of Montreal
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYOF MONTREALWhen creators f<ck with how we experience time and space, great fictions emerge: Clive Barker’s Imajica, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Solaris, and Godard’s Alphaville. But what happens to artists when the flow of time gets f^cked up IRL? When an hour stretches into eternity, and the voices in your head begin to echo through empty rooms? If you’re Kevin Barnes, the creative visionary behind of Montreal, Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck happens. Isolation and uncertainty loomed throughout the genesis of the band’s latest studio album. “The experience of just trying to keep my head above water and navigate through the last couple years played a huge role in this record,” says Barnes.These expansive selections contrast markedly with the focused pop of 2020’s UR FUN, which was crafted for visceral thrills and the concert stage. As it was for countless musicians around the world, the inability to tour eliminated one of the linchpins of Barnes’ creative process. “I didn’t know if we’d ever tour again, so I didn’t consider that side of things.” Denied social interaction and diverse experiences, Barnes delved inward.Barnes contemplated how time functions in music and experimented accordingly. These new songs, dense with ideas but short on repetition, feel epic in scope despite reasonable running times. Like the staircases of M.C. Escher’s Relativity, the discrete sections of “Marijuana’s A Working Woman” and “Blab Sabbath Lathe of Maiden” crisscross and pivot, confounding the senses yet commanding attention. The imagery and sentiments that bubble forth from Barnes’ lyrical wordplay prove equally disorienting.“Is it important to say black chrome rodents?,” asks Barnes on “Après The Déclassé.” Phrases borne of free association took on new meaning when introduced into a song. “It’s like collaborating with my subconscious in a way. It feels deeply personal, even though I don’t necessarily understand it at that moment.”“Marijuana’s A Working Woman” juxtaposes oddball funk a la Zapp or Rick James with nods to Alice Anne Baily’s 19th century spiritualism. “Modern Art Bewilders” zigzags between baroque psychedelic idyll and synthpop tantrum, equal parts Sgt. Pepper’s and Gary Numan. Other influences woven throughout include realist painter Edward Hopper, fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, cinéaste Pedro Almodovar, and erotic illustrator Toshio Saeki.Barnes likens their compositional process to making collages from seemingly unrelated source materials, combining them in provocative ways to reveal new meanings. “I wasn’t working with specific themes that I wanted to try and stretch over a three-minute pop song. It was sewing together a lot of fragmented thoughts,” which ties in nicely to the ‘freewave’ aspect of the album title’s meaning. As Barnes explains, “Freewave is my term for wild and intractable artistic expression. Lucifer is the angel of enlightenment and elucidation. Fuck is something we say when things are going really well, or really badly.”As for anything else going on behind the scenes during the genesis of Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck, Barnes opts to preserve the mystery. “Sometimes in the past, I felt it was important for people to know certain things, so they could get into a specific headspace.” Not this time.LOCATE S,1
Margaret Glaspy
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYMARGARET GLASPY The third full-length from Margaret Glaspy, Echo The Diamond emerged from a deliberate stripping-away of artifice to reveal life for all its harsh truths and ineffable beauty. Like the precious gem of its title, the result is an object of startling luminosity, one capable of cutting through the most elaborately constructed façades. “This record came from trying to meet life on life’s terms, instead of looking for a happy ending in everything,” says the New York-based musician. “The whole experience of creating it felt like effortless catharsis.” Produced by Glaspy with co-production from her partner, guitarist/composer Julian Lage, Echo The Diamond expands on the frenetic vitality of her widely acclaimed debut Emotions and Math— a 2016 release The New Yorker hailed as an album “in which pretty songs often turn prickly, enriched by carefully measured infusions of dissonance and grit.” This time around, Glaspy worked with drummer/percussionist David King of The Bad Plus and bassist Chris Morrissey (Andrew Bird, Lucius, Ben Kweller), recording at Reservoir Studios in Manhattan and embracing an intentionally unfussy process that left plenty of room for spontaneity. “I love music with a big element of risk to it, which was really the heartbeat of this album,” she says. “A lot of what you hear are the very first takes.” Anchored in the raw yet mesmerizing vocal presence and impressionistic guitar work she’s brought to the stage in touring with the likes of Spoon and Wilco, Echo The Diamond holds entirely true to the spirit of its lyrical explorations, presenting a selection of songs both unvarnished and revelatory. BRIDGET KEARNEY Bridget Kearney is an American musician and songwriter. She is a founding member of the band Lake Street Dive and winner of the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Jazz category. Kearney’s solo recording work began with her debut solo album, Won’t Let You Down, released by Signature Sounds Recordings in 2017 followed by a number of singles released on streaming platforms and social media sites such as YouTube and Instagram.
