,” how the banjo curls around his guitar lines and backing vocals from Lucius to lend a high-lonesome aura to “Come Again.”
These journeys took Vile more than two years to navigate, during which time he toured behind his breakout 2015 album b’lieve I’m goin’ down, recorded a duets album with Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist Courtney Barnett, opened for Neil Young in front of 90,000 people in Quebec, famously became a clue on Jeopardy, hung out with friends, took vacations with his wife and daughters. “I’ve been bouncing around a lot and recording all over. My family would meet me in the middle of America, and we’d go on a road trip somewhere. I would record in between all that stuff.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE 12PM FRIDAY 4/19 HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2Im8mjj
Friday, August 16th
Juice w/ Kyle Duke and the Brown Bag Boys
$15 ($12 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
INFO: There’s strength in numbers.
With seven distinct personalities, Juice distills rock, r&b and hip-hop into a signature sound witha distinct kick of electric violin, rich harmonies, honest lyrics, and festival-worthy choruses. The Boston septet—Ben Stevens [lead vocals], Michael Ricciardulli [guitar], Rami El-Abidin [bass], Christian Rose [violin, vocals], Kamau Burton [acoustic guitar, vocals], Daniel Moss [guitar], and Miles Clyatt [drums]—perfects this mix on its 2018 independent project.
“There are so many colors when we play,” explains Michael. “The chemistry is there in the studio and on stage. When we play to a crowd, it’s all organic. The reactions… the faces… the experience, what you see is what you’re getting, people know that, they can tell. We’ve learned to listen to each other and to what the music has to say. At the same time, we channel our youth, there’s no bottling that up. We’re always searching for something tangible our listeners can thoroughly feel at the core of the music. We’re trying to create an atmosphere much bigger than the seven of us on stage.”
It was evident from the band’s beginnings that this collective potency could contribute to something far greater, and something truly different. After meeting as freshman at Boston College, Juice became unified upon winning their school’s “Battle of the Bands” in 2014. Soon after, things got serious.
Through constant gigging Juice honed their live performance, displaying an original raw energy. Soon, Juice went from frequent gigs at the city’s famed Middle East to selling out East Coast hotspots such as Brighton Music Hall, Mercury Lounge, Rockwood Music Hall, and more. Releasing their full-length debut in 2016, the band landed a viral hit in the form of “Gold,” which popped up on countless “Discover Weekly” playlists and cracked over 386,000 Spotify streams without any traditional promotion.
Hitting Summerfest Milwaukee for the first time in 2016, Juice impressively won the grand prize at of the festival’s “Land The Big Gig” Competition. Graduating from college a year later, the musicians returned to the annual festival and opened for pop juggernaut DNCE.
Along the way, they carefully sharpened their style, merging virtuosic musicianship and vivid songwriting. “The hardest question for us to answer is always who do we sound like. We have so many influences from so many different places. When it all falls together, we end up with songs that are honest, songs that we love, songs people remember…but songs that don’t sound like anyone else” explains Michael.
“It’s a combination of so many things,” says Rami. “Everyone hears their own impression, first you might hear the violin, then the soulful, dynamic vocals, and then the melody driven guitars, all of which is anchored by our prominent rhythm section.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRIDAY 4/19 HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2HshZwm
Thursday, September 26th
The Moth Mainstage
$30-$55/All Ages/Doors at 6:30PM
INFO: The Moth – hailed as “New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket” by The Wall Street Journal – is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. In its twenty-year history, The Moth has presented more than 35,000 stories, told live and without notes, by people from all walks of life to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. The Moth Podcast is downloaded more than 52 million times a year, and The Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour, airs weekly on more than 475 public radio stations nationwide. Each Moth Mainstage features simple, old-fashioned storytelling, by five wildly divergent raconteurs who develop and shape their stories with The Moth’s directors.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://ticketf.ly/2Gqquax