Honey Magpie
Known for vocal harmonies, classical string instruments, and nature-inspired lyrics, Honey Magpie is fronted by Millennial singer-songwriters Rachael Hurwitz (guitar, keys) and Pippa Hoover (cello). Their sound invites comparisons to all-female folk groups like I’m With Her, but draws more influence from pop than bluegrass or old time. The band formed in 2015, when all members were in their mid-to-late 20s. Despite what felt like a late start in music, Honey Magpie pursued performing and recording wholeheartedly. They gained early success in the Triangle when they won the band contest at the Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival in 2015. They released their debut album Honey Magpie in 2017, and have since been featured in the Oak City Sessions video series and on WUNC’s The State of Things. Their single “Undecided” premiered on Pop Matters in January 2020. Their second album Midnight Morning draws from a richer range of musical influences and boasts a higher production level than Honey Magpie. Listeners will recognize elements of 90s rock, 60s pop, country, and femme-fronted indie pop, supported by a full rhythm section of bass, drums, guitar, and keys. Millennials experiencing a “quarter-life crisis will relate to the album’s mix of joy, angst, and reflection on life, and fans of all ages will love the new depth in the band’s sound. Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | SoundCloud | YouTube
Joe Purdy
Mask and Proof of Vaccination and or a negative Covid-19 test taken by a licensed health professional within the previous 72 hours before the event are required for entry.Joe Purdy is an internationally acclaimed folk artist who has released 14 albums and a soundtrack to a movie in the last 15 years. Along the way, his songs have turned up on numerous TV shows, film soundtracks and he has co-starred in an acclaimed film.“American Folk” marked Joe’s first foray into acting. He also contributed to much of the soundtrack. It earned several awards including Best New Film at the Cleveland International Film Festival.Joe’s last album, “Who Will Be Next?”, is deeply rooted in the tradition of artists such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. It is a searing commentary of our turbulent times. Joe’s determination to honor the giants of American folk music while applying his formidable skills as a writer and vocalist reveal him as a compassionate observer and participant in our times.Joe has just finished a new album which will be released soon and supported by a Worldwide Tour in 2022.Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
Holy Fawn
Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify
Esme Patterson
Ray Bradbury’s 1950 sci-fi short story collection The Martian Chronicles takes place between 1999 and 2057. Life on earth is crumbling post-nuclear war. The robots are thriving, carrying out the duties set before them, while the humans are forced to flee to Mars. Esme Patterson’s fourth studio album, There Will Come Soft Rains, is named after the Sara Teasdale poem of the same name which inspired the Bradbury collection’s penultimate tale.There Will Come Soft Rains revolves around the constant cycle of creation and destruction. A process that Patterson felt reflected the sonic direction she started moving in on 2016’s We Were Wild, and which she delves deeper into on her newest effort, and first for BMG. “It’s about how life continues on this planet after humans inevitably wipe ourselves out,” the Denver-based artist says. “The songs echo the surrender of starting over and failing and starting over again many times. I was hoping to convey the bittersweet peace of letting go alongside the courage to start again, being swallowed by fear and pain and coming out the other side stronger.”The album follows the Grand Jury Music release of 2016’s critically acclaimed We Were Wild and marks her new partnership with BMG. Patterson got her start in the mid-aughts with her band Paper Bird and went on to release her first solo album, All Princes, I, in 2012. She began touring with Shakey Graves in 2014, in between albums and her own tours, and co-wrote three songs for his 2014 album, And The War Came, while also releasing her “defiant and witty” (The Guardian) second solo album Woman To Woman in 2015. Patterson has frequently collaborated with the likes of Craig Finn, William Elliot Whitmore, William Ryan Fitch and many more.Patterson’s music is constantly evolving but that has never been as obvious and crucial as it is on There Will Come Soft Rains. Jangly guitars and glowing synths build on the direction of We Were Wild and mark a stark transition from the folkier sound of her previous works. Raw vocals lay bare against fellow Denver duo Tennis’ shiny production and surfy dream pop. For the album Patterson and Tennis holed up in the band’s garage for 12 days in 2018 in the scorching hot Denver summer to record the album, but she has been conceptualizing it since 2015. “I feel like I’ve been continually rising from the ashes,” she says. “Being born and dying again.”Over ten songs, Patterson yearns for true love, bemoans sexual frustration and capitalism, questions the afterlife, and ponders suicidal ideation. The album opens with the ectastic “Shelby Tell Me Everything” a “sweet and innocent gay love song”. She wrote “Out The Door,” a deceptively upbeat meditation on what happens to our souls when we die, while living with her dying grandmother. The dusty and delicate guitar-led “Momentito” is about living in the present, surrendering to what we can and can’t control.The darkest moment and brightest light come in the middle of the tracklist. The twinkly piano number “All Mine” takes us back to when Patterson lived in a motel room by the highway. “I was dealing with constant suicidal thoughts for several months, and through writing, writing this song specifically, I found an anchor,” she says. “I knew at the center of my being…that I was enough, that I was ok, that I could take suicide off the table permanently, and never go back, that I was fine being all mine and loneliness too shall pass, it comes and goes, and there is beauty to be found in all of it.”Links: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Panchiko
