Wild Party
After a multi-year hiatus, the indie pop maestros, Wild Party, are set to release a new full-length album in 2023. After releasing their debut record, Phantom Pop, in October of 2014, the band toured extensively during the following year and a half before finally calling it quits at the end of 2015. “We played probably 100 shows in 2014 and 2015… but there weren’t a lot of people at the shows who knew the music, and we weren’t making a lot of money…things just weren’t working out,” frontman Lincoln Kreifels recalls. Family and financial obligations meant taking the focus away from music for a while. While Phantom Pop’s infectious melodies and danceable grooves never found a home with a larger market in 2015, the band’s nearly decade-old release has recently found a new, devoted fan base online. “The Spotify algorithm seemed to suggest us to a lot of new fans who were listening to bands that sounded similar to us, and things really began to take off around 2018.” To date, the band has hundreds of millions of streams and a half a million monthly listeners on Spotify alone. A newly found fan-base reinvigorated Kreifels and long-time collaborator Lucas Hughes, and they began demoing songs again in 2018. However, it wasn’t until a close call gave Kreifels what he describes as a re-awakening: “I got really sick about 9 about months ago, and it was almost a miraculous healing… I went from almost dying––my liver almost failed… but I came out of that floating almost, really thankful to be given another chance… music is something I need to pursue.” Together with band member and producer, Ethan Kaufmann, Wild Party has been steadily dropping singles since 2021, culminating into the band’s 2023 EP release, Get Up. The yet-to-be-named full length EP (expected at the end of 2023) will continue to feature the band’s signature indie-pop sound, albeit with more creative ambition. “It’s pretty similar (but) it’s a little more experimental in a lot of ways… there are going to be some songs that aren’t structured so pop-centric.” When asked about touring, Kreifels expresses enthusiasm, “The plan is play shows consistently… (and) make as many real connections with people as possible… (we want to) try and make the world a better place with our music.”Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud | TikTok
Cosmic Charlie / Dark Side of The Dead
Cosmic New Year – 2 Night Combo Ticket for Saturday 12/30 and Sunday 12/31 available here!“Dark Side Of The Dead” is Cosmic Charlie’s hybrid show featuring the music of both the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. The centerpiece of the show is a live performance of Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side Of The Moon. The album is performed start-to-finish, by the Cosmic Charlie “big band” that includes two drummers, 4 keyboards, backup singers & saxophone. Before and after the “Dark Side” album performance, Cosmic Charlie will offer up two heaping helpings of its signature high energy Grateful Dead. Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band has swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue, a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, and both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight.Website | Facebook | YouTube
Cosmic Charlie New Year’s Eve
Cosmic New Year – 2 Night Combo Ticket for Saturday 12/30 and Sunday 12/31 available here!Ring in 2024 with Cosmic Charlie! The festive evening will include party favors, Father Time, champagne toast at midnight, and a healthy dose of Cosmic Charlie’s high energy Grateful Dead. Maybe even a few surprises! Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band has swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue, a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, and both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight. Moving and shaking even the most skeptical of Deadheads, Cosmic Charlie storms into a town and plays with an energy that eludes other bands, an energy that sometimes eluded the Dead themselves. Those precious moments during Dead jams when the synchronicity is there and all is right with the world, these are moments that Cosmic Charlie relishes and feverishly welcomes with open arms. Clearly, Cosmic Charlie’s audiences are also eager to arrive at those moments, and together with the band, they have indulged in many memorable evenings. Website | Facebook | YouTube
Cosmic New Year – 2 Night Combo Ticket
