Alesana
Positive Mental Attitude. This is the mantra that is not only a driving force for Raleigh, North Carolina based Alesana, but also a way of life. Celebrating eleven years as a band, the pop-metal sextet is always in high spirits and accustomed to playing their hearts out every night when on the road. Countless US tours, several trips around the world, and seven major releases later, Alesana is living proof that hard work and dedication to dreams can go a long, long way. Calling Revival Recordings their home, the band released the conclusion to their Annabel Trilogy in April 2015 with Confessions. Released in December of 2013, the stand-alone single Fatima Rusalka progressed the band’s conceptual trilogy en route to its conclusion with Confessions. The song does what has come to be expected of the storytelling rock machine which is to draw from past influences while incorporating new possibilities, dynamics, and sonic exploration. Having spent time on Tragic Hero Records, Fearless Records, and Epitaph Records, Alesana’s entire catalogue, consisting of Try This With Your Eyes Closed, On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax, Where Myth Fades To Legend, The Emptiness, A Place Where The Sun Is Silent, and Confessions, has charted on the Billboard Top 200. In summer 2016, Alesana released a special edition of Confessions including two new tracks along with a novella, entitled Annabel, which inspired The Annabel Triology. The album is available on all digital outlets now and the novella is available for purchase on Amazon Kindle now. In 2017, Alesana began working on the ulitmate fan project which they called Origins. Filled with hours worth of behind the scenes and never before seen footage, demos, and a brand new EP The Lost Chapters, Origins was born as a visual history of the past thirteen years of the band. In early 2018, Alesana released The Lost Chapters EP digitally. Origins bundles are currently available on the Revival Recordings shop page. The Lost Chapters EP is available to stream on all digital platforms and to purchase on iTunes now! Links: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Apple Music
Ghostly Kisses
Music has always been around Margaux Sauvé, born in Quebec to a family of musicians; she picked up the violin at the tender age of five. Moving on to the Conservatoire in Quebec, she quit due to “missing the fun part of it” but still loved music so started to play violin in local bands. Singing came a bit later as she thought that “to be a singer you had to have a powerful voice and be loud”, something that doesn’t come naturally to her as a quiet, thoughtful person. Alongside this, the pop music on the radio whilst growing up in Quebec wasn’t connecting with her, so it wasn’t until she started to write music whilst studying psychology at University that the creativity and desire to express revealed itself: “it just opened a completely new path for me”. Writing music as Ghostly Kisses arrived at a moment where Margaux was in “a living situation I was not able to get out of. A toxic relationship where I had a hard time understanding what was happening.” With this knowledge, it is understandable that most of her early music has a sorrowful but exploratory mood; knowing there were things she needed to express, but not understanding quite how instinctively she was writing until years later it became apparent what she was singing about.And now, with ‘Heaven, Wait’, her mesmeric debut album ready for release, her songwriting has developed to the point that this is the first time she has written and felt like she was part of the conversation. Able to view herself with an external eye, the album reflects transitions and rebirth – still talking about difficult situations, but with the ability to cast someone else in the lead role, giving the music a deeply personal yet starkly universal appeal. One which Margaux feels has come from “a more mature, adult way of looking at it.”Identifying key themes of the album, Margaux frames the album artwork within the context of the songs as being “from water towards the air, there’s a lot of dark around me and I’m just going through to the light.” And that feels like the crux of the album, that nothing is perfect – there are always difficult situations, but it is about trusting the process and working hard towards something positive.All the songs on ‘Heaven, Wait’ talk at some point about a transition or a relationship she had to work on, not wanting to be stuck in a situation forever. Whilst the story of the album is an intensely personal journey, it’s the first time we find Margaux writing about excitement and desire. We also hear her develop as an artist with liberating songs that can be danced to amongst the darker, more melodramatic songs she has built her name on.If title track ‘Heaven, Wait’ encapsulates the positive side of growth, then other songs, such as first single ‘Don’t Know Why’ is about how “at some point I had to let go and accept defeat, it was my own choice to leave and it was painful.” ‘Blackbirds’ is about depression; something she experienced first hand when she was eighteen going into an intensely dark place: “there was no grey area, there was only black or an idea of being free.”Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Sir Woman