On July 21st, 2016, a user on 4chan’s /mu/ board posted a photo of a CD they’d found at a record store in Nottingham, UK: a rough-worn demo titled D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L, purportedly released in 2000 by four musicians: Owain, Andy, Shaun, and John. The listener uploaded the ripped audio – the recordings sounded like they were plagued with disc rot – to file-sharing sites, and later YouTube, where they began circulating among internet music circles. The record’s sensationalist appeal was multifold. Was this an honest- to-God ’90s curio? A prank hatched by internet-savvy teens? An internet experiment in nostalgia, in the spirit of vapourwave? Nobody knew. So the Panchiko hive mobilised, gathering on subreddits and discord servers, examining every square inch of the packaging for potential clues, and even calling the Nottingham record store where D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L had allegedly sprung up in the first place.“I woke up one day,” recounts Owain, “and ping – there’s a message on a defunct Facebook page of mine, ‘Hello, you’ll probably never read this, but are you the lead singer of Panchiko?’” The query took Owain by shock; to his and Andy’s knowledge, D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L had never been uploaded to the internet. The Panchiko fandom finally made contact the following day, when they received their reply from Owain, a simple “Yeah.” At last, the world had confirmation: not only were Panchiko not 14-year-old kids, they were the real deal, right down to the disk rot.Links: Bandcamp | Instagram | Spotify
The Black Angels
The best music reflects a widescreen view of the world back at us, helping distill the universal into something far more personal. Since forming in Austin in 2004, The Black Angels have become standard bearers for modern psych-rock that does exactly that, which is one of many reasons why the group’s new album, Wilderness of Mirrors, feels so aptly named.Says vocalist/bassist Alex Maas, “a big focal point of this record is just the overall insanity that’s happening. What’s true? What’s not?” Adds guitarist Christian Bland, “We leave our music open to interpretation, but our topics are always universal themes—problems mankind has had since the beginning of time. You can relate them to any period.”Indeed, in the five years since the release of the band’s prior album, Death Song, and the two-plus years spent working on Wilderness of Mirrors, pandemics, political tumult and the ongoing devastation of the environment have provided ample fodder for the Black Angels’ signature sonic approach. If the group’s members were terrified as they honed new music heading into an election year, they realized they didn’t even know how scary things could still get. So, they looked inward, focusing on both their ongoing creative and musical development as well as their own struggles amid the external chaos.Wilderness of Mirrors (to be released 9/16/22) hits even closer to home, as the group recorded solely in the friendly confines of Austin for the first time in more than a decade and entrusted co-production duties to its longtime front-of-house engineer, Brett Orrison. “It was a really great experience, because Brett understands us a lot on a musical level. We’ve grown together,” Maas says. “We worked on this record for over a year in the studio in Austin. I don’t know any other situation where we’d have been able to do that in a 9-to-5 way.” Adds Bland, “Doing it in Austin allowed for open creativity and took away the stress of rushing to get something done. We used our time wisely.” That methodical modus operandi can be heard throughout Wilderness of Mirrors, which expertly refines the Black Angels’ psychedelic rock attack alongside a host of intriguing sounds and textures. “History of the Future” and opener “Without a Trace” are classic blasts of fuzzed-out guitars that simultaneously perk up the ears and jumpstart the mind (“Is it still possible to be invincible when everyone else is expendable?” Maas wonders aloud on the latter), while a fast, thumping bass line and an allusion to a world leader hiding in his bunker propel “Empires Falling” into an ominous decree: “Every time youwake, I want to end you.”“I came in with a riff that was kind of slow and mid-tempo-y,” Bland says of the song. “When I showed it to the band, [drummer] Stephanie [Bailey] started playing a quicker beat over it, [guitarist] Jake [Garcia] added this cool mercurial lead guitar line, and [multi-instrumentalist] Ramiro [Verdooren] laid down a heavy driving bass, and all the sudden it had some rock’n’roll gasoline behind it. That’s the beauty of being with these folks. Everybody brings their creativity to the table and a song could become something you never had envisioned before.”Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Courtney Marie Andrews
