Manic Presents / Premier Concerts Guest Post:
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 -indie/folk punk band The Mountain Goats on (8/9)! At Space Ballroom – Swearin’ and Mike Krol co-headline show on (8/4), Mark Mulcahy (of Miracle Legion, Polaris) on (8/24) and British blues rocker Barns Courtney on (9/13)! Don’t forget to grab your tickets when they go on sale tomorrow!
This week’s show schedule begins TONIGHT (5/09) with Virginia Beach emo-pop band Turnover w/ Turnstile at College Street Music Hall! The jam-packed weekend continues Friday (5/10) with the SOLD OUT Killswitch Engage and Parkway Drive co-headline showat College Street Music Hall and Minnesota indie rock band Bad Bad Hats at Space Ballroom! On Saturday (5/11)Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, known for putting a vintage twist on modern favorites at College Street Music Hall and genre-defying dub/metal bandDub Trio at Space Ballroom! On Sunday (5/12) acclaimed indie singer/songwriter Damien Jurado performsat Space Ballroom! Monday (5/13) features Milwaukee-based singer/songwriterTrapper Schoepp at Cafe Nine as part of our weekly Manic Mondays series! On Tuesday (5/14) we have the Meat Puppets with their original lineup at Space Ballroom! And, lastly on Wednesday (5/15) at Space Ballroom we have Mobyin conversation with Michael Ian Black as part of his latest book tour! These are DO NOT miss shows – hope to see you there
CONTEST TIME! Enter for a chance to win a pair of tickets to Kevin Devine and John K. Samson at Space Ballroom on May 16th, a copy of “Winter Wheat” by John K. Samson on vinyl, and the Devinyl 7’’ split vinyl featuring Kevin Devine and John K. Samson!
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 (5/09)
Turnover w/ Turnstile, Reptaliens, Illusion
$23-$27/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: Front man Austin Getz doesn’t blink when asked to sum up Turnover’s third full-length, Good Nature.“Learning,” he replies. “This whole record is about learning. Opening your eyes to new things, going out-side of your comfort zone, and learning to grow into something new.”The album’s unique blend of musical and spiritual growth is immediately audible on the opening track, “Super Natural,” a late-summer idyll of intertwined guitar parts and laid back vocals. Listening to how the leisurely “Nightlight Girl” melts into a more propulsive selection like “Breeze,” and the way Good Nature flows together as a seamless whole, it’s also evident that the foursome has been paying closer attention to how artists from earlier eras made full-length albums: the range of textures, tempos, and dynamics on Good Nature are influenced in part by bossa nova, cool jazz, electronic music, and psychedelic grooves. This influx of new influences and inspiration, navigated by Peripheral Vision producer Will Yip, results in the band’s best album to date. Good Nature comes from a place of calm and contentment, nurtured by looking inward.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday (5/10)
Killswitch Engage, Parkway Drive w/ After The Burial
SOLD OUT/All Ages/Doors at 5:30PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO:
Killswitch Engage: KILLSWITCH ENGAGE exists deep within the eye of the storm, wielding the thunderous power of the elements like metallic alchemists, touching a nerve with the disenfranchised, and crafting populist anthems that both challenge the status quo and rally those who society casts aside. Across multiple albums, videos, and worldwide tours, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE forged a musical foundation steeped in classic heavy metal, melodic death metal, and early punk/hardcore, and built a following across economic, political, religious, international and social divides.
No matter the climate, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE makes trend-resistant, timeless heavy music that has elevated them to the critical and community status of the greatest of American metal bands. The fiercely individual yet collaboratively resilient New Englanders have also commanded respect and appreciation from all corners. Having shared the stage with acts ranging from Rise Against to Slayer, the diversity and versatility of their touring reach is unparalleled. As headliners on celebrated tours like Ozzfest, Vans Warped Tour, Taste of Chaos, Rockstar Mayhem, and countless international festivals, their influence reigns on a worldwide scale.
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE anthems, singles, and live staples, like “Fixation on the Darkness,” “My Last Serenade,” “A Bid Farewell,” “My Curse,” “Always,” and “In Due Time,” have had staying power and appeal to all generations of metal fans worldwide.
