With Love
With Love With Love is the project of Carrboro-based songwriter Reilly Milburn, brought to the stage with multi-instrumentalists Emmaus Holder, Max Levinson, John DiSabito, Bradley Robasky, and Steve. Formed in late 2022, With Love melds indie, rock, and emo, paying homage to Milburn’s own musical influences. Bandcamp | Instagram | Spotify MonadiWhile Monadi is the songwriting project of North Carolina-based artist, Nick Chilman, the live band includes an array of musical savants including Mitchell Barnett, Nicholas LaPlant, Charlie Sothcott, Will Snider and Kyle Schneider. Featuring largely introspective songwriting, the live band harnesses influences from spanning Americana to psychedelic Rock. In Persian, the word “monadi” refers to a harbinger or herald. Instagram | Spotify Johnny SunriseHailing from Western Massachusetts, Johnny Sunrise is an indie folk singer-songwriter who draws inspiration from love, longing, the “quarter-life crisis,” and the uncertainty of life. Although Johnny grew up with music primarily as a drummer, his unforeseen travels up and down the east coast and the isolation caused by the COVID pandemic brought him closer to his neglected guitar. Johnny has carved a place in the Carrboro music scene over the past year or so performing original songs with honest lyrics and a soulful voice. Always with a smile and a healthy dose of banter. Recorded music is on the way with the hopes of a full project release in late 2024 or early 2025. Instagram
Saturdays At Your Place
Saturdays At Your Place is an emo band from Kalamazoo, MI. With the release of ‘always cloudy’, in 2023, they caught the attention of a wider audience outside of their hometown. The six song EP showcased a more refined creative direction and sound that has left fans eager to hear what’s next from the young three piece. Their intimate lyrics combined with heavy hitting instrumental hooks and cleverly placed twinkly guitar parts creates a uniquely personal sound that has come to define the band. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Slaughter Beach, Dog
From the Desk of Craig Finn Hey, I just got off the phone with Jake Ewald. He says hello. I called him to tell him I’ve been digging the new Slaughter Beach Dog album he’d sent me. I’d been playing it around the house a lot, and had a question about it. He picked up on the first ring and told me that it’s called Crying Laughing Waving Smiling and that it’s going to come out on September 22nd on Lame-O Records. That wasn’t really my question, but I guess it’s good to know. I actually called to ask him if his van really got stolen. He mentions it in one of my favorite songs on the record, called “Engine”. I’ve been a fan of Slaughter Beach Dog for a little while now, and I know that Jake can tell a fantastic story, though I also know a great storyteller can stretch the truth. But Jake said his van really did get stolen in 2020, right at the top of the pandemic. It’s also true that just a little while later he moved from Philadelphia, where he’d been living for a decade, to a house in the Poconos. Once there, he found he had less distraction and a calmer mind. He started going for walks and listening to music. He found some new appreciation for the “old guys”, as he said on the phone- Neil Young, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, those types. Personally, I’d call them the “classic guys”, but I’m a bit older so I’m probably somewhat defensive about age. Anyways, to me it seems like some of this might have led to an old school approach to making a record. In July 2022, the whole Slaughter Beach, Dog band (Jake, Zach, Ian, Adam, Logan) gathered at their long time studio The Metal Shop back in Philly with a bunch of songs Jake had written over the past two years. Jake would show them a new song, singing and playing an acoustic guitar, and then the band would all play what they were hearing for the song. Classic, human, and not overthought. They’d talked before entering the studio about this approach: emphasising the instinctual, not being afraid, listening to each other. The band caught fire. They captured fifteen songs in the first five days. The priority throughout was serving the song. I’ve been listening for days now. I can tell you these songs got served.There’s beautiful space in everything. It’s patient and aware. I’ve always admired Jake’s eye for detail, and it’s on full display here. It’s an album filled with gorgeous imagery and vivid worlds are built within each song. I see it all. He careens around the country (New Jersey, Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Florida, Georgia) and engages his tastebuds (spinach, cheddar, caviar, buttercream, margaritas). He’s tender in bars and funny in cars. And vice versa. Most impressively to me, he consistently finds the divine and sacred in the everyday: church pews in a diner, toast bearing the image of Christ. It’s my opinion that every record is about growing up- we all have to get a little older before we make the next one. But Crying Laughing Waving Smiling examines a particular weightlessness that is part of spreading wings, putting down roots, trying to grab a hold of something. This is how it feels when you’re making the moves that you make while becoming the person that you’re going to be. Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Tropical Fuck Storm
