Archers of Loaf
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYARCHERS OF LOAFAs sculpted shards of guitar—tumbling, tolling, squalling—shower the jittery bounce of a piano on opener “Human,” it’s obvious that Reason in Decline, Archers of Loaf’s first album in 24 years, will be more than a nostalgic, low-impact reboot. When they emerged from North Carolina’s ’90s indie-punk incubator, the Archers’ hurtling, sly, gloriously dissonant roar was a mythologized touchstone of slacker-era refusal. But this, the distilled shudder of “Human” (as in “It’s hard to be human / When only death can set you free”), is an entirely different noise. In fact, it’s a startling revelation. A few distinctions between 2022 Archers and the Clinton-era crew—whose “South Carolina” could be heard blaring out of Jordan Catalano’s car radio on ABC teen-angst epic My So-Called Life. First, guitarists Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, once headstrong smartasses inciting a series of artful pileups on the band’s four studio albums and EP, are now a fluidly complementary, sonically advanced unit. Notably, Johnson’s signature trebly lines peal clearly above the din instead of struggling to be heard. Second, singer-songwriter Bachmann, after throat surgery, relearned how to sing (this time from his diaphragm); as a result, he no longer howls like the angriest head cold on the Eastern Seaboard. And now, his lyrics balance righteous wrath with a complex tangle of adult perspective. He still spits bile, but it’s less likely to concern scene politics, music trends, or shady record labels thwarting the dreams of a young rock band.Bachmann puts it bluntly: “What I really think about going back to the Archers and doing a new record is that the three other members of this band are awesome. It’s not about responding to the past or whatever our bullshit legacy is. I just wanted to work with these guys because I knew the chemistry we had and that we still have. I knew that was rare. I didn’t care what it ended up sounding like.”Archers of Loaf’s first tour of duty ended after 1998’s White Trash Heroes. The album did not raise the band’s once touted commercial roof, and the members—Bachmann, Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price—were a bedraggled bunch of coulda-beens. Price was unable to play without extreme pain due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Bachmann itched to try a different musical approach. Everyone was tapped out in one way or another. Though the four remained good friends and convened for occasional reunion gigs (to support Merge’s 2011–12 album reissues, for instance), they never worked on new music. Gentling had joined Band of Horses; Johnson, now a criminal defense attorney in Asheville, North Carolina, contributed guitar to projects when he had the time. On his own, Bachmann thrived, releasing 11 albumsof atmospheric, folky rock/pop under his own name or “group” moniker Crooked Fingers. In recent years, he’d toured as a sideman/foil for torch-country star Neko Case. opener: WE HAVE IGNITION
LATE SHOW: Illiterate Light
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYILLITERATE LIGHTIlliterate Light has been stretching boundaries and upending expectations with a captivating blend of soaring indie rock, swirling psychedelia, and atmospheric folk that calls to mind everything from Neil Young and My Morning Jacket to Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses. Recorded with producers Adrian Olsen (Foxygen, Natalie Prass) and Vance Powell (Jack White, Kings Of Leon, Chris Stapleton), the record is blissful andecstatic, with a mix of raw electric guitars, propulsive drums, and shimmering harmonies that showcases the band’s remarkable live setup—Gorman plays guitar with his hands and synth bass with his feet, while his musical partner, Jake Cochran, plays a standup drum kit, which captures the scintillating energy that’s fueled their journey.Gorman and Cochran first met while attending college in Harrisonburg, VA, where they discovered a shared passion for sustainable living and community building. After graduation, they took over a local organic farm, spending their days tending crops and working farmer’s markets and their nights performing anywhere they could land (or make) a gig. Dubbing themselves the Petrol Free Jubilee Carnival Tour, the pair wouldoften tour the region on their bikes, sometimes joined by as many as two-dozen other cyclists and artists, performing at coffee houses, street corners, rock clubs, and off-the-grid communities.Hailed as “a perfect addition to your summertime playlist” by NPR, the band honed in on their distinctive sound and identity over years of relentless touring, earning dates along the way with the likes of Shakey Graves, Rayland Baxter, Mt. Joy, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Futurebirds, and The Head and The Heart in addition to high-profile festival slots at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk, and more.DOGWOOD TALESOut of the Shenandoah Valley blossoms the debut album from Dogwood Tales Too Hard To Tell. Recorded at the Fidelitorium in North Carolina (Wilco, Avett Brothers, Mandolin Orange) on 2 inch analogue tape, this organic Americana/Alt-Country record hits like a contemporary take on Neil Young’s Harvest. In 2016 they released an EP and toured heavily building a strong fan base. This promising debut full-length is sure to expand on the solid foundation they’ve built over the past few years. Benjamin Ryan and Kyle Grim are the duo behind Dogwood Tales. They began playing together in high school and became friends playing in pop-punk bands in bordering towns. Naturally they cultivated a more roots oriented pallet, echoing the classic sounds of their home in the Valley. Their discovery of the great country duos of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris and more recently Mandolin Orange gave them a broader view of the valley music they would set out to create. The Tales’ songs have a spiritual aspect that derives more from the Blue Ridge Mountains than the Church. Their lyricism grows out of a serious commitment to literature and specifically the Southern-Gothic canon. Too Hard To Tell carries the weighted stories and one-liners often found in the songs of American folk music with a special attention to tone and emotion. The songs speak of scenarios and heavy stations of life and death in small town America.