Cosmic New Year – 2 Night Combo Ticket Saturday, December 30, 2023“Dark Side Of The Dead” is Cosmic Charlie’s hybrid show featuring the music of both the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. The centerpiece of the show is a live performance of Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side Of The Moon. The album is performed start-to-finish, by the Cosmic Charlie “big band” that includes two drummers, 4 keyboards, backup singers & saxophone. Before and after the “Dark Side” album performance, Cosmic Charlie will offer up two heaping helpings of its signature high energy Grateful Dead. Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band has swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue, a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, and both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight.Website | Facebook | YouTube Sunday, December 31, 2023 Ring in 2024 with Cosmic Charlie! The festive evening will include party favors, Father Time, champagne toast at midnight, and a healthy dose of Cosmic Charlie’s high energy Grateful Dead. Maybe even a few surprises! Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band has swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue, a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, and both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight. Moving and shaking even the most skeptical of Deadheads, Cosmic Charlie storms into a town and plays with an energy that eludes other bands, an energy that sometimes eluded the Dead themselves. Those precious moments during Dead jams when the synchronicity is there and all is right with the world, these are moments that Cosmic Charlie relishes and feverishly welcomes with open arms. Clearly, Cosmic Charlie’s audiences are also eager to arrive at those moments, and together with the band, they have indulged in many memorable evenings. Website | Facebook | YouTube
Video Age
Video Age make breezy and timeless songs that are so ineffable, they can only be the result of a decades-long friendship and songwriting partnership. Across four albums, Ross Farbe and Ray Micarelli have gleefully worn their influences on their sleeve, writing inviting tunes that reference sounds ranging from disco to pop and indie rock. On their latest LP, Away From The Castle, the New Orleans duo have strayed from nostalgia and instead have honed their own unique musicality, making songs that sound like themselves with a taste of inspiration from classic singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s. The album is a testament to the possibilities that come from getting out of your comfort zone, the freedom of writing vulnerably and unselfconsciously, and the joys of getting to work with your closest companions. After releasing and eventually touring their critically-acclaimed third album Pleasure Line in 2020, Farbe and Micarelli sought inspiration for their next project through collaboration. They worked with Drugdealer on his album Hiding In Plain Sight, Micarelli gigged throughout New Orleans’ jazz and blues scenes, and Farbe recorded local artists at his home studio, most recently producing Esther Rose’s new album Safe to Run. Feeling refreshed, they rented a cabin in Eunice, Louisiana with touring members Nick Corson and Duncan Troast, where they spent eight days in August 2022 jamming, cooking and writing together. Through this process, Video Age have made their best collection of tracks to date by perfectly alchemizing their influences and experiences into a record still tinged with nostalgia, but moving towards a more succinct and authentic voice. Away From The Castle is a document of a band having fun and rediscovering their love for making music together, but it’s also their most honest and personal work yet–Video Age distilled to its purest form.Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | TikTok
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (SGM) – the most gloriously unclassifiable American band in existence – is bringing back the apocalypse. The esteemed curators of SGM are proud to announce a series of Grand Reopening tours, recordings, and related events. On any given night, SGM’s live set careens from euphoric to eerie to ego-annihilating wall-of-sound. Gleefully dark and joyful noise emanates from a wild array of instruments, many homemade. Crowds are engulfed in circuitous melody, strange bursts of color and light, unknowable time signatures, spasmodic dance. A Sleepytime performance is never just a string of head-bangin’ anthems. Each song is an elaborate journey of its own, often clocking in at 10+ minutes, framing cameos from friends and family in the form of Butoh dance, parades, puppet shows, even the occasional impassioned oration of Italian Futurist poetry. People speak in hushed tones about the live shows like rites of passage. What was an average local rock club just hours before is transformed into a volatile dreamspace where anything can, and does, happen. Flustered reviewers, desperate to pigeonhole the ineffable, have labeled SGM everything from neo-RIO (Rock in Opposition) to avant-prog metal to grindcore funk theatre to, in the words of one particularly rapt concertgoer, “some kinda Satanic Anarchic Viking Shit”. None of those descriptors come anywhere close to conveying the band’s ethos. Sleepytime’s arsenal of instruments ranges from the searing violin of a certain lady, standard rock fare