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 Space Ballroom – an intimate show with We The Kings with Where the Wild Live on (6/28), Mike Clip Payne (of Parliament Funkadelic) brings the 420 Funk Mob with Jen Durkin and The Business on (7/12), Oakland, CA psychedelic rock outfit Howlin Rain with Garcia Peoples on (8/9), rising indie pop star Tessa Violet on (8/11), L.A. singer-songwriter Weyes Blood on (9/6), and comedian Matt Braunger on (9/28)! Finally, at Cafe Nine, as part of our Manic Mondays weekly music series, Brooklyn-based rockers A Deer A Horse with Kid Sistr on (6/3) and Nashville via Havana pop group Sweet Lizzy Project on (7/15)! Don’t forget to grab your tickets to these great shows!
This week’s show schedule begins TONIGHT (5/23) with New Orleans funk/soul collective Tank and the Bangas with Adia Victoria at Wall Street Theater in Norwalk! The holiday weekend is full of great shows with Mephiskapheles & Pilfers co-headline show at Space Ballroom with Sgt. Scagnetti and Stop The Presses on Friday (5/24) and experimental indie pop collective Dirty Projectors at Space Ballroom with Buke and Gase on Sunday (5/26)! Enjoy your long weekend and these awesome shows!
CONTEST TIME! Enter for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the almost sold out Frank Iero and the Future Violents show at Space Ballroom on Friday, May 31st!
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 (5/23)
Tank and the Bangas w/ Adia Victoria
$22 ($19 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Wall Street Theater – Norwalk
INFO: Coming from New Orleans, Tank and the Bangas are surrounded by plenty of grand musical traditions. And the five-piece group has a rare knack for combining various musical styles—fiery soul, deft hip-hop, deep-groove R&B and subtle jazz—into one dazzling, cohesive whole that evokes the scope of New Orleans music while retaining a distinctive feel all its own.
“It’s music that can’t really be put in a box,” says singer and poet Tarriona “Tank” Ball. She fronts the band with vivid charisma that helped Tank and the Bangas win NPR’s 2017 Tiny Desk Concert Contest by unanimous acclaim, standing out among 6,000 entrants because of what Bob Boilen called “the depth of their lyricism and the versatility of their players.” Those same qualities also attracted the attention of Verve Records, which has signed the band.
Ball’s lyrical depth has been years in the making. She came up in the strong local slam poetry scene before meeting her bandmates: Merell Burkett on keyboards, Joshua Johnson on drums, Norman Spence on bass and synth keys and, eventually, Albert Allenback on alto sax and flute. “Growing up, I always could sing, but I wrote better than I sang, so I focused on writing,” she says. After her team won the National Poetry Slam Championship two years in a row, Ball turned her full attention to Tank and the Bangas.
What started as a loose collaboration at an open-mic night in 2011 has grown into a mesmerizing musical force that’s only picking up speed. After a featured set at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival early in the band’s career, the musicians built a reputation outside their hometown by grinding it out on the road, honing their live show and releasing the 2013 album Think Tank, all the while converting audiences into passionate fans and garnering critical acclaim, from the New Orleans Advocate to The New York Times. “It made us work hard,” Ball says of playing Jazz Fest. “It made us want to feel deserving of it.”
Their hard work is paying off: The Huffington Post says Tank and the Bangas defy description onstage, adding, “It’s music that you have to experience.” The experience is subject to change from one night to the next.
“One show will feel very electronic, or hip-hop, and another show will feel slow and vibe-y and jazzy, and then another show will just be poetry and off-the-cuff riffs,” says Johnson. “As a band, we don’t like to hear ourselves do the same thing for too long, so we might change a small thing here or there, and if we change enough small things, it seems like a big change.”
Tank and the Bangas won the Tiny Desk contest with “Quick,” a riotous single they released in 2017 (and soon accompanied with a cheeky, not entirely safe-for-work video). There’s more new music where that came from as the group works on the follow-up to Think Tank. “It’s going to be awesome,” Ball says. “It’s going to be fun, and a little vulnerable at the same time.”