It was the silence as much as the disease that proved so unsettling. The world had gone inside, underground, taking with it some of its more destructive aspects. The clean and clear air in major cities was a jarring reminder of the airborne rot we had grown used to. Stuck indoors, we went stir crazy, imagined new worlds, dystopian worlds, apocalypses of the small and large variety. There were viral social media stories, most of them fake, about animals reoccupying cities, dolphins taking back the canals of Venice, elephants getting drunk in abandoned Chinese corn wine distilleries and passing out in tea gardens . In those first fearful days of the pandemic, we wrote ourselves out of existence and imagined what the world would be like without us. We missed the noise; we carried it inside us. We tried to find melody in the madness. Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Gareth Liddiard, frontman for the Aussie band with a name perfectly suited to the times, was like the rest of us in feeling the malaise. On not writing any new songs for the first six months of the global shutdown, he says, “Why would I? Everything seemed pointless.” Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.” A Laughing Death in Meatspace and Braindrops, Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2018 and 2019 records, probed the destructive force of consumerist culture, the imperialistic reaches of the United States, the threat posed by a warming planet. The band wedded a brave new worldview to an ever lively acid punk sound. Which made you sometimes despair. While still wanting to dance. Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic. Over the last five years, you didn’t have to be conspiratorial to see the conspiracies everywhere you turned; and Liddiard, Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn, and Lauren Hammel, the Tropical Fuck Storm collective, know how to make friends with the strange. They invite our paranoia and fatigue. “It’s a permanent state,” Liddiard sings, “war made the State, the State made war, what’s the point of worrying ’bout it anymore?” The band chronicles weird adventures in statecraft and surveillance, ponders the global infatuation with resurgent fascisms. Tropical Fuck Storm shines an incandescent light on a world in which corporate media, bad-faith leaders, and charismatics of all stripes lose the ability to recognize their own deceptiveness. At times we’re tempted to call Deep States a protest album, though it’s not, quite. The band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode. “We make pop records,” Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” But Tropical Fuck Storm does their preaching on the sly, always cognizant of the fact they are making pop music, after all, no matter how avant-garde or “out there” it gets. Deep States comes complete with Q drops, nods to the January 6 th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven’s Gate to The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night only to betray us by morning. Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Cannons: Heartbeat Highway Tour
CANNONS alternate between flashes of gauzy introspection, glitter-drenched dancefloor ecstasy, and gritty sensuality. The Los Angeles trio — Michelle Joy [vocals], Ryan Clapham [lead guitar], and Paul Davis [drums keys] — elevate alternative / electro-pop to a neon stratosphere with nocturnal production and a visual sensibility equally suited to Studio 54 or summer festival season. The band honed this signature style over the course of three albums, namely Night Drive [2017], Shadows [2019], and Fever Dream [2022]. Along the way, “Fire For You” reached RIAA gold status, generated nearly a quarter-of-a-billion streams, topped Alternative Radio, and landed massive syncs on the likes of NETFLIX’s Never Have I Ever, American Horror Story, and more. CANNONS earned critical acclaim from The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, FLAUNT, and Consequence of Sound while YouTube touted them among 2021’s “Artists on the Rise.” Emerging as a live force, they’ve headlined countless packed shows in addition to lighting up festivals such as Coachella, Lollapalooza, Life Is Beautiful, Outside Lands, and Electric Forest, to name a few. Evolving yet again, CANNONS ushered in a new era with the sunny, sassy, and sexy funkified strut of their 2023 album Heartbeat Highway, which features “Loving You,” their third Top 10 single at Alternative radio. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud | TikTok