On the honey shores of Cape Cod in a beach shack, Courtney Marie Andrews found self-love and her voice. Every morning, she’d walk 6-8 miles around the back trails of an island and meditate on her life, perusing old memories and patterns like browsing a used bookshop. That summer of introspection led her to a joyous sense of beginnings and ends. When she let love for herself in, she therein let the outside love in, too—the summer feeling, the swaying cypress, the full moon, and the possibility of healthy love. This phase came only right after one of her darkest, though, where being alone with oneself was the most terrifying thing you could do. After more than a decade on the road, the Phoenix-born songwriter, poet, and painter finally had the space to process all the highs and lows of a life of constants. She was finally ready to make a record of triumph, while not completely forgetting the years that made her. That record is Loose Future. After committing to penning a song a day, Courtney found the sounds of summer flowing through her writing—the romance, and possibility, and the free sounds. Collecting an album’s worth of material, she tied up some loose ends in Bisbee, Arizona, her “soul place” and beckoned Sam Evian to come and produce a record. Her guideposts were lots of harmonies and alternative percussion. The rest was pure exploration. At Flying Cloud Recordings in New York, she dipped in the creek every morning before proceeding. She wanted to embody the feeling of letting love in. Taking the dip is what letting love in feels like. Sometimes you plunge, and sometimes you walk slowly in. This summer feeling materializes on the first single “Satellite” where her shimmering vocals orbit delicate acoustic guitar, a soft beat, and buzzing intergalactic synths. As if bottling rays of July sun, it glows with the affirmation, “I like to see you shine—my favorite piece of the sky.” “I’ve written a lot of love songs, but there’s always a tinge of heartbreak,” she explains. “I wanted to write a love song with no caveats, which I’ve never allowed myself to do. A satellite is so mysterious to the average person. It’s the idea somebody is floating around your mind. You’re not quite sure why, but you like it.” Then, there’s “I’ll Be Thinkin On You.” A bombastic beat echoes as an organ underscores her lovestruck delivery as she rethinks the whole concept of “missing” the one you love. “I fell in love with someone,” she goes on. “Instead of saying, ‘I’ll be missing you,’ we’d say, ‘I’ll be thinking on you’. When you’re ‘thinking on’ somebody, it means this person is on your mind and not absent.”The opener and title track “Loose Future” embodies the core of the album’s message. Her voice rings out through a guitar amp pedal as off-kilter bass lines thump with lush guitar, mirroring the ebb and flow of her constant self-work to reach this point creatively, personally, and spiritually.Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
School of Rock Chapel Hill’s Mid-Season Preview Show
Free Show / $5 Suggested DonationShow Times:12:00 – Best of R.E.M.12:30 – Yacht Rock1:00 – Rock 1011:30 – House Band – The Who’s “Who’s Next”2:15 – Best of Reggae2:30 – 90’s Alt Ladies3:00 – Rock 2013:30 – Allman Brothers Band vs The Grateful DeadLinks: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Chloe Moriondo
On her new album SUCKERPUNCH, singer/songwriter Chloe Moriondo inhabits an entire cast of unruly characters: a larger-than-life vigilante who collects ill-behaved boys like figurines, a champagne-popping Barbie doll with its hair chopped off, a champion boxer stepping into the ring in a satin pink Hello Kitty robe. Expanding on the untamed imagination and volcanic emotionality of 2021’s Blood Bunny—a critically acclaimed album that landed on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of The New York Times—the 19-year-old Michigan native uses that whirlwind storytelling as a vessel for self-exploration, uncovering potent truths about self-image and obsession and the complexities of power. At turns campy and confessional, tender and explosive, SUCKERPUNCH is heralded by the sticky-sweet anthem “Fruity” and marks a bold leap forward from the understated indie-pop and jittery pop-punk of Blood Bunny, often echoing the sheer unpredictability suggested in its title. But despite that seismic shift in sonic direction, Moriondo continues to imbue each track with the diary-like honesty that’s earned her a global fanbase of millions, slowly revealing the immense depth of her sensitivity and creating the most gloriously uninhibited work yet from a truly one-of-a-kind artist.Links: Website
Madison Cunningham
Two-time Grammy nominated artist Madison Cunningham is set to release her highly anticipated new album, Revealer, September 9 on Verve Forecast. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter-guitarist recently received her second Grammy nomination for Wednesday (Extended Edition) in the “Best Folk Album” category, previously having her debut album Who Are You Now nominated for “Best Americana Album” in 2020. Cunningham is fresh off the heels of a successful 2021, having opened for Harry Styles at his sold-out Madison Square Garden shows, toured with the likes of Andrew Bird, Bahamas and My Morning Jacket, and joined the touring band for “Live from Here.” She performed on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” (alongside Courtney Marie Andrews) and penned an original song “Broken Harvest” for the NPR “Morning Edition” Song Project. Her forthcoming album Revealer finds Cunningham working once again with longtime producer and collaborator Tyler Chester, as well as Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Mastodon) and Tucker Martine (Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens). The album is full of confessions, intimations, and hard truths — a self-portrait of a young artist who is full of doubt and uncertainty, yet bursting with exciting ideas about music and life. “There’s a sense of conflict about revealing anything about yourself; not just what to reveal, but whether you should reveal anything at all,” Cunningham explains. “This record is a product of me trying to find myself and my interests again. I felt like somewhere along the way I had lost the big picture of my own life.” Links: Website | Spotify | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