of electric guitars, basses and drums, to intriguing contraptions from various folk traditions, to junkyard percussion and Fisher Price toys, to horns ‘n’ bells ‘n’ rusty trash can lids, to a collection of handcrafted one-offs including the Percussion Guitar, the Wiggler, the Spring-Nail Guitar, and a brutal, seven foot long piano-stringed bass behemoth called The Sledge Hammer Dulcimer. Together the group has penned lyrics inspired by the Unabomber, by James Joyce, by Muriel Rukeyser, by madness, by a stroke-stricken obstetrician, by love, by death, by cockroaches, by the increasingly bleak industrialized end times we’re all enduring. The band sports blackened teeth and spiked leather gauntlets and bonnets and tri-hawks and military khaki and antique lace nighties. They croon lilting post-modern folk melodies enmeshed with face-melting blasts of pure untrammeled black metal. Well, drop-kick a lithopedion, lizards and germs, because it’s time to ROCK AGAINST ROCK AND REJOICE! Run, walk, crawl, slither your way to one of their upcoming shows. Whatever you gotta do to get to the club, where some truly spectacular DIY-or-Die-Tryin’ art and community awaits you. Bring your body down to where SGM always has and ever shall live: on the loving, bleeding edge of an interrobang. This singular act is not to be missed. This message approved by The John Kane SocietyBandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Helado Negro
Born in South Florida in 1980 to Ecuadorian immigrant parents, the world-building multi-instrumentalist Roberto Carlos Lange stitches together memories, impressions, and atmospheres to make detailed dreamscapes as Helado Negro. He produces, engineers, and mixes his own songs, literally creating and populating his own sonic world. Lange has a degree in Computer Art and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design and works extensively with video, sculpture, sound, and performance. He brings that toolbox to whatever he makes, and there’s a seeming effortlessness to the complexity. His songs are awash with vibrant melodies, sharp lyrical vignettes, and subtle, even whispered hooks. Since his 2009 debut, Awe Owe, across multiple projects and collaborations, through his breakthrough records, 2016’s Private Energy and 2019’s This Is How You Smile, and to 2021’s Far In, Lange’s work continues to move past easy genre assignments. Showcasing that interest in open-ended multidisciplinarity, in 2022, he and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, created the multidisciplinary exhibition, Kite Symphony, with Ballroom Marfa—it was a collection of impressionistic installations, drawings and sound pieces that encourages listeners to “open their ears to the sky, the sound of cacti, and the feeling of the wind on their skin.” Lange’s ninth studio record, Phasor, picks up on that interest in the natural world but in the form of pop music. Deep, atmospheric, and meticulously executed, it’s Lange’s tightest collection to date. Lange has been awarded a United States Artist fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. He lives in Asheville, NC.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
G. Love & Special Sauce 30th Anniversary Tour
“I’ve been in the game a long time, but I’ve always considered myself a student,” says G. Love. “Finishing this album with Keb Mo’ felt like graduation.” Recorded in Nashville with a slew of special guests including Robert Randolph, Marcus King, and Roosevelt Collier, ‘The Juice’ is indeed diploma-worthy. Co-produced and co-written with GRAMMY-winning icon Keb Mo,’ it’s an electrifying collection, one that tips its cap to more than a century of blues greats even as it offers its own distinctly modern pop spin on the genre, mixing programmed beats and hip-hop grooves with blistering guitar and sacred steel. G. Love’s lyrics are both personal and political here, artfully balancing his appreciation for the simple joys in life with his obligation to speak out for justice and equality, and his performances are suitably riotous and rousing to match, with infectious call-and-response hooks and funky sing-along choruses at every turn. Easy as it is to succumb to cynicism these days, the songs on ‘The Juice’ refuse, insisting instead on hope and determination in the face of doubt and despair. “I’ve always tried to make music that’s a force for positivity,” G. Love explains. “It was important to me that this album be something that could empower the folks who are out there fighting the good fight every day. I wanted to make a rallying cry for empathy and unity.” Born Garrett Dutton in Philadelphia, PA, G. Love grew up equally enthralled with folk, blues, and rap, devouring everything from Lead Belly and Run D.M.C. to John Hammond and the Beastie Boys. After migrating to Boston, he and his band, Special Sauce, broke out in 1994 with their Gold-selling self-titled debut, which earned widespread critical acclaim for its bold vision