Parkway Drive: Known for their unstoppable live show—as showcased in releases like the platinum-selling Home Is For The Heartless DVD—Parkway Drive will spend most of the coming year on the road. After touring the U.S. this spring, they’ll head to Europe/UK to headline several major festivals, taking on a massive stage production that includes a spinning drum room and stunning pyrotechnics. The band will then return to the states for their biggest U.S. tour yet, a run to be followed by their mid-autumn tour of Australia. Early next year, Parkway Drive will again bring their awe-inspiring show to Europe/UK and—in a significant step forward for the band—hit arenas all across the continent.
In reflecting on the making of Reverence, Parkway Drive point out that using heartbreak as creative fuel has ultimately had a life-changing impact on the band. “This time there are triumphs that come from swinging a sledgehammer and dealing with real raw emotion,” says McCall. “I hope Reverence is the kind of album that redefines what people expect of us, in the sense that you can now expect the unexpected. This time around we’ve taken more risks, and I don’t think we’ve ever sounded more interesting.”
SOLD OUT
Friday (5/10)
Bad Bad Hats w/ Boyscott, Similar Kind
$15 ($12 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom (Front Room)- Hamden
INFO: Bad Bad Hats is an indie rock band from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The band consists of Kerry Alexander, Chris Hoge, and Connor Davison. Named for a trouble-making character from the Madeline children’s books, Bad Bad Hats is defined by a balance of sweet and sour. Their music honors classic pop songwriting, with nods to nineties rock simplicity and pop-punk frivolity. Through it all, Alexander’s unflinchingly sincere lyrics cut to the emotional heart of things.
Alexander and Hoge met while attending Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2012, they formed Bad Bad Hats with friend and bassist Noah Boswell, and began performing around the Twin Cities. That same year, they were signed by Minneapolis label Afternoon Records. Their 2015 debut album Psychic Reader caught the attention of outlets including The New Yorker, NPR, Pitchfork, and Paste. Since the release of Psychic Reader, Bad Bad Hats has toured the U.S. extensively, supporting artists including Margaret Glaspy, Hippo Campus, and Third Eye Blind.
Lightning Round, the band’s second full-length album, finds Bad Bad Hats more confident and mature than ever. Producer and collaborator Brett Bullion (who also produced Psychic Reader) encouraged the group to record live in the studio, an approach which pushed the band outside of their comfort zone and lends many songs on the record a loose, organic feel. There is a vulnerability in this (fluttering tape loops, a few wrong notes) and it makes the music on the new album feel as honest and unpredictable as Alexander’s lyrics. In this spontaneous environment, Hoge, who is known to play every instrument in the band, delivers some of his most inspired musical performances yet.
As for Alexander, she’s still writing love songs, ones that recount with cinematic swell the subtle joy and pain of the everyday. Her vocals are supported by open, breathing arrangements that feature lush keyboard sounds and woody guitar tones. Davison was recruited to play drums on the album and became a full-time member in the process. His drumming and melodic contributions give the new songs a level of nuance not heard in previous releases.
Lightning Round marks the final release with contributions from original member Noah Boswell, who will be leaving the group this fall to pursue a master’s degree. Bad Bad Hats continues with Alexander, Hoge, and Davison. They have plans to tour the country this year.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Saturday (5/11)
Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox
$29.50-$85/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: Since Bradlee created PMJ in 2009, the project has amassed more than 740 million YouTube views and 2.7 million subscribers, chalked up more than 1 million likes on Facebook, performed on “Good Morning America,” topped iTunes charts with all 14 of their releases since 2014, caught the attention of NPR Music and NBC News, and played hundreds of shows to sold-out houses around the world.
Despite finding such success for the project on the road, Bradlee continues to arrange and record new arrangements every week for PMJ’s legion of fans. The multi-talented collective has interpreted hits by Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, The White Stripes, Lorde, Outkast, Radiohead, Maroon 5 and many more. Last year, PMJ collected 18 favorites from among their hundreds of songs to compile The Essentials for Concord Records. The album included the song that put the band on the map, a vaudevillian distressing of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop,” and their ‘50s doo-wop version of Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” which garnered more than 19.5 million views and was named one of the “9 Best Viral Cover Videos of 2015” by People magazine.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Saturday (5/11)
Dub Trio w/ Balkun Brothers, Pulluter
$15 ($13 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Every time we wake up, we return to life. Shaking off slumber, the world seemingly begins anew in front of our eyes.
Dub Trio underwent such an awakening.