The band’s ongoing evolution involves more than just music: Ball continues to grow and develop as a performer and writer. Even back in the open-mic days, she was a force of nature. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing as too free, but it was totally uninhibited. She was inspired,” Spence says, laughing at the memory. More recently, Ball has become less of a dervish onstage—“I was running around so much I didn’t have time to sing at all,” she say—while finding new ways of expressing herself as a writer.
“I don’t just think about myself when I write now,” she says. “Just being with my bandmates taught me to think more about other people. And when you have an audience of people ready to listen to you, you’re excited to connect with them, you really are.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday (5/24)
Mephiskapheles & Pilfers w/ Sgt. Scagnetti, Stop the Presses
$20 ($15 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO:
Mephiskapheles: Mephiskapheles are back in red and black. The band who invented the devilish, whimsical MTV- and radio-friendly genre of Satanic Ska, then defied critics by exploring even greater possibilities for their darkly original ska fusion, have reunited, with a new tour and new album in the works.
Formed in the East Village of New York City in early 1991 by a group of artists, ad-agency employees, and jazz musicians, Mephiskapheles played their first show on Long Island, and from day one began attracting a diverse, dedicated fan base.
Flash-forward to today; and with Satanic Ska being, without a doubt, the genre of music most relevant to our current times. Mephiskapheles are picking up where they left off, with a reissue program with Jump Up Records, a focused performance schedule, and a new Mephiskapheles album in the works.
Pilfers: Pilfers are a legendary band out of New York City that play an infectious, unique sound that blends pop, reggae, hardcore, dub, punk, and ska. Their sound, dubbed “raggacore” features the talents of lead vocalist Coolie Ranx, guitarist/vocalist Nick Bacon, drummer James Blanck, bassist Ben Basile, and trombonist/keyboardist Billy Kottage. Pilfers are well known and loved for their intense live performances that encourage constant crowd participation. Followers of Pilfers have been affectionately named “Pilfers Crew.”
Formed in 1997, Pilfers has toured internationally with the likes of Bad Brains, Zebrahead, Reel Big Fish, the Specials, Madness, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Amazing Royal Crowns, Mustard Plug, and Goldfinger. Pilfers released two albums including a self-titled full-length and Chawalaleng (Mojo Records). In the summer of 2001, the band broke up over various differences. Since 2005, the original line up has come together for several sold out reunion shows along the East Coast for their devoted fans.
In 2013, Pilfers hit the road with Reel Big Fish making new fans across the U.S. and Canada. The strong demand for more from their Pilfers Crew and their love for playing intense live shows has them hitting the road more frequently. Pilfers are currently recording new songs for an upcoming full-length album. Stay tuned for big t’ings to come!
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Sunday (5/26)
Dirty Projectors w/ Buke and Gase
$26/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
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.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS
Monday, June 3rd
A Deer A Horse w/ Kid Sistr
FREE WITH RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7:00PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: From their roots in Brooklyn’s DIY scene, A Deer A Horse has grown into a relentless touring act over the years. The band has clocked in nearly 250 shows across the country since 2017.
ADAH is comprised of Rebecca Satellite (vocals/guitar) and Angela Phillips (bass/vocals), and Dylan Teggart (drums). Their debut EP, _Backswimmer_, drew praise from the AV Club, who noted the band’s unlikely marriage of doom metal dirges with vocal earworms.
In 2018, ADAH released singles “Cold Shoulder” and “Double Wide” in anticipation of their new EP, Everything Rots That Is Rotten. The EP aims to reflect upon the current socio-political moment, offering the possibility of catharsis in the midst of systemic corruption. Everything Rots That Is Rotten was recorded at Silver Cord Studio, home-base of French metal pioneers, Gojira, and will be released on Detroit’s Corpse Flower Records on June 21st.
RSVP HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, June 28th
We The Kings w/ Where The Wild Live
$25 ($20 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: We The Kings is Hunter Thomsen (guitar), Coley O’Toole (auxiliary/background vocals), Travis Clark (guitar/vocals), Danny Duncan (drums) & Charles Trippy (bass). The band currently resides in sunny Bradenton, FL. Their album releases include Self Titled (2007), Smile Kid (2010), Sunshine State Of Mind (2011), Somewhere Somehow (2013), and The Story of Tonight (2016).
