DL Zene

Zachary Williams (of The Lone Bellow)

ZACHARY WILLIAMSDIRTY CAMARO BIOby Marc MenchacaI heard Zachary Williams play for the first time in 2006. A good friend of mine invited me to his show at Rockwood Music Hall. I found myself in a small room packed shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other eager listeners. Rockwood started in 2005 as an artist’s room; it expanded in step with Zach’s career incidentally or not, and it still is a place where people flock to listen to music as opposed to a bar where music is secondary. Thanks to everything good for that place and especially for providing a sanctuary for Zach. He commands your attention on stage, and it was, in my opinion, the place where he got the ears he deserved. Needless to say, after seeing Zach play upwards of two hundred shows over fifteen years, I became an early fan of his.His stories come through him with such conviction and beauty that you can’t escape the impact of his writing and his voice, which is informed by those vulnerable parts of a soul baring the most of oneself. I remember telling his wife Stacy after the second or third time seeing him at Rockwood that I’d never smiled so