Sir Woman is the new musical project from Wild Child/Glorietta singer Kelsey Wilson. Started in 2019 as a way for Wilson to write and record the styles of music that inspire her – Soul, Funk, RnB, Gospel – the project quickly garnered massive attention around their homebase of Austin, TX. In 2020, after just a handful of shows and single releases, Sir Woman was dubbed “Best New Act” at the Austin Music Awards.During the pandemic, Sir Woman released a five song EP (appropriately) titled Bitch. With the massive lead single “Highroad,” the collection has already passed 14.5 million streams on Spotify, and led to radio airplay across the U.S. Now that concerts have resumed, Sir Woman has also cemented their status as one of the funnest shows anywhere with sold out club dates and festival appearances around Austin as well as tour dates opening for Black Pumas and Shakey Graves.Now the band is ready to introduce the rest of the country to the party. The Sir Woman self-titled full-length was released in April 2022, and tour dates throughout the U.S. are planned for the next several months.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Wyatt Easterling CD Release Show
Wyatt first came to Nashville as a folk singer on the verge of signing with CBS Records, but in true industry fashion, Sony acquired the label, and the deal fell through. Undeterred, he signed on as a writer with a new publishing company opened by former CBS label head Rick Blackburn.After a couple of years there, Blackburn brought him on as head of A&R at Atlantic Records where Wyatt signed some of country music’s biggest names including John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Lawrence, Michael Johnson and Neal McCoy. He also began working as a producer, guiding Montgomery’s debut album Life’s A Dance to an impressive three million copies sold. After Atlantic, Wyatt opened Bugle Publishing Group with partner Miles Copeland, where he signed a number of artists, most notably Keith Urban, Paul Jefferson and Paul Thorn. At Bugle, Wyatt also produced Thorn’s debut album Hammer and Nail and got the future superstar Urban his first record deal.During that period, Wyatt and Miles had the inventive idea to turn a chateau in the south of France into a writers’ den they called “The Castle” where they began pairing their Nashville songwriters with big name artists like Carole King, Cher, Peter Frampton and Olivia Newton John. In time, Wyatt was ready to move on from the publishing world, and he signed as a writer with DreamWorks Publishing, API and EMI where he had numerous songs recorded by the likes of Dierks Bentley and Joe Diffie, including the gorgeous title track from Bentley’s album Modern Day Drifter.After all of his time navigating the many facets of the music industry, it turns out his true destination was in fact to be a singer-songwriter. He started touring, including consecutive appearances as a finalist in the prestigious Kerrville New Folk contest, and he’s since recorded his two beautiful albums Where This River Goes and Goodbye, Hello. And now happily we have a third collection of songs by Wyatt Easterling in Divining Rod that we can all listen to it for years to come.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Mipso
Since making their acclaimed debut with 2013’s Dark Holler Pop, North Carolina-bred four- piece Mipso have captivated audiences with their finely layered vocal harmonies, graceful fluency in the timeless musical traditions of their home state, and a near-telepathic musical connection that makes their live show especially kinetic. On their self-titled sixth album and Rounder Records debut, fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson share their most sonically adventurous and lyrically rich work to date, each moment charged with the tension between textural effervescence and an underlying despair about the modern world.Mainly recorded at Echo Mountain in Asheville, North Carolina, Mipso finds the band joining forces with Sandro Perri (a musician/producer known for his work with acts like Great Lake Swimmers, as well as his own post-rock/experimental-electronic material). In overseeing the production process, Perri guided Mipso toward their goal of shaping a sonic landscape that was expansive and atmospheric yet surprisingly personal, even playful. To that end, the band dreamed up Mipso’s resplendent textures by stretching the limits of their acoustic instruments, rather than employing outside musicians to create new sounds. The result is a body of work with spacious arrangements that gently illuminate the idiosyncratic details and refined musicianship at the heart of every song.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Mipso