PATIO SHOW: Ivy Eld (Album Release Show)
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGIVY ELDIvy Eld’s music dances in the land of paradox. Her voice is simultaneously angelic and rawly human, fiery and red-wine smooth. Her evocative and tender songwriting invites listeners to dive in quickly and deeply, piercing weary hearts and enshrouding them with the fierce love and witnessing they desire and deserve. Her vulnerable, heartfelt lyrics soar through the air on the wings of her transcendent, soulful voice. A mental health professional for over a decade and a half, Ivy has been privy to the sacred inner worlds of thousands of souls (while navigating her own inner hallways, dark attics, and sun-lit living rooms). This rich interpersonal and intrapersonal experience and her curiosity about the internal landscape saturates her songs. She longs for her music to be an oasis of healing and beauty, a call to deeper respect and compassion for ourselves and for humanity, and also just some plain old fun for the ears. As a solo artist, her shows are intimate, playful, and deep. And when accompanied by her band, her songs become even more layered and potent with the backdrop of rich rhythms and moody, electric sounds. Ivy considers her music to be another facet of how she shows up in the world in authentic and passionate service— both as a musician and as a therapist. She hopes her thoughtful, earthy, poetic songs will inspire others to look inside—light, shadows, and all—and come home to their deeply worthy selves.
PATIO SHOW: Corey Parlamento & Claire Hoke
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGCOREY PARLAMENTOCorey Parlamento is a solo guitarist and songwriter living in Asheville, NC. His songs blend elements of traditional songwriting with more experimental and neo-classical compositions. Being heavily influenced by film music, Parlamento’s songs and performances are immersive in their instrumentation, allowing a world to be built around personal and abstract narrative.CLAIRE HOKEClaire Hoke is a singer songwriter born and raised on North Carolina land and music. She’s been performing around WNC since 2018 in various groupings and these days finds herself settling into playing her tunes solo. Drawing inspiration from artists like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Sarah Jarosz, Claire weaves her innermost musings into the fabric of her fingerstyle and open tuning driven music. She uses songwriting to express things that are honest, uncomfortable, and sometimes left unsaid
PATIO SHOW: The Trusty Hucksters
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGTHE TRUSTY HUCKSTERSThe Trusty Hucksters are from North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, the Great Expanse of the Universe, and Under Your Own Bed. They crawl out and they beam down to perform that tasty Tango from Tartarus, that Swing Jazz from Alcatraz, that Mambo from Below. Throw in another dollar and you’ve got that Vaudeville from the Hills, a Rock and Roll Rigamarole that you can’t get at your local vegetable stand. Two for a buck, three for five dollars!
Brent Cobb & Hayes Carll Gettin’ Together
– 7PM DOORS / 8PM SHOW – ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYBRENT COBB and HAYES CARLL Acclaimed alt-country artists Brent Cobb and Hayes Carll are set to hit the road for a co-headlining tour kicking off at The Basement East in Nashville, touring throughout the Southeast and Northeast, and wrapping up in New York City at City Winery – Pier 57. The two road warriors are bringing a special edge to this run, though, as each artist will hit the stage to perform their own songs, before uniting after both sets to perform a one-of-a-kind collaborative concert during which they’ll swap stories about inspiration and life on the road. For Cobb, the run signifies a chance to link up with one of his favorite musicians on the planet. “Hayes is everything a true artist/songwriter ought to be in my book. Somehow, I’ve had the privilege of playing shows with him here and there over the years, but I’ve always hoped we’d be able to do something a little longer lasting. We’re gettin’ together to give ourselves as well as the crowds something that I believe we’ll all talk about for a while.” Carll concurs, adding, “Every time I listen to Brent, I’m reminded that there’s still some groove, soul, and sanity in this world. His songs hit their mark with a laid-back confidence and invite us to celebrate the good and shake hands after we work through the hard. He’s an extraordinary everyman, and that’s the kind of friend I like gettin’ together with.” Cobb is touring in support of his January 2022 release, And Now, Let’s Turn to Page…, which was made with legendary producer Dave Cobb in RCA Studio A in Nashville. Carll will be performing songs from his whole discography and, in particular, from 2021’s You Get It All. You Get It All — produced by Allison Moorer and guitar legend Kenny Greenberg. Together, the duo will showcase their singular country styles before uniting to prove the unending power of collaboration. Catch them in a city near you.