Jeremie Albino
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYJEREMIE ALBINO Jeremie Albino’s grainy ballads are inflected with a joyous tenor that has found him a distinct space in the world of Americana, folk, blues, and country. Reimagining the image of the lonesome wanderer, his music is rooted in the instant when everyone in a room experiences the same moment in a multitude of different ways—embodying solitude and connection all at once. Starting out playing late night gig slots, Jeremie’s rigour has landed him a blossoming touring career. Garnering attention from the community and press alike, he’s heralded as “a true resurgence of the most authentic blues brought to life through the eyes of a modern and young, but old-soul artist ” (American Songwriter) and “the next in line of emotive band leaders that project soul and directness atop a head turning sound” (Glide Magazine). His forthcoming album, Tears You Hide (2023), produced by Jeremie’s long time collaborator and manager Crispin Day, is a memento to family, resilience, and the road ahead. Three years in the making, the rickety footstomping, and lilting stories inherent to Albino’s sound remains, yet the narrative has shifted slightly. Tears You Hide troubles the romanticization of the past by cherishing the present, stringing a narrative where connection, resolve, and vulnerability are distilled in an unfiltered amount of gratitude.CLINT ROBERTS (of Holler Choir) Led by the lyrical craftsmanship of singer, guitarist, and songwriter Clint Roberts, the distinctly Appalachian, old-time sound of Asheville’s Holler Choir combines haunting harmonies, stirring string compositions, and heart-wrenching ballads, yet hardly conforms to a stereotypical genre. Call it a confluence of old-time, Americana, and bluegrass, but, by its own exceptional design, the sound and atmosphere of Holler Choir are singular. Robert’s wordcraft and explosive vocal range is met with the dulcet clawhammer banjo plucking of long-time collaborator Helena Rose and the sturdy timekeeping of upright bassist Norbert McGettigan. With a rotating cast of gifted musicians featured on Holler Choir’s recordings and electrifying live performances, it’s no wonder they are the band to watch in 2023. The band’s inception began when recording Robert’s 2022 solo release, entitled “Mountain Air”. That fortuitous collaboration of gifted roots musicians at Asheville’s Crossroads Studios proved to be the genesis of an unmistakable new sound built on that shared experience. Produced by Grammy award-winning multi-instrumentalist, Michael Ashworth, of The Steep Canyon Rangers, the five-song EP lit the fuse and Holler Choir was well on its way to delight audiences throughout the southeast and beyond. According to Roberts “Holler Choir” could be a double entendre. A choir that hollers, or a choir from the hollers of western North Carolina. What their sound and vision exude leaves the meaning up to you.
Trash Panda + Hotel Fiction
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYTRASH PANDATrash Panda began in 2015 as the pet recording project of songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Taylor (AKA Lazuli Vane), expanding into a duo then a trio in 2016. Pulling from influences as wide as neopsychedelia, soul, indie rock and pop music, the band considers themselves somewhat postgenre. Darlings of the indie scene, Trash Panda tapped into both the perils of modern dating and the existential questions of dark nights of the soul. Their 2016 EP Off features crowd-favorites “Aging Out of the 20th Century,” “Off,” and “Check Please.” Trash Panda’s 2018 album The Starclimber made a splash with tongue-in-cheek banger “Atlanta Girls” and the psychedelic groove of “Heartbreak Pulsar.” After the album the band went on hiatus and pursued other projects, emerging four years later in 2022 with several new members, releasing four singles “Things Will Never Change,” “Doin’ Fine Today,” “STARHEART,” and “Made of Love,” which are quickly gaining attention, featured on more than 10 of Spotify’s editorial playlists. “Doin’ Fine Today” has seen radio play in France. In Trash Panda’s first wave, only two years of frenzied creativity, the band made a regional splash touring small and midsized venues. Then, during its four year hiatus, the band reached a certain level of worldwide cult status with passionate fans spanning the globe. Autumn of 2022 brought the band their first nationwide tour as support for Ceramic Animal. Trash Panda plans to release their second full length album, PANDAMONIUM, on April 28, 2023, coinciding with their first national headlining tour in the May and June.HOTEL FICTIONHotel Fiction is an Athens, Georgia-based band comprised of Jade Long and Jessica Thompson. Both women have been playing music for over ten years and began writing, performing, and playing together in January 2019. In August of that year, Hotel Fiction released their debut single “Astronaut Kids” which received a warm welcome from the indie scene, and went on to amass over 2 million global streams.Hotel Fiction’s sound has often been described as genre-fluid, with indie, pop and rock influences. With Jade’s dynamic vocals and piano, and Jessica’s complementary lead guitar and harmonies, the two create a sound that invites listeners to settle in and stay a while. For Hotel Fiction, the no vacancy sign is never illuminated, everyone is accommodated here.During quarantine, the two finished recording their debut album Soft Focus which was released in the fall of 2021. The project was met with praise from Atwood Magazine, Early Rising, A1234, and We Are the Guard, and was placed on Spotify editorial lists Fresh Finds and Fresh Finds Rock, where it spent eight weeks straight.Most recently, Hotel Fiction has supported Beach Fossils, Adam Melchor, flipturn and The Brooke and The Bluff. The band released their new EP Enjoy Your Stay on October 28, 2022.