Over nearly two decades together, the Brooklyn triumvirate—Stu Brooks [bass], DP Holmes [guitar], and Joe Tomino [drums]—not only delivered a string of albums that forever redefined the term “dub” under cover of metal, punk, alternative, and shoegaze, but also infused its musical prowess into the studio recordings and the shows of genre-bending icons ranging from Mike Patton to Lady Gaga. The three-piece introduced itself on 2004’s “live-dub experiment” Exploring the Dangers Of followed by successors New Heavy [2006], Another Sound Is Dying [2008], and IV [2011]. Conjuring up instrumental music hummable enough to sing, praise came from the likes of Pitchfork who predicted “Dub Trio are on to something.” Along the way, the guys served as Peeping Tom’s live band and toured alongside everyone from Clutch to Gogol Bordello and Dillinger Escape Plan.
However, the band took a hiatus as a collective in 2015 after touring heavily behind IV. Having an impact on various genres, they served as the backing band on the Lady Gaga demos that famously attracted the attention of Interscope in addition to backing Matisyahu for six years. Brooks received a GRAMMY® Award nomination for his work with Pretty Lights in addition to backing Rock and Roll Hall of Fame® Inductee Dr. John on the road. During 2018, he played bass in the Saturday Night Live Band sharing the stage with the likes of Kanye West and Kid Cudi. Moreover, he is the musical director and bassist for the GRiZ Live Band alongside Tomino. Additionally, Tomino hit the kit for The Fugees as Holmes lent his six-string talents to Mos Def, Common, and more in the studio. Members shuffled around the country with Holmes in North Carolina and Tomino in Cleveland before regrouping for a European tour in 2017.
A two-week 2018 reunion at a tiny Brooklyn rehearsal spot set the stage for their fifth full-length and first release for New Damage Records, The Shape of Dub To Come as an homage to titles such as The Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.
“The band has been in hibernation, and now we’ve awakened,” smiles Brooks. “It took a while just by virtue of the fact everyone was in a different geographical location. Once we got together, we rehearsed for a few days, hit the studio, tracked, and mixed everything within two weeks. It has a different energy. It’s more fresh. The first time playing these songs was three days before we hit ‘record.’ That’s a big part of the record’s identity. We needed a little bit of a break, because we’d gone so hard for fifteen years. Joe had a baby. Dave had a baby. In the rehearsal room, it was like no time had passed though. There was a little bit of nostalgia and sentimentality. We fell into our usual patterns and continued.”
“It felt like going back to the beginning,” adds Tomino. “Back in the day, we used to play in really close quarters: Dave’s basement. That’s where it started. Here we are in this little Brooklyn rehearsal room, and it brought me back to the roots of Dub Trio. It started this recalibration as we went home to the genesis of Dub Trio and evolved from there.”
This time around, the groove hinged on slower stoner-inspired sludge riffing—another first. The space allowed the dub to flourish. “We got comfortable with the space,” adds Tomino. “We could let it breathe and let it go, one step at a time. Even though we hadn’t necessarily been that sludgy in the past, it made room for the dub.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Sunday (5/12)
Damien Jurado w/ Anna St. Louis
$20 ($18 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Spend any amount of time with Damien Jurado and he’s going to talk with you about movies. Speaking about the films that influenced his 14th album, the solitary masterwork In the Shape of a Storm, Jurado tosses out a list of favorites—American Graffiti, Paris, Texas, The Last Picture Show—films in which settings serve as silent, omniscient characters. But inquire about the curious way he writes songs, the hazy manner by which he seems to channel them from beyond the beyond, and the cinematic reference point he reaches for is a surprising one. “You ever see that movie Ghost? Whoopi Goldberg’s character, Oda Mae Brown—that’s who I am. These spirits are showing up at her door, jumping into her body. That’s how I feel. I don’t know what’s coming out of me…I just show up and deliver it.”
For more than two decades, Jurado has sung folk songs brimming with prophetic imagination. Whether singing ballads about killers, wounded lovers, UFO cults, or yes, the phantoms of departed friends, he’s populated his work with eerie foretelling, the sense that he’s divining something just on the verge of happening. He wrote his last record, 2018’s The Horizon Just Laughed as a goodbye letter to his home of Seattle, Washington, before he’d even decided to leave there for sunny Los Angeles. And while he recorded the ten songs featured on In the Shape of a Storm months before the passing of his longtime collaborator and close friend Richard Swift, it’s no coincidence that Swift’s death looms over the album. “His absence is very much felt on this record,” Jurado says.