Foxing
Beneath the audible progress of Foxing’s 13 year career – from the chamber emo of debut The Albatross to the art pop of 2021’s Draw Down The Moon – has been a gradual movement towards self-sufficiency. Appropriately, the quartet of vocalist Conor Murphy, guitarist Eric Hudson, drummer Jon Hellwig, and bassist Brett Torrence (who recently joined after years as a touring hired gun) chose to self-title their fifth LP simply, Foxing. The album was entirely produced by the band and mixed by Hudson. The cover art was created by Murphy and Torrence, and it is being released on the band’s own Grand Paradise label. DIY requires doing, and Foxing was not an easy album to make. I share a studio space with the band and was an onlooker to the tedious two year process of its creation. I heard good songs emanating from their room at the bottom of the stairs, only to be abandoned and later reborn as incredible songs. I also witnessed some absolute garbage – a testament to the quartet’s willingness to entertain any idea and push it to its furthest conclusion before filling their iMac’s recycling bin. I was jarred by explosive cheering as the band turned the basement hallway into a makeshift putting green during breaks. I overheard arguments that were decibels shy of shouting matches. There were some moments when their creative stalemates seemed unresolvable and others where the enthusiasm of making a transcendently great album was intoxicating. It is fitting that tension is at the core of Foxing, an album that balances hopefulness and nihilism, the pastoral with the tumultuous. Whether oscillating between visceral noise rock and intimate bedroom cassette experiments on opener “Secret History” or cruising at the edge of collapse on “Barking,” the dramatic dynamics that have long permeated Foxing’s music have never felt so extreme. Five albums into a discography defined by its own restlessness, Foxing is a document of a band finding comfort in their own chaos. -Ryan Wasoba Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Southern Culture on the Skids
Southern Culture On The Skids has been consistently recording and touring around the world since 1983. The band (Rick Miller – guitar and vocals, Mary Huff – bass and vocals, Dave Hartman – drums) has been playing together for over 30 years. Their musical journey has taken them from all-night North Carolina house parties to late night TV talk shows (Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show), from performing at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan to rockin’ out for the inmates at North Carolina correctional facilities. They’ve shared a stage with many musical luminaries including Link Wray, Loretta Lynn, Hasil Adkins and Patti Smith. Their music has been featured in movies and TV, parodied by Weird Al, and used to sell everything from diamonds to pork sausage. In 2014 the band was honored by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with an exhibition featuring their music and cultural contributions. Their legendary live shows are a testament to the therapeutic powers of foot-stomping, butt-shaking rock and roll and what Rolling Stone dubbed “a hell raising rock and roll party.”At Home with Southern Culture on the Skids is the latest full length album from the band and is due to drop into stores on March 12th. The album consists of 11 tracks recorded and mixed in Rick Miller’s living room with some additional tracks recorded at his studio, The Kudzu Ranch.The first radio single off the album is “Run Baby Run”—a rocking number with deep garage roots. SCOTS bassist Mary Huff provides an urgent vocal while the band pulls back the throttle on a full race fuzz fest—cause she’s gotta to go fast! Run Baby Run!The other songs on the album are a combination of the band’s unique mix of musical genres: rock and roll, surf, folk and country—all a bit off-center, what Rick proudly calls “our wobbly Americana”. Rick goes on, “We put a few more acoustic guitars on this one, as you would expect if you recorded in your living room, but it still rocks like SCOTS. So put your headphones on, get in your favorite chair/sofa/recliner, put on “At Home With” and let’s hang out for a while.” Guitar riffs as lumpy as a camel, rough as a jackhammer or smooth and bright as Tennessee sippin’ whiskey, all slung loose and loud over salacious beats – No Depression For over thirty years, Southern Culture On The Skids have played an eclectic range of Americana including rockabilly, surf rock, country and R&B, with a punk edge and heaps of humor. They are known for their legendary live shows and wacky antics…But it’s more than just great fun; they are fantastic musicians to boot. – Elmore Magazine This Chapel Hill-based trio is flat-out amazing. Without resorting to needless flash or attention-hungry showboating, Miller in particular is one of the most spectacularly gifted guitar players I’ve ever seen. He juggles a lot of styles – country, garage rock, surf, rockabilly and soul to name just a few. – Stomp & Stammer Website | Facebook | Instagram