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, July 12th
Mike Clip Payne’s 420 Funk Mob w/ Jen Durkin and The Business
$22 ($20 adv)/All Ages/Doors at 7:00PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: The 420 Funk Mob is the “Off Days” project from P-Funk front man Mike Clip Payne that has headlined festivals, clubs and special events in Europe and the United States since 1997. The 420 Funk Mob features a line up of allstar musicans from inside and outside the Parliament/Funkadelic universe. You never know who you are going to see or what you are going to hear at a 420 Funk Mob show. Why? Most bands switch up the set list every night to keep things fresh. Clip Payne’s 420 Funk Mob takes it one step further. Band members change every tour. The 420FM has been everything from a 6 piece Mini Funkadelic to a 20 piece Funkestra with horns, strings and backing singers. Past bands have included PFunk, David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Dr. Dre, Amy Winehouse, MuzikMafia, and Lenny Kravitz members. Special guests have included George Clinton, Fred Wesley, Leo Nocentelli of the Meters, Dr Know and Daryl Jennifer of Bad Brains, MuzikMafia members James Otto, Shannon Lawson and Jon Nicholson, Jazzman Stanley Jordan, Eric McFadden, Matheiu M Chedid, Alex Gopher and DJ Logic.
A 420 Funk Mob show is more than just a concert it is an EVENT!
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Monday, July 15th
Sweet Lizzy Project
FREE WITH RSVP (or $5 at the door)/21 and over/Doors at 7:00PM
Cafe Nine – New Haven
INFO: Sweet Lizzy Project, one of the most culturally significant bands to emerge from Cuba in recent years, has a distinctive sound imbued with overtones of classic American indie pop-rock suffused with an intoxicating Latino flair. Lead singer Lisset Diaz’s incomparable voice, which has been likened to that of a long-caged sparrow finally set free, captures listeners’ imaginations, note by note, leaving fans enthralled as they surrender to the group’s mesmerizing forcefield of sound. In addition to Diaz, who also plays acoustic guitar, the five-piece band includes: Miguel Comas, lead guitar, producer, and background vocals; Wilfredo Gatell, keyboards and background vocals; drummer Angel Luis Millet, and bass player Alejandro Gonzalez. Sweet Lizzy’s songs, all original and penned in English, are reflective of the members’ wide range of ages, from their 20´s to 40´s. SLP has attracted international attention with its high-energy, genre-defying live performances. In 2017, they were showcased on PBS’s “Havana Time Machine,” alongside Grammy award-winning group, The Mavericks. It was a fortuitous pairing, as it gave SLP an opportunity to forge a relationship with Raul Malo, the Mavericks congenial lead singer, who invited them to Nashville,TN the following year. Since arriving in the United States, SLP has performed coast-to-coast. The group, which was featured on PBS’s Emmy award-winning music television series, “Bluegrass Underground,” has been touring the nation with The Mavericks. SLP has just completed its second album, “Technicolor,” which was mixed by renowned sound engineer Niko Bolas and Thom Pununzio at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. The album is slated for release in the early spring of 2019.
RSVP HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, August 9th
Howlin Rain w/ Garcia Peoples
$15/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Oakland, California’s Howlin Rain are touring in support of ‘The Alligator Bride,’ their fifth LP of swampy, ragged, unapologetic rock ’n roll. Led by Ethan Miller (co-founder of psych rockers Comets On Fire and Heron Oblivion), the band recorded the album at the Mansion in San Francisco, direct to tape, in one or two takes. MOJO Magazine called the collection “an album of sublime crescendos and melodies like warm embrac- es, so joyful, so tender, so warmly anthemic, its vintage moves are timeless, and irresistible.”
‘The Alligator Bride’ is Howlin Rain’s first release on Silver Current Records, the artist- run label owned by Miller, and gleefully indebted to classic rock formations like the Grateful Dead’s ‘Europe ’72′ and Free’s 1969 masterpiece of atmospheric, minimalist blues, ‘Fire and Water.’ “The guiding principle for ‘The Alligator Bride’ was to create ‘Neal Cassady Rock,’” says Miller. “Which is to say, high energy, good-times adventure music, driving the hippie bus, shirtless and stoned, up for four days straight, and extremely fuzzy around the edges.” It’s a fitting vision for the band: torn between eras, fuzzed out but full of soul, an epic perspective on what’s come before and what lies ahead, woven into a cosmic tapestry of riffs, rhymes, and resonant frequencies.