Damien has always worked fast, but In the Shape of a Storm came together with unprecedented speed. Recorded over the course of two hours one California afternoon, it’s Jurado’s sparsest album to date. Gone are the thundering drums and psychedelic arrangements that defined the trilogy of concept albums he made with Swift. Gone even is the atmospheric air that hovered above his early albums for Sub Pop. Here, there’s only Jurado’s voice, acoustic guitar, and occasional accompaniment from Josh Gordon, playing a high-strung guitar tuned Nashville style, rendering its sound spooky and celestial. Though fans have long requested a solo acoustic album, the prospect never made sense to Jurado, until one day it simply did. “It just felt like it was time,” Jurado says. The idea of an unadorned album became its own medium in his mind, like a painter who sets down his brushes and instead opts for charcoal pencils instead.
“There is nothing left to hide,” Jurado sings on “Lincoln,” which opens the record. It’s something of a thesis statement for these songs. Everything here is clear and laid bare, two-tone, like the drawing Jurado crafted for the record’s cover. Originally written for 2000’s The Ghost of David, “Lincoln” was shelved and forgotten about until Damien came across it on an old cassette tape. The discovery inspired him to go about gathering up songs that had never found proper homes. As a result, In the Shape of a Storm is like an archive of previously abandoned songs. And yet, despite their disparate nature, Jurado’s visions hang together in curiously symmetrical ways: the moon shines in both the echo-drenched “Silver Ball” and closer “Hands on the Table”; rain ties the title song to the lilting “Oh Weather.” Jurado repeatedly returns to oceanic poetry—waves, tides, and shores—and to the theme of anchors, the metaphorical ones we use to tether ourselves to the sea floor and to each other. These are songs about the enormity of the unknown — the shape of storms that threaten to swallow us whole— and above all, they are songs about the connections that keep us from drifting away. “We are not meant to be on our own,” Jurado sings on “Throw Me Now Your Arms.”
Damien Jurado’s discography is filled with songs written as miniature movies, cinematic vignettes that capture people, the places they are from, and where they are going. In the Shape of a Storm is his first black and white picture. It’s both a snapshot of two hours in a California recording studio and a document spanning 19 years and a life of music. It is the sound of a singer pouring out possible futures and visions. “I believe songs have their own time and place,” Jurado says. For these ten, that time has finally come.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Monday (5/13)
Trapper Schoepp w/ The Proud Flesh, Elison Jackson (solo)
Free with RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7:00PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Trapper Schoepp was in a dark place.
The Milwaukee-based tunesmith had been on a roll, earning acclaim as one of America’s most gifted new singer-songwriters, singled out for his remarkably detailed tales of characters on the fringes of society. His Brendan Benson-produced second album, 2016’s RANGERS & VALENTINES, was hailed among that year’s finest, declared a “mini masterpiece” by Relix after being named Billboard’s “Best of the Week.” But by the time 2016 came to its end, Schoepp had split with his longtime partner, been all but forced out of his longtime home and band clubhouse by a new landlord, and worst of all, painfully re-herniated a disc in his back that had plagued him for years.
Heartbroken but unbowed, Schoepp found solace and direction in his music, devoting his substantial energies to crafting what now proves his most emotional and expertly crafted collection of songs thus far.
Schoepp credits a couple of significant events with getting him out of his ditch and back in the game. He’d told a few friends about his desire to perhaps try working on a baby grand piano, despite his inability to play the instrument. In December 2016, he returned home from another long tour and lo and behold, said friends had arranged for one to be sitting in his living room when he got home. Schoepp spent the next months teaching himself to play the hundred-year-old instrument, writing songs like “Drive Thru Divorce” and “It’s Over” using only white keys.
RSVP HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Tuesday (5/14)
Meat Puppets w/ Sumo Princess, Stephen Maglio
$20/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: The Meat Puppets’ story begins with idle time spent in the wide-open spaces of the Phoenix area during the early 1980s. Friendly high school acquaintances, Bostrom and Curt Kirkwood were in the dawn of their twenties, unemployed and “starting to hang out because we were the only guys home,” the drummer recalled with a laugh. “Cris was going to school at the time, so we would lay around waiting for him to get out, and then he would join us as a trio. We began to make such a hellacious racket that we knew we were on to something.”