Since making their acclaimed debut with 2013’s Dark Holler Pop, North Carolina-bred four- piece Mipso have captivated audiences with their finely layered vocal harmonies, graceful fluency in the timeless musical traditions of their home state, and a near-telepathic musical connection that makes their live show especially kinetic. On their self-titled sixth album and Rounder Records debut, fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson share their most sonically adventurous and lyrically rich work to date, each moment charged with the tension between textural effervescence and an underlying despair about the modern world.Mainly recorded at Echo Mountain in Asheville, North Carolina, Mipso finds the band joining forces with Sandro Perri (a musician/producer known for his work with acts like Great Lake Swimmers, as well as his own post-rock/experimental-electronic material). In overseeing the production process, Perri guided Mipso toward their goal of shaping a sonic landscape that was expansive and atmospheric yet surprisingly personal, even playful. To that end, the band dreamed up Mipso’s resplendent textures by stretching the limits of their acoustic instruments, rather than employing outside musicians to create new sounds. The result is a body of work with spacious arrangements that gently illuminate the idiosyncratic details and refined musicianship at the heart of every song.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Fleece
“If two men just ain’t right, then I’m living in a world that’s upside down,” Matt Rogers, lead vocalist and songwriter of Montreal-based LGBTQ indie-rock band Fleece, croons on “Upside Down”, a song on their gorgeous new LP, Stunning and Atrocious. On this album, the band isn’t holding back on sharing their roadmap for how they see the world.In fact, Fleece has never paused, even for a moment, to define themselves or add labels to their experience, instead opting to open up and be. This band is au naturel and it shows, right from their earliest days and rise to notoriety through their rice cake- munching “How to write an Alt-J song” viral video (which amassed 12 million views). Since that video, that notoriety has only amplified. Subsequent releases and antics have added fuel to this fire and grown large and dedicated followings on Spotify, Instagram and TikTok, resulting in worldwide audiences and millions of monthly streams. The band’s recent singles “Upside Down”, “Do U Mind? (Leave The Light On)”, and “Love Song for the Haters” have each leapt past the 2-million stream mark. Along the way the band found themselves on tour across North America multiple times, supporting renowned bands Tokyo Police Club, Born Ruffians, Mt. Joy, and others as their demand as a headliner grew in these same markets.While having been focused on the songwriting of lead vocalist Matt Rogers and the relentless energy of drummer and co-founder Ethan Soil, Fleece has always been about being a band. Fleece’s previous music had drawn from musicians no longer in the project, but it was the emergence of Megan Ennenberg (guitar/vocals) and Jameson Daniel (guitar) as members that completed the line up and contributed to the cohesive whole, the final resting place, the rebirth of Fleece.And it is from this new Fleece where their newest emerging musical work, the album Stunning and Atrocious, came to fruition. Said Matt, “I think we’re finally Fleece. In the past, the process was more about bringing my own compositions to the band, but this album is a complete coming together of all of our brains. We played whatever we came up with, stream of consciousness style, and then restructured the songs until they felt right. It was a bit daunting to give up control at first, but the product and process of collaborating made Fleece more exciting for all of us. I definitely grew from it too. Song two (“Like It A Lot”) is about exactly this – letting the power go and feeling good.”Written from the late parts of 2018 until 2020, the album was a first for Fleece in that it was created with a collective focus in mind: songwriting with a strong emphasis on contributions from all four band members. While on tour, the band would write and demo songs, creating oodles of voice-memo-type song skeletons everywhere they went, from rural Texas to the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec to a highway-side rehearsal room in Montreal. The song ideas came together naturally and the singers began weaving in lyrics about the complexities of vulnerability, sexuality, love, depression and anxiety, joy and silliness, honesty, and power. And then, of course, the lens of a pandemic magnified the stunning and atrocious parts of all of these tropes, and they wove in that new intensified insight as well.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Pile – Dripping Ten Year Anniversary Tour