Ty Segall Solo Acoustic
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYTY SEGALL The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again? “Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday. “Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through. “Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years. Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion. CHARLES MOOTHART Charles Moothart is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He is best known for his collaborations with the garage rock musicians Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin. Moothart is the drummer for Segall’s current backing band, The Freedom Band. He was previously the guitarist for Segall’s backing band, the Ty Segall Band, and is the guitarist and vocalist in the pair’s hard rock project, Fuzz. Additionally, he is a member of Segall’s collaborative project with Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw, GØGGS.
[CANCELED] PATIO SHOW: William Matheny
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING (FIRST COME FIRST SERVED) WILLIAM MATHENYLet me tell you an anecdote about William Matheny. And no, this is not the 5:15 AM drive to the Albany Airport when we both were drinking Genesee beer and black coffee because we were both thinking correctly at that hour. More on that later. It was before I really knew William, but the moment when I knew that he was great. Envision: A punk rock club in Washington, DC, its inhabitants and paid customers. Who knows why and how he had been booked? A songwriter from Mannington, West Virginia stepping into the lair of upper-crust, judgment-packed DC punks with their Fugazi-leftover orthodoxies in their wildly provincial scene. He had fifteen minutes, a Vox amp, a telecaster and no one interested in the audience. I live in DC and I would have fled. There was a 10,000% chance that the next band up was going to have a spiel about gentrification and then play “angular riffs.” Billy — I can call him that, you can’t — played a solo set. He played loud. He played “Out For Revenge” and “29 Candles” and “Teenage Bones” and the other great songs which you may not have heard on his debut LP. Over the course of that short set he first brought that crowd to heel and then brought the crowd around. By the end the applause was thick and the appreciation unmistakable. He did it in DC. He can do it anywhere.But let’s talk about the other thing with the beers and the coffee and Albany. You need to know that William Matheny and I have been through some things together. We’ve seen parts of the world that I was sure existed only in Elmore Leonard novels. When I needed to pull over on the Cross-Bronx Expressway to throw up in a plastic trash bag, he was my driver and bag provider. We made it to the Bowery Ballroom an hour later for soundcheck and everything went great. William Matheny is the lead guitarist in my band the Paranoid Style, in addition to his other obligations. William Matheny is a man that makes things happen.William Matheny may be the best songwriter working, and is at a minimum the best songwriter you might have never heard of. For those who haven’t had that good fortune, let’s go, as Warner Wolfe used to say, to the videotape. Consider his 2018 standout single “Christian Name,” which is like Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream” if it had been “Runnin’ Down A Nightmare.”Over the past four years, he has assembled a wondrous catalog which situates itself amongst the indelible tradition of roots-rock misfits like Guy Clark and Lowell George, with just enough Jackson Browne-craft and Springsteen-triumphalism to make the thing potentially huge. You can’t talk about Matheny without talking about West Virginia, although it is sometimes true that he would prefer not to discuss it. Matheny is from Mannington, population smaller than your average small town. Like most of the state, Mannington fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War and represented a crucial strategic stronghold as one of the stops on the B&O Railroad. The correct side, not that it helped all that much. They say history is written by the winners, but in spite of upholding the Union, history was not written by Mannington. Heavy industry: logging and coal. An oil boom in the 1910s. Comfortable lives and then the Great Depression. Bankers and foreclosures. History was written by Mannington and then history was written on Mannington. That grand old feeling, indeed.
PATIO SHOW: Todd Baker
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEDTODD BAKERTodd Baker is a singer-songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and actor based in Brooklyn, NY. Writing and performing steadily since the late 1990’s, Baker has served as either front-man, bassist, guitarist or drummer for multiple bands including, most notably, Fountain Project, the Wicked Hemlocks, Featherweight and his own eponymously named solo project. He has also scored commercial projects for companies such as Condé Nast and Big Star NYC. With six studio albums to his credit, Baker will be releasing a new E.P. entitled Vampires in the Fall of 2022. This will be his third solo release, the follow up to The Disaster Handbook (2010) and When I Die (2015).
PATIO SHOW: The Greybirds
– ALL AGES- PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME, FIRST SERVEDTHE GREYBIRDSThe Greybirds is a band from Asheville, NC. What started as a songwriting partnership began to take on different forms: duo to five-piece, acoustic and/or electric, but the songs are the core of everything. The band formed in early 2022 after escaping to the mountains from big cities such as New York, Seattle & Atlanta. The sound is comprised of Wurlitzer, Upright Bass, two guitars, drums, and two lead harmony vocals. There are fingerprints of Rock & Roll, the common language of Folk, instrumentation of Early American Roots music, with a focus on vibe, dynamics, and lyricism.