AJJ
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYAJJAJJ frontman Sean Bonnette can summarize the band’s new album, Good Luck Everybody, in a single sentence: “Sonically, it’s our least punk record, and lyrically, it’s our most punk record.”And indeed, Good Luck Everybody (January 17, 2020), the Arizona band’s seventh album, stands out in their already diverse catalog. While still rooted in the folk-punk sound AJJ has become known for, the album is unafraid to delve into new territories that test the limits of what the band is capable of. “I think it explores some of the weirder sides of AJJ, the more experimental leanings that we’ve had in the past,” says bassist Ben Gallaty. Good Luck Everybody draws from a wealth of sonic inspirations, from Laurel Canyon folk-rock of the 60s and 70s to avant garde artists like Suicide, as well as some orchestral pop. There is even a piano ballad, the tragic “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope.”Lyrically, Good Luck Everybody is a change of pace from the idiosyncratic songwriting style Bonnette has honed over more than 15 years fronting AJJ. It still features his wonderfully weird turns of phrase and oddball word pairings, but this time, his thematic lens is more directly focused on the inescapable atrocities of the world around him. Longtime fans will recognize the album’s social commentary as a return to their 2011 release, Knife Man, but this time it’s fueled by a more radical urgency.“I usually try for a timeless effect in songwriting, so that you can hear a song and generally not think about the context under which it was written,” says Bonnette. “But for this one, I was trying to write, and all the bad political shit just kept invading my brain and preventing me from writing that way. So I decided to fully embrace it and exorcise that demon.”Much like Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs pulled their songs straight from newspaper headlines, Good Luck Everybody feels like a long scroll through social media feeds on a particularly volatile day.with special guests….OPEN MIKE EAGLESAD PARKFOOT OX
CANCELED: Damien Jurado at Asheville Masonic Temple
Unfortunately the remaining Damien Jurado tour dates from 9/15 to 9/28 have been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. You will be refunded at your point of purchase. Thanks so much for your support and see you down the road!- ALL AGES- FULLY SEATED SHOW- AT ASHEVILLE MASONIC TEMPLE (80 Broadway St) DAMIEN JURADO
Triathalon
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYTRIATHALONSometimes lo-fi rock, sometimes r&b, always smooth. Savannah, GA formed trio TRIATHALON gear up to tour this fall and soothe speakers in a city near you.CURRENT BLUEHailing from Charleston, South Carolina, Current Blue is an indie pop group, and has been working on music since 2014. The band features STEPHAN on guitar/vocals and Yuki Tillis on drums/lead guitar. The band blends indie, surf and R&B into a unique and distinguishable sound.