Look for Howlin Rain to also release the first in a series of live albums dubbed ‘Under The Wheel’ in the coming months to document their ecstatic, freewheeling live performances.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Sunday, August 11th
Tessa Violet
$15/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: Tessa Violet Williams was born in Chicago and later claimed the small creative town of Ashland, Oregon as her home. She was drawn to Ashland’s theater community in her adolescence and in 2011, during her senior year of high school, she began posting videos online. Tessa quickly became one of the first breakout stars on YouTube and developed close relationships with her fans and other creators.
Last year, Violet took a break from vlogging to focus on writing and recording, and in June 2018, released “Crush,” – the first single from her forthcoming album, Bad Ideas. In the time since her last two singles “Crush” and “Bad Ideas” have exploded, Tessa has gone from an acoustic-leaning solo artist, to an inspirational female fronting a shreddy live band (anchored by badass drummer Jess Bowen). Although her recordings are competitive modern productions which perform well on playlists, her live show has a raw organic energy that is intoxicating. She sold out her first ever headline shows (The Troubadour in LA; Mercury in NYC; Camden Assembly in London) and finally achieved her goal of bonafide rock-queen status when she was offered her first festival slot on this year’s Lollapalooza (incidentally selected by Billboard as one of the 10 new festival artists to look out for in 2019). In addition, she was tapped as main support for COIN’s US tour in February, became the first YouTube Foundry Artist of 2019 and will be headlining her first US tour this summer.
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Friday, September 6th
Weyes Blood
$18/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
Space Ballroom – Hamden
INFO: The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down — there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising (out April 5, 2019 on Sub Pop Records), Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist.
Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.”
“An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions — the lyrics, the melody, the production — to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental.
Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements — one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.”
The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.”
As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that the Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans.
The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.”
But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRI (5/24) HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
Saturday, September 28th
Matt Braunger (Comedian)
$25/All Ages/Doors at 7PM
INFO: Matt Braunger was raised in Portland, Oregon. A headlining comedian since 2007 and an actor since childhood, Matt studied theatre in New York and improvisation in Chicago. Matt’s television credits include starring in the Amazon pilot The New V.I.P.’s, recurring roles on ABC’s Agent Carter, NBC’s Up All Night, Netflix’s Disjointed, go90’s My Dead Ex, and the Starz series Take My Wife. Matt was a series regular on Fox’s MADtv, a cast member of the TruTV series How to Be a Grown Up, as well as appearances on BoJack Horseman, Garfunkel and Oates, Maron, HBO’s Family Tree, the Chelsea Lately roundtable, The Michael J Fox Show, Happy Endings, CONAN, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Pete Holmes Show, United States of Tara, Pushing Daisies, Carpoolers, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Acceptable TV, and Live At Gotham.
Matt was also a regular guest on @midnight and appeared in Showtime’s SXSW Comedy with W. Kamau Bell and Comedy Central’s The Meltdown. He won the 2008 “Best Of The Fest” at the inaugural Rooftop Comedy Festival in Aspen. In 2009, he was named to Variety’s Top 10 Comics to Watch, and Comedy Central’s Hot 9 in ’09 list, his debut album Soak Up The Night was released by Comedy Central Records and he was named to the iTunes REWIND Top 20 Albums of 2009. In 2010, he recorded his half hour Comedy Central Presents special and in 2012 released his debut hour-long special entitled Shovel Fighter, also released as an album. Matt’s hour-long comedy special, Big, Dumb Animal is now available on Netflix, and he recently recorded a new hour special coming soon. He also has a hilarious podcast “Advice from a Dipshit”.
Along with touring comedy clubs across the country, Matt is also a regular at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles, and he headlined the Old Milwaukee Comedy Tour for Funny Or Die in 2013. Matt has also performed at a variety of prestigious comedy festivals including the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal and Chicago, The TBS Comedy Festival Las Vegas, and
South By Southwest. Matt also co-founded the popular Bridgetown Comedy Festival that takes place annually in Portland.
TICKETS AVAILABLE 10AM FRI (5/24) HERE: https://www.ticketfly.com/
**Tickets are available for all these shows in the shop (cash only for ticket sales) without the online fees. **