The collective influences in play ran the gamut—classic rock, British prog, the Dead, Zappa, Beefheart, fusion, the jazz avant-garde and, of course, punk rock, which had enjoyed a tightknit but robust scene in Phoenix since the mid-to-late ’70s. But the fascinating take on hardcore that can be heard on Meat Puppets, the band’s 1982 SST debut, had more to do with punk rock’s ethos of creative freedom (and Arizona’s psychedelic history) than with any calculated musical strategy. “Curt was trying to play in straight bands and getting kicked out,” Bostrom recalled. “I told him, ‘No—in this day and age you can be anything you need to be, and this band is going to support your weirdness.”
Throughout the ’80s, the Meat Puppets found a crucial advocate in SST. Founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, the trailblazing indie label emboldened the trio to follow their whims from one artistically brazen record to the next, and spearheaded a national touring network that gave them hard-earned exposure. Still, the hardcore kids devoted to the likes of Flag didn’t always take kindly to three longhairs whose punk was infused with Neil Young. “I got spit on so much,” Curt said. “I would get spit in my open eyeball and come offstage with loogies dripping off the guitar. It was hideous.”
But the band persevered, and by the late ’80s a dependable legion of Meatheads had accrued. “It was the attrition of the naysayers going away,” Curt recalled, “and not bothering to come and waste their money and waste our time.” But the same nonstop cycle of touring and recording that allowed the band to gather their following was also threatening to burn it out. “We were trying to do this to make a living,” Bostrom said, “so we were definitely interested in new opportunities.”
Major labels had begun to pluck the best of what was then called college rock, but the Meat Puppets weren’t the easiest sell. “We were not punk enough, and we were too punk,” Bostrom said. Eventually a deal was struck with London, and the Meat Puppets’ second album for the label, Too High to Die, became a gold record with a breakout single, “Backwater.”
Despite such achievement, the Meat Puppets hit a wall not much later. No Joke!, the follow-up to Too High, was strong, but lightning didn’t strike twice. The majors were quickly losing interest in the indie scene they’d been exploiting, Cris’ drug use had become a dire problem, and Bostrom was at a crossroads. “I needed to get a life,” he said. “I’d been on the road for 15 years.” Post-Nirvana sales and royalties had given everyone some savings, so we could afford to part ways.
Kirkwood and Bostrom remained on good terms. A computer enthusiast who built a thriving career in information technology, Bostrom became the band’s webmaster and oversaw their ambitious Rykodisc reissue campaign in 1999. By the time Kirkwood assembled a new Meat Puppets lineup for 2000’s Golden Lies, Bostrom was happily settled into his work and family life. Cris, once again happy and healthy, and Curt reunited for 2007’s Rise to Your Knees and three well-received subsequent albums. The Meat Puppets continued to grow and impress as a live act, though the set lists mostly acknowledged albums such as Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun, which had long been recognized as landmarks of alternative music.
Meatheads should go ahead and add Dusty Notes to the canon, on record and onstage. “When we had it pretty much done,” Curt Kirkwood recalled, “Derrick said, ‘You know what people are gonna do after they listen to this? Listen to it again.’”
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Wednesday (5/15)
Moby in conversation with Michael Ian Black (Book Event)
$34.95 (Each ticket includes a copy of “Then It Fell Apart”)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Moby was born in Harlem in 1965. He is a singer-songwriter, musician, DJ and photographer. The first volume of his memoirs, Porcelain, was published in 2016.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS
Friday, August 9th
The Mountain Goats
$26.00-$39.50/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
College Street Music Hall – New Haven
INFO: THE MOUNTAIN GOATS ARE JOHN DARNIELLE, PETER HUGHES, JON WURSTER, AND MATT DOUGLAS. THEY HAVE BEEN MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER AS A QUARTET FOR SEVERAL YEARS. THREE OF THEM LIVE IN NORTH CAROLINA AND ONE HAS MOVED BACK TO ROCHESTER. THEIR SONGS OFTEN SEEK OUT DARK LAIRS WITHIN WHICH TERRIBLE MONSTERS DWELL, BUT THEIR MISSION IS TO RETRIEVE THE TREASURE FROM THE DARK LAIR & PERSUADE THE TERRIBLE MONSTERS INSIDE TO SEEK OUT THE PATH OF REDEMPTION. AS AXL ROSE ONCE MEMORABLY ASKED, IN THE SONG “TERRIBLE MONSTER”: “WHAT’S SO TERRIBLE ABOUT MONSTERS, ANYWAY?” THIS IS THE QUESTION THE MOUNTAIN GOATS HAVE BEEN DOGGEDLY PURSUING SINCE 1991. THEY WILL NEVER LEAVE OFF THIS QUEST UNTIL EVERY OPTION HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED. THANK YOU.