mssv (mike baggetta + stephen hodges + mike watt)
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYmssv No less an authority than Nels Cline, the high priest of art-rock guitarists, has called Knoxville’s Mike Baggetta a “guitar poet.” That poetry, alternately gnarled and flowing, is on fine display in Main Steam Stop Valve, the second album by (and the decompressed namesake of) mssv, an experimental rock trio featuring Baggetta, the legendary punk bassist Mike Watt, and the versatile drummer Stephen Hodges. The collaboration began when Watt, of The Minutemen fame, joined Baggetta and seasoned session drummer Jim Keltner to record an improvised jazz-rock album called Wall of Flowers, an eight-track romp from pastoral splendor to urban din and back again. When Keltner declined to tour, they brought in Hodges, whose credits as a player include Mavis Staples, Tom Waits, and David Lynch, not to mention Contemplating the Engine Room with Watt. Solidified as mssv—some heretofore unimagined hybrid of a punky power trio and a dreamy experimental rock band—they released Main Steam Stop Valve, which blends industrial vigor and impressionistic languor into a lingering impression of “pressure, combustion, power, and hissing clouds of sonic poetry,” as Premier Guitar said. From the throttled surf guitar of “The Mystery Of” and the glimmering post-rock of “Every Growing Thing” to groovy, songful numbers like “Old Crow,” there’s no telling which way the band will turn at any given moment, a proposition that becomes a promise when they break down and reassemble these songs live, with an instinct for restraint and an openness to anarchy.RED ZEPHYRRed Zephyr is based out of Knoxville, Tennessee and has been playing together since 2013, experimenting with psychedelic prog rock with funk, jazz, classical and many other styles. We play a wide variety of styles with a lot of instrumentals, changes, experiments, and occasionally sprinkling in some vocals here and there about feelings, thoughts, and experiences. We have been performing in and around Asheville for a couple years, and would love to do it again.¿WATCHES?Formed as Fortezza in 2016, founding members Emma Garau and Tristan Smith reorganized the group as a duo in 2022, leaning in to their inclination towards the avant-garde and bombastic minimalism. Ever dancing between Smith’s garage rock sensibilities and Garau’s background in jazz, ¿Watches? finds common ground in a mutual love of all things loud and weird. No-wave punk / Asheville, NC.
TORTOISE
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYTORTOISE Simply put, Tortoise has spent nearly 25 years making music that defies description. While the Chicago-based instrumental quintet has nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica and minimalism throughout its revered and influential six-album discography, the resulting sounds have always been distinctly, even stubbornly, their own. It’s a fact that remains true on “The Catastrophist,” Tortoise’s first studio album in nearly seven years. And it’s an album where moody, synth-swept jams like the opening title track cozy up next to hypnotic, bass-and-beat missives like “Shake Hands With Danger” and a downright strange cover of David Essex’s 1973 radio smash sung by U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittman. Throughout, the songs transcend expectations as often as they delight the eardrums. Tortoise, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, has always thrived on sudden bursts of inspiration. And for “The Catastrophist,” the spark came in 2010 when the group was commissioned by the City of Chicago to compose a suite of music rooted in its ties to the area’s noted jazz and improvised music communities. Tortoise then performed those five loose themes at a handful of concerts, and “when we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” says McEntire, at whose Soma Studios the band recorded the new album. “It turned out that for them to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They’re all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they’re orchestrated and complex.” As ever, Tortoise has conjured sounds on “The Catastrophist” that aren’t being purveyed anywhere else in music today. There’s a deeply intuitive interplay between the group members that comes only from two decades of experimentation, revision and improvisation. And at a time when our brains are constantly bombarded by myriad distractions, “The Catastrophist” reminds us that there’s something much greater out there. All we have to do is listen. Tortoise’s reissue of their classic, long out-of-print remixes album Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters is out April 22nd on Thrill Jockey.BRETT W. NAUCKEBrett W. Naucke is an American experimental composer and visual artist from Chicago, IL currently based in Asheville, NC. With a sonic output primarily focused on marrying an ever-evolving practice of audio-synthesis with conceptual narratives, his recordings have been released by a wide variety of acclaimed labels in addition to providing original scores for several films and presented many works for multi-channel audio and video installations.RICH RUTHRecorded under a loft bed in the guest bedroom of his Nashville home, Michael Ruth aka Rich Ruth’s I Survived, It’s Over starts in a humble space. And while many contemporary music projects are produced in such an environment, I Survived, It’s Over sets itself apart in its transformative properties as well as its transparency.
Harbour: To Chase My Dreams Or To Just Lie Down Tour
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYHARBOURSince their formation in 2014, HARBOUR has gone from packing rooms in their native Cincinnati to selling out venues across the United States. With three tours already under their belt in 2022, and more cross-country shows on the way, the band has no plans of slowing down anytime soon. Members Ryan Green (vocals/guitar), Jarett Lewis (guitar), Ryan Sulken (drums), Walker Atkinson (bass), and Devon Turner (guitar) have curated an infectious indie pop/rock sound that transfers seamlessly into their live shows. During their tenure as a group, HARBOUR has delivered an EP and three full length albums.Their latest single, “Swimming In My Head,” is the third track to come off of their latest LP, poised for release in early 2023. The song vocalizes the insomnia-fueled thoughts that make a person feel like they’re drowning in their own head; the hypotheticals and hindsights that keep one up all night.The contemplative, often ruminating lyrical matter of HARBOUR’s music finds juxtaposition against playful melodies that perfectly encapsulate the boundless energy the band brings to all their performances – each of which begin with an enthusiastic shout to the crowd: “Let’s have some fun!”