Pile is from Boston, Massachusetts. Started as a solo project by Rick Maguire back in 2007, Pile released ‘Demonstration,’ a 10 song demo and ‘Jerk Routine’ in 2008 before expanding their line-up. Wanting to be able to tour on the material with a band, Maguire attempted to find some other players. After some shuffling, the band found a cohesive line-up with Kris Kuss (drums), Matt Becker (guitar), Matt Connery (bass) and Maguire (guitar, vocals). In the eight years since, Pile has released several acclaimed albums, ‘Magic isn’t Real’ (2010), ‘Dripping’ (2012), ‘You’re Better Than This’ (2015), and “A Hairshirt of Purpose’ (2017), in addition to two highly sought after EP’s and the ‘Odds and Ends’ (2018) collection. Becker and Connery left the band in 2018 and Chappy Hull (guitar) and Alex Molini (bass) joined. They released their most recent album, “Green and Gray,” in May of 2019. Since coming together as a full band in 2009, Pile have toured as much as their lives collectively allow, playing nearly 1000 shows spread out over the US, Canada, the UK and Europe.Links: Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify
Post Sex Nachos & Similar Kind
Similar Kind is an indie pop band from Norwalk, CT. It originated as just a few friends jamming in a garage and has blossomed into a five piece band playing shows all over the US. Similar Kind has played with acts such as Sunflower Bean, Bad Bad Hats, Hot Flash Heat Wave, No Vacation & more. The band is currently working on a follow up EP to their debut “Faces & Places” a project chock-full of indie pop, reminiscent of The Cure and Talking Heads, described as “dance-ready synth-pop. equal parts R&B, pop, and indie rock, the EP is a highly-polished, thoroughly-confident release.”The band has a pair of new singles “I Don’t Wanna Fight Anymore” and “ There She Was” their latest releases.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTubeFrom the depths of the Midwest alternative scene arises a soulful and passionate quintet, ready to bend genres and produce tunes that will make you jump, shake, and move: Post Sex Nachos.Charging into battle for the love of rock n’ roll, this roller-coaster collective and their irreplaceable sound has shown audiences young and old, from coast to coast, the power of one thing: their music. Breathing new life into genres across the spectrum – from jazz, pop, indie rock, and straight up funk – Post Sex Nachos is here to redefine the term “boyband” forever.With the release of their first two self-produced albums, four original music videos, and the recent release of their third full-length LP, the band continues to pursue one thing: the groove. Collaborating with artists, producers, musicians, and filmmakers locally and globally, Post Sex Nachos continues to reimagine the scope of their music. Where most find a wall, they find a door, in a get-me-a-sledge-hammer kind of way.Who is Post Sex Nachos? We’re glad you asked.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Be Loud! ’22
We’re back for Be Loud! ’22, our 9th annual show! Inspired by our Clash London Calling tribute show in ’21, we decided to ask some of our favorite local musicians to cover truly influential acts of the 1980s. Rob Ladd, Robert Sledge and Brian Dennis (you know them as Preeesh!) stepped up to do The Police. Glam rockers What Peggy Wants are regrouping to perform the music of The Cure. And, finally, The Sex Police & Friends will take on The Ramones. It promises to be an incredible evening of music and community, with all proceeds going to support the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation and the amazing work of the UNC AYA team at UNC Hospitals. Get your tickets now…before they’re gone! Here’s the full line-up with show details: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24TH Doors Open 7:00 pm, Music Starts 8:00 pmIn order of appearance:Special Guest: Secret Monkey Weekend The Police performed by Preeesh! The Cure performed by What Peggy WantsThe Ramones performed by The Sex Police and Friends TICKETS & DETAILS Tickets are $25 and all proceeds will go to the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation. Be Loud ’22 is an all ages show.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