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRI (5/10) HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Sunday, August 4th
Swearin’, Mike Krol
$15 ($13 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO:
Swearin’: Swearin’ is Allison Crutchfield, Kyle Gilbride, Jeff Bolt, and Amanda Bartley.
Mike Krol: Of all the breakups in Mike Krol’s songs, the most harrowing story is about his breakup with music.
In 2015, coming off his best record yet and the ensuing world tour, Krol found himself in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis. He’d invested everything to create the rock-and-roll life he’d always wanted, but he wasn’t sure the life wanted him back.
Power Chords, Krol’s new Merge release, picks up where 2015’s Turkey left off. It traces Krol’s journey back to punk rock, harnessing both the guitar technique and the musical redemption referenced in its title. To rediscover the power in those chords, Krol recorded for two-plus years in three separate locations (Nashville, Los Angeles, and Krol’s native Wisconsin). The record opens in a howling maelstrom of feedback: welcome to Krol’s crucible. After a stage-setting spoken-word intro (“I used to never understand the blues, until the night I met you. And every day since, I’ve gotten better at guitar”), we find ourselves back in familiar Krol territory—aggressive and assertive, scratchy and raw, catchy as hell—but something has changed. The sounds have a new density—and so do the stories. Krol’s lyrics have always walked a fine line between self-acceptance and self-destruction, but throughout Power Chords, they reveal a new sense of self-awareness. “Without a little drama I grow bored and sick of all my days,” he sings on “Little Drama,” and it’s just one revelatory moment on a record full of them.
Of course, none of this is to say that Krol has mellowed. You might find a mea culpa or two, but Mike Krol will never be chastened. If anything, he’s out more for revenge than forgiveness, and if he’s grown, it’s because he’s grown bolder. He’s wielding the same influences—Misfits, The Strokes, early Weezer, Ramones—but turning up the gravity and the gain. Indeed, Krol has gone somewhere new; yes, he bludgeoned himself with over-analysis and self-loathing, but along the way he stumbled upon a trove of intricate guitar lines and artfully mutating melodies. It’s there in the chorus of “Blue and Pink,” the bridge in “I Wonder,” the entirety of the deliriously infectious first single, “An Ambulance.”
Music ruined Krol’s life. And then saved it. In chronicling that process, Krol has made his best record—painful, voyeuristic, and angry, but ultimately transcendent and timeless. It is the sound of Krol giving in to a force greater than himself, as though the chords are playing him rather than the other way around.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Saturday, August 24th
Mark Mulcahy (Miracle Legion, Polaris)
$20 ($15 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: “One of the great singers of our generation showcases the depth of his talents.” –Consequence of Sound
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Mark Mulcahy returns with his brand-new LP, ‘The Gus’, will be available on Friday June 7 on the Mezzotint Label. The Gus is Mulcahy’s sixth solo record and follows 2017’s dynamic The Possum in the Driveway and his celebrated 2013 return record, Dear Mark J Mulcahy I Love You Long heralded by contemporary luminaries like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and covered by touchstone artists such as The National and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Mulcahy refuses to rest on laurels and turn out the same type of album twice. Inspired to “up his lyrical game” while reading a collection of short fiction by George Saunders, The Gus finds the songwriter channeling his eclectic voice and ear for melody into the role of storyteller more than ever before. The result is ten infectious songs that combine Mulcahy’s unique window on the world with stories that absorb listeners more with each spin.
In addition to his celebrated solo career, audiences may also know Mulcahy as the frontman of seminal ‘80s rock band Miracle Legion or as “Muggy Polaris,” ringleader of Polaris, the fictional house band of the beloved ‘90s Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Both Miracle Legion and Polaris have reunited in recent years to tour and will likely do it again.
