Summer Salt: Driving Back to Hawaii Fall Tour
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYSUMMER SALTThis June, trop-pop outfit Summer Salt—formed around the duo of singer/guitarist Matthew Terry and drummer, multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chung—will release their fifth LP, Electrolytes, via their new record label AWAL. Produced by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Ziggy Marley, The Linda Lindas), Electrolytes’ first single “Poolside,” drops March 29th. “‘Poolside’ is a song about being there for your significant other, and not forgetting the romance as time goes on,” Terry and Chung explain. “It is a song about love and being emotionally available and reliable in a relationship. Reassurance that you’re there for each other at the end of each day. This song was inspired by sunny days spent by the pool, date nights on rooftops under the stars, and the drive to always win together in any situation regardless of what others think.” Electrolytes follows 2023’s Campanita, the band’s breezy, blissful, and intimate monument to love, family, and everything in between. Electrolytes is another bold step forward in Summer Salt’s skyward career arc, marking the band’s first LP created with touring members Winston Triolo and Anthony Barnett. This all began a decade ago, when Chung and Terry moved to Austin to start on this journey, and years of hard work and an increasingly dedicated cult fan community have combined to bring Summer Salt to this moment. The new record is packed with short, to-the-point pop goodness. Crackling with presence and confidence, the 7 tracks sway and stroll through different moods and expressions. While so much of our time and energy is spent wondering how to achieve happiness and find our perfect place, Electrolytes suggests that maybe we’re already living in it. “Electrolytes is an admiration of our lives, as-is,” say Terry and Chung. “Each song is a theme in our adult lives and how we navigate the realness of it these days, just trying to be our best.” After 10 years of making music, Summer Salt plan to make 2024 their biggest year yet. In addition to the new LP, later this year they’ll celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut release, Driving to Hawaii, with a US headline tour beginning in the fall. A band that began in bedrooms, playing for family and friends, has grown into what is now a welcoming and blossoming culture of devoted and widespread fans, a symbiotic community that gives life back and forth to one another. Summer Salt can’t wait to continue building this community with a year of celebration and plenty of new music.WILL PAQUINMINI TREES In the late summer of 2022, Mini Trees’ Lexi Vega was wrapping up an exceptional year. Her debut album Always in Motion came out while she was on the road supporting Julien Baker in 2021, and she launched into a busy touring schedule, supporting towering fixtures of the indie music world, like Death Cab for Cutie, Thao, Yumi Zouma, and Hovvdy. Suddenly, Mini Trees — a project Vega started on a whim in 2018 — had become a career.
Quasi – Featuring “Birds” Tour
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYQUASIPacific Northwest rock legends Quasi play their beloved 1998 classic third album Featuring “Birds,” start to finish in its entirety for the first time. MARNIE STERNIt’s been a decade since we last heard from Marnie Stern, and in her absence the indie music world has become overrun with an army of anti-Marnies i.e. corporate clones making banal playlist rock lacking in the whimsy, creativity, and virtuosity that made Stern’s take on rock music such a singular sound in the late 2000s. But when Stern’s guitar bursts in like a shower of stardust on The Comeback Kid, her long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia, it’s like no time has passed. Marnie Stern is back—and not a moment too soon.Where has Stern been? She cops to having been lulled by the gentle rhythm of a nine-to-five job as the guitarist in the band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers; she’s also been raising two kids. But when it came time to start working on a new record, the ease with which she picked up right where she left off was surprising even to her. “I expected that all those years of playing other kinds of stuff would have influenced me—and it didn’t at all! I was fully back where I was before,” Stern says.Even so, The Comeback Kid is no nostalgia trip: it’s a statement of intent, as Stern makes clear on the anthemic opening track “Plain Speak”. “I can’t keep on moving backwards,” she repeats, her fingers furiously tapping the fretboard as the song joyfully zips forward like a rocket hitting warp speed. She follows that up with “Believing is Seeing,” a song about overcoming alienation with nose-to-the-grindstone creative effort. “The sound is hard to hear right/ You can’t take it,” she sings. “What if I add this! And this! And this!” punctuating each “this” with another layer of sound, gleefully rifling through her bag of musical tracks and trying each one on for size, building the song up as she goes along—it’s fun and colorful and imaginative; it’s also weird. But being unafraid to embrace her oddball impulses has always been part of Stern’s musical DNA, and something she missed in her years of being a player for hire. “It was so great to be able to start being myself again and when I would think, ‘Oh, is that too, too weird?’ I’d remember I’m allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It’s me,” says Stern of writing songs for The Comeback Kid. “I’m trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit.”That sense of taking joy in your individuality is all over The Comeback Kid, which really is what the title says: the story of an artist coming back to the world with the hard-earned wisdom that making music that truly reflects who you are in all your brightness, boldness, and (yes) weirdness, is always something worth celebrating, and maybe the key to happiness in the end. “This record is about reassuring yourself that happiness is not about what kind of things you have or how many things you have or what you don’t have—it’s about all the good things you do,” says Stern.