and adventurous production. Over the next twenty-five years, G. Love would go on to release seven more similarly lauded studio studios albums with Special Sauce (plus four solo albums on his own), solidifying his place in music history as a genre-bending pioneer with a sound The New York Times described as “a new and urgent hybrid” and NPR called a “musical melting pot.” G. Love’s magnetic stage presence, meanwhile, made him a fixture on festival lineups from Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza, and his relentless appetite for tour and collaboration landed him on the road and in the studio with artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Dave Matthews, The Avett Brothers, Jack Johnson, and DJ Logic. While G. Love has covered considerable sonic ground during his prolific career, he’s always found himself drawn back to the blues, and to one bluesman in particular. “Keb Mo’ and I got signed to the same label at the same time back when I first started out, and we toured together early on in my career,” G. Love remembers. “He used to introduce me onstage as ‘a true American original,’ and I could tell that he got a kick out of what I did. We didn’t see each other for a while after that, but a few years ago we reconnected and did a co-headline tour, which was really special for me.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Dan Bern
If you must put him in a box, make sure it’s a big box! Undefinable by genre, crossing over and through folk, rock, singer-songwriter, and kids music, Dan Bern is a captivating live performer with a loyal, multi-generational following. He has written thousands of songs, released dozens of albums, and played shows across North America and Europe–from coffee shops to Carnegie Hall, and he most recently opened for The Who. Dan’s songs have appeared in numerous films (“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” “Get Him to the Greek” “The Bubble” “Zero Effect”) and TV shows (Amazon Prime’s award-winning kids program “The Stinky & Dirty Show”). A rare, and true renaissance artist, Dan is the author of several books, is a prolific painter, has his own podcast, and internet radio station. During Covid, his online “Hunkered in the Bunker” shows developed their own passionate community of followers. His topical sports songs are regularly featured on “The Tony Kornheiser Show.” Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Otoboke Beaver
Otoboke Beaver おとぼけビ～バ～ are a punk-rock-garage quartet from Kyoto, Japan. The band’s name is taken from a local ‘Love Hotel’ and they describe themselves as: “Japanese girls ‘knock out or pound cake’ band”. Formed at Kyoto University’s music club, the band consists of Accorinrin (Lead Vocal & Guitar), Yoyoyoshie (Guitar & Vocals), Hirochan (Bass & Vocals) and Kahokiss (Drums & Vocals). Acco’s off-kilter self-taught compositional and confrontational performance skills, together with the band’s incredible musicianship make for a thrilling and unmissable live act. Damnably Records released the compilation ‘Okoshiyasu!! Otoboke Beaver’ in March 2016, which was championed by Gideon Coe and Tom Ravenscroft on BBC6Music & John Kennedy on XFM. 2017 was a breakthrough year for the band, with attention from Pitchfork, NPR, i-D and The Fader and more, acclaimed debuts at SXSW and FujiRock Festival, a sold-out show in London’s legendary 100 Club, and their ‘Love Is Short’ 7” charted in the UK for 4 weeks. In 2018 the band’s ‘ATTYUUMA’ tour saw them travel over 24,000 miles in a week, on a brief UK tour that was bookmarked by slots at Coachella Music Festival. Recent converts include Dave Grohl, Tadanobu Asano, Tom Moreno, Krist Novoselic, Aidan Moffat and The Cribs, the latter describing them as “PUNK AS F*CK”. After kicking things off at 2019’s SXSW music opening party and a run of wild showcases, the band released new album “ITEKOMA HITS” in April on Damnably, receiving widespread praise from the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum, NYLON, BrooklynVegan and many more. They made their European debut at Lowlands Festival in The Netherlands, appeared as part of the line up at Koyabu Sonic Festival in Japan, and composed the opening theme song for Japanese comedy series “Susumu Inomata & 8 Mojo”. In 2020, the band quit their day jobs in order to tour the world and were announced for a slew of festival worldwide, including SXSW, Villette Sonique, Primavera Sound, Beaches Brew Festival, Eurockeenes, Green Man Festival and many more. But since the pandemic hit, live music has been put on hold, and you know the rest of the story. Otoboke Beaver released their newest album, Super Champon, in May 2022 and have started touring again. They announced they would be touring the new album across Japan and North America later this year, marking their first full length tour of North America. The tour will continue across Europe into 2023. Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