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRI (5/10) HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, September 13th
Barns Courtney
$20-$125/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: The title of Barns Courtney’s new album will no doubt be familiar to anyone who’s ever searched for something online and found themselves face to face with nothing. But 404 is an album that explores feelings of loss and bereftness inspired by life’s habit of throwing up its own error pages, with Barns exploring absence, frustration, and the never-ending search for something that seemed like it would always be there until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t: his childhood. “It’s painful knowing that something has gone, whether it’s a good time, a good feeling, a pleasant section of existence, or something physical. I’m always wondering: if you were to go back and find places you knew as a child, what would they look like?” Barns says.
There was a time not so long ago when a 16-year-old kid who’d spent his teens ricocheting between Seattle and Ipswich thought he was about to be the biggest star in the world. He and some mates got a deal with the biggest of all the big labels, then spent three years working with one of the planet’s hottest producers. What could go wrong? Well, plenty. “My entire life since I was 14 had been an upward trajectory,” is how Barns remembers it. “Then suddenly at the age of 22 I’m dropped, I’m totally, woefully unprepared for the real world. No qualifications. I didn’t bother learning to drive, because I thought I’d be driven everywhere. Thank God I didn’t have any success — I would have been a complete ass.”
The years in the wilderness that followed formed the basis of Barns’ 2017 debut album The Attractions Of Youth, a blistering shot of blues-driven rock that got this singular pop performer’s foot back in the door. Songs like Glitter & Gold and Fire became viral smashes, prompting a swell of support on both sides of the Atlantic that saw Barns performing on Conan O’Brien and opening for everyone from The Who, to Blur, to Ed Sheeran. Which brings us to 2019 and a body of work that finds this reflexive, meticulous pop storyteller delivering a minutely crafted album with big tunes, flashes of humour and no shortage of ambition. Kickstarted by 2018’s sparky, Atari-referencing single 99, it’s an album that delves back beyond the arrested development of Barns’ early-20s and into the teens he spent in Seattle and then Ipswich.
“The record’s partly about the bizarre modern formalisation of fun, and the strange ritual that we all go through from childhood into adulthood,” is how Barns describes one aspect of the music. And layered on top of that all, because there really is quite a lot going on in this album, is Barns’ experience of being out of town — and taking time out of real life — then coming back down to earth with a bump. “You go off and live this fantastical existence, play these shows and have fun, and you come back and you expect everyone to be the same as they were when you left,” he notes. “But they’ve all grown up. It’s like Peter Pan coming back from Neverland.”
Babylon, written shortly after Barns returned from having accidentally spent most of this album’s recording budget on an extended stay in a Carmel chateau, came to life in somewhat tense circumstances. “I’d spent all the money, didn’t have any songs to show for it, and had nowhere to stay,” Barns remembers. He offered collaborator Sam Battle’s parents £300 and moved into their Peterborough home, sleeping on Sam’s bedroom floor. It was where the pair had first made music together many years earlier, a full-circle moment Barns remembers being “bleak and depressing”. “I felt myself degenerating into insanity in that tiny room. I spent one memorable day in the foetal position under a chair while Sam muttered in the corner. It was taking us to the edges of our own sanity, but that’s where I wrote Babylon: a song about feelings of losing myself and being set adrift.”
Boy Like Me, about being virtually invisible to the opposite sex, finds Barns revisiting a song he began writing several years ago while on tour around Nashville; Hollow, originally inspired by Sam’s desolation at having to sell a prized synth in order to put food on his table, eventually twisted into a song about loss, love and hollowness in someone’s absence. The album finishes with Cannonball, a song about “walking through a waking dream when everything is teetering; floating through life but weighed down by everything you’re carrying”. In common with many of the songs on 404 the vocals, largely improvised, were recorded in one take in the middle of the night. Unusually, a lot of what you’ll hear on 404 captures the very first moment Barns ever expressed some of his deepest thoughts.
All in all, Barns says 404 is “a commentary on my own journey from awestruck naivety to the dark realisation of adulthood”. The big picture, he adds, is “a weird alternative Narnia or Neverland, where all the tropes of your childhood have melted. From Pokémon to Nintendo 64 the core of my being is there: an unorthodox maelstrom of memories condensed down into this bizarre undulating world”.
Despite the new album forcing Barns to confront difficult points of his life, it strikes an overwhelmingly optimistic note. “This record’s actually a lot happier than the last one,” he smiles. “With the first album I was suffocating, I could hardly talk to anybody, I felt terrified and bitter and downtrodden — I’m still aware that I carry a lot, but a lot of great music comes from pain, and when you’re in pain you can’t help but be your most authentic self in your music.”
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