Fiddlehead
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYFIDDLEHEAD Formed with the most modest of expectations, Fiddlehead has unexpectedly become one of the most vital groups in rock music. Their fervent audience responds to the urgency of their music, but also the intensely human exploration of loss that’s colored so much of the band’s output. Fiddlehead’s previous albums, 2018’s Springtime and Blind and 2021’s Between The Richness, dealt heavily with grief from different perspectives, and now their latest album, Death Is Nothing To Us, feels like a de facto culmination, drawing together many of the catalog’s through-lines sonically and lyrically. The album finds Fiddlehead so deeply delving into the pain, confusion, nuances, and contradictions of sadness–so willingly wrapping their arms around a concept as existentially baffling as death itself–that they’ve created an album that is truly life-affirming. “I don’t want people to romanticize grief and depression, myself included,” vocalist Patrick Flynn explains. “But I wanted to write about the way loss can perpetuate this feeling of sadness in your life. I didn’t intend to make some kind of thematic trilogy but there is this connection to the first two records, and this album sort of rounds out some of the stages of grief that weren’t addressed previously–especially this feeling of stickiness that a depressive attitude can have.” This is the mental space where Death Is Nothing To Us exists, with Flynn observing the confounding allure of sorrow and the difficulty of holding onto so many conflicting internal and external hurts at once. He approaches this subject matter with a deftness and intensity that can only be matched by that of the music itself. Since forming in 2014, Fiddlehead–Flynn, drummer Shawn Costa, guitarists Alex Henery and Alex Dow, and bassist Nick Hinsch–have been honing their unique sound, bringing together the energy of hardcore, the anthemic melodies of ‘90s alternative, the unbridled passion of Revolution Summer era emo. For Death Is Nothing To Us, the band again teamed with producer/engineer Chris Teti, and his punchy production captures the spark of Fiddlehead’s live show while doing justice to the massive guitars and undeniable catchiness that makes their music so immensely satisfying. The album’s concise 27 minutes sound like a natural extension of all of the band’s strengths, embracing the more melodic sensibilities of Between The Richness while maintaining the visceral bite of Springtime and Blind. “We knew we wanted to do something a little more aggressive sounding,” explains Henery. “That kind of stuff grounds the band. I think maybe people would have expected us to go cleaner with this LP but I see this as a real mix of the first two.” MILLY
Built To Spill: “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” 30th Anniversary Tour
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYBUILT TO SPILL Built to Spill is an indie rock band from Boise, ID, formed in 1992 by guitarist/vocalist Doug Martsch. In 2024 they celebrate 30 years of “There’s’ Nothing Wrong with Love, their second full-length album, performing it in its entirely. For this celebration tour the band also brings the recording’s original cello player, John McMahon. Known as well for their rotating line up, Built to Spill currently counts with Melanie Radford on bass and Teresa Esguerra on drums
Brijean
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYBRIJEAN Brijean is the duo of percussionist and singer-songwriter Brijean Murphy and multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Stuart, and together they make dance music for the mind, body and soul, evoking 70s disco, 90s house and sly pop sensibilities. Their debut album Feelings arrived via Ghostly International in February 2021, a golden-hued dream pop tropicalia of dazzling beats and honeyed vocals; remixes from Buscabulla, Sam Gendel, DRAMA and Rick Wade followed. In August of 2022 they released Angelo — an EP, named after Murphy’s recently purchased 1981 Toyota Celica, featuring nine songs Brijean have crafted and carried with them through a period of profound change, loss, and relocation. It finds them processing the impossible the only way they know how: through rhythm and movement. The months surrounding Feelings, which celebrated tender self-reflection and new possibilities, rang bittersweet with the absence of touring and the sudden passing of Murphy’s father and both of Stuart’s parents. In a haze of heartache, the duo left the Bay Area to be near family, resetting in four cities in under two years. Their to-go rig became their traveling studio and these tracks, along with Angelo, became their few constants. Whereas Feelings formed over collaborative jams with friends, Angelo’s sessions presented Murphy and Stuart a chance to record at their most intimate, “to get us out of our grief and into our bodies,” says Murphy. They explored new moods and styles, reaching for effervescent dance tempos and technicolor backdrops, vibrant hues in contrast to their more somber human experiences. Angelo beams with positivity and creative renewal — a resourceful, collective answer to “what happens now?”