Slater
From seductive club bangers to therapeutic, night-time-cruising tunes, Slater has solidified his role as a tastemaker and star of the new wave of alternative pop. Since 2013, Southern California’s rising underground sensation, Slater, has blended the best elements of alternative, pop, and hip hop into a new, unique sound all of his own. Smooth, groovy, and infectious, his niche style is as reminiscent of early 00’s pop and radio hits as it is innovative and fresh. As a member of the collective, Vada Vada (consisting of The Garden, Enjoy, Puzzle, Cowgirl Clue, Lumina, and Glitch), Slater is no stranger to experimentation. With over 20 releases under his belt, he continues sonically evolving his signature sound. Instagram | Twitter | TikTok
Barefoot Modern
Barefoot Modern NC Indie/Alternative • Original song “Whatchu Want” featured in Epic Games’ Fortnite (2022) • “Best local band” – The Appalachian’s Best of Boone (2021) • “Best alternative band” – Richmond International Film & Music Festival (2019)Barefoot Modern’s story began in 2010 when Robert Beverly (producer/songwriter) moved into Tegan Dean’s (lead vocalist/songwriter) neighborhood. The duo started with simple piano covers, and first recorded in the studio & performed in 2015. Barefoot Modern’s first single was released during their senior year of high school. The following albums, EP, and singles were recorded at Appalachian State’s RFG Studios, mostly as school projects. BFM is currently working on their 3rd full-length album. Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Soundcloud | TikTok
Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley
This is a seated show. Take a 15-time IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) Dobro Player of the Year and a Tennessee-born guitar prodigy called “Nashville’s hottest young player” by Acoustic Guitar magazine, and you have Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley, a powerhouse acoustic duo that has electrified the acoustic music scene around the world. Known for their white-hot picking and world class musicianship, as well as their soulful stone country vocals, the GRAMMY® nominated duo cleverly and uniquely melds bluegrass, country, blues, rock, jamgrass, and string band music of all kinds to create a signature blend of music that defies restrictions of genre. NPR has called Ickes and Hensley “two musical phenoms”; Vintage Guitar raved they’re an “acoustic firestorm” who “are changing the rules”; Acoustic Guitar describes their sound as “steel-string bluegrass with all the intensity of rock ‘n’ roll” and No Depression observed they’re “two of the finest musicians playing today.” Ickes and Hensley have shared the stage or collaborated with Tommy Emmanuel, Taj Mahal, Vince Gill, David Grisman, Jorma Kaukonen, Marty Stuart, and Steve Wariner—all admirers of the duo. Ickes, the most decorated musician in IBMA Awards history and former founding member of bluegrass “supergroup” Blue Highway and highly sought-after Dobro master, has graced the recordings and concerts of artists such as Earl Scruggs, Merle Haggard, Alison Krauss, Tony Rice and more. Hensley, who earned IBMA Guitar Player of the Year nominations for the past three years, made his Grand Ole Opry debut at the age of 11 (thanks to an invite from Marty Stuart with Earl Scruggs) and has appeared on stage with the likes of Johnny Cash, Peter Frampton and Old Crow Medicine Show. All three of the Compass Records albums released by Ickes and Hensley have received widespread acclaim, including their debut Before The Sun Goes Down, which garnered a GRAMMY® nomination, and the combo’s current release World Full of Blues, which features collaborations with Vince Gill and Taj Mahal. Ickes and Hensley teamed with guitar master Tommy Emmanuel for a very special EP, Tommy Emmanuel – Accomplice Series Vol. I With Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley (released May 7, 2021 via Emmanuel’s label, CGP Sounds) to critical acclaim. The three high-powered guitar virtuosos performed together on the Grand Ole Opry on May 8, 2021 and from famed Nashville venue 3rd & Lindsley on May 9, 2021 via worldwide broadcasts to celebrate the release of the project. Ickes and Hensley have completed their fourth record for Compass Records with GRAMMY®-winning producer Brent Maher, which is set for release in early 2023. Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