OUTPOST: Five Door Sedan + Wim Tapley
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLY- RAIN OR SHINE Five Door Sedan is an indie rock group from Charleston, SC. Their new sound blends the improvisation and raw emotion of psychedelic rock with a modern feel of carefully orchestrated, catchy indie rock music. Tight rhythms, deep lyrics, and passionate playing make this band a powerhouse of musicality. The 5 piece band, (formerly Dacota Muckey and The Trip) brings a unique twist with sultry saxophone and layers of melodic synths. Wim Tapley is based in Athens, GA, and has been touring the east coast with his band, the Cannons, since 2021. Wim’s original music is a crowd pleasing mix of Rock, Pop, Folk, and Americana that provides something for everyone (Wim Tapley Spotify). Wim and his band have played some historic venues in the southeast including a sold out Georgia Theatre and the 40 Watt Club, the latter of which he has headlined multiple times. He has also opened for notable acts such as the Vegabonds and Flipturn.With local support from The Old Futures.
Pedro The Lion
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYPEDRO THE LIONEarly into Santa Cruz, the poignant third album in David Bazan’s ongoing musical memoir of his sometimes-uncanny life, he discovers the Beatles. He is the new kid from Arizona in a new school in the famous California coastal town where his dad has accepted another post at a Bible college. He and his first friend there, Matt, are sitting on the carpet in Matt’s little bedroom, flipping through the records bequeathed by his father, when Bazan spots a familiar cover—The White Album, known only from a church documentary that warned children of the Satanic secrets of “Revolution 9.” Play it backwards, the propaganda said, and it would offer a command: “Turn me on, dead man.”So, of course, the kids played it forward and were fascinated by the sound, by the imagination, by the act of consecrated creativity far outside of Christian rock. Bazan was 13. “Treading water on the open ocean/Then you threw me out a life ring,” he sings, the smile obvious just through the sound as the beat picks up like a racing pulse, more than three decades later. “All I needed was a little help from a friend.” That is the moment where, in many ways, the remarkable songs of Pedro the Lion begin to take shape.In 2019, after a 15-year break filled with solo records and side-projects, Bazan returned to the moniker under which he had become one of indie rock’s most identifiable voices and incisive songwriters, Pedro the Lion. He sort of stumbled into 2019’s Phoenix, a charged chronicle of his childhood there, while spending the night with his grandparents during a tour stop. But he soon understood that unpacking his peripatetic youth, where his music minister father shifted around the country like a Marine moving bases, was helpful, healing, and maybe even interesting. The gripping Havasu followed in 2022. Bazan was onto something, untangling all the ways his past had both shaped and misshaped his present inside some of his best songs ever.That past truly begins to become the present on Santa Cruz, the most fraught and frank album yet in a planned five-album arc; this one covers a little less than a decade, from just after he turned 13 until he turns toward adulthood around 21. These songs ripple with the anxiety and energy of teenage awakening—of hearing rock ’n’ roll, of understanding that independent music exists, of making out with an older schoolmate in deepest secret, of falling in love, of finally starting to understand that in order to be yourself you’re going to need to be something other than your parents’ vision of you. It is the rawest, most affecting and affirming album Pedro the Lion has ever made.FLOCK OF DIMESJenn Wasner is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, producer, and songwriter based in Durham, North Carolina by way of Baltimore. She releases solo music under the name Flock of Dimes, and as half of beloved duo Wye Oak. Wasner is also a member of Bon Iver, and ofSylvan Esso’s extended live lineup. Over the years, Wasner has collaborated with Future Islands, Helado Negro, Sharon Van Etten, Deerhoof, Shearwater, William Brittelle, and many other artists. She also produced Madeline Kenney’s Sucker’s Lunch (2020) and Perfect Shapes (2018). Flock of Dimes’ latest solo LP, ‘Head of Roses,’ (Sub Pop, 2021) follows a winding thread of intuition into the unknown and into healing, led by gut feelings and the near-spiritual experience of visceral songwriting.
Mildlife
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYMILDLIFE
PATIO: Polly Panic
ALL AGES LIMITED PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEPOLLY PANICJenette Mackie is creator and frontwoman of cello shredding rock duo Polly Panic. Built on the back of distorted and often looped cello, drums, and powerful vocals, Mackie and drummer/backing vocalist Chris Medrano are not to be missed in this era of cellos coming to the front. Polly Panic is one of the longest standing cello Art rock forces out there…”References abound, P J Harvey’s bleak and angsty soundscapes, Tori Amos dark dreaming, Apocalyptica’s classical-rock attitudes, Tom Waits belligerence, but whilst you catch fleeting sights of those past glories, Polly Panic creates something totally her own, something wonderfully unique, where classical grunge meets baroque ’n’roll!” (Dave Franklin, Dancing About Architecture, on Losing Form)
Man Man
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYMAN MAN When Man Man released its last album, “Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In Between,” frontman Honus Honus (né Ryan Kattner) was in a state of unrest, oscillating between hope and cynicism. Perhaps fittingly, the album ended up dropping during the pandemic. (We could all relate.) But much like that bizarre turn of global events, the ennui seems so distant now to Man Man’s creative force, whose revived sense of purpose washes through Carrot on Strings (out June 07, Sub Pop), his latest release, which radiates a mix of calm and confidence. Kattner always embodied a wild-man pied-piper vibe: his melodic, art-rock output just unhinged enough that it was at once intriguing and angsty. He was so alluringly creative that you went along with it, even if you were never sure where Man Man would take you. Carrot on Strings is no less inventive, but its ethos is radical in context of the band’s two-decade, idiosyncratic career. “When I was younger, I would feed off of chaos. I would, you know, be upset and get drunk and smash chairs. Physically demonstrative of my emotions,” Kattner explains, “Now those chairs are in my head: It’s less of an outward projection, more of an interior monologue.” The name “Carrot on Strings” came to Kattner while experimenting with the sound of someone munching on the vegetable, which you can hear in the cacophonous, almost similarly named title track. It refers to “the diagnosis of my career,” or how success always seemed to dangle uncertainly before him—life as a series of “almost maybe” opportunities to elevate things to a more sustainable tier. But listen intently, and you’ll hear a more content Kattner, making an uneasy peace with, “Life, as far as I’ve known it, has always been side hustles. Would it be great if I could go into a studio and record for a year without figuring out how to finance it? Yeah, it would be,” he says. “But ultimately, I need to keep making music because art is an extension of my psyche. It’s not about how I define myself or want to be perceived necessarily. It’s how I have learned to translate the palpitations of my heart. Or, simply put, I’d go insane without it.” The unrest may have slightly lifted (chalk that up to fatherhood), but “Carrot on Strings” opener, the shot of scintillating adrenaline that is “Iguana,” clarifies that he’s still on a mission to traverse uncharted territory, even if it is total banger sing-along. The song melds Krautrock, dance music, no-wave, and even an homage to Old Yeller (the 1950s Disney film) sneaks in for good measure. Kattner, who penned the lyrics to “Iguana” while cycling through the hills of Los Angeles (“That’s how I found a lot of the songs, through looping…if you passed by me on the street, you probably thought I was a very unstable person, singing and workshopping ideas, but I guess in LA that kinda goes with the territory”), was inspired by director Werner Herzog’s somewhat mystical cave-painting documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “In the last 10 minutes of it, he has this beautiful monologue about uncertainty and the universe, the evolution of self-consciousness, albino crocodiles. How nothing is real, nothing is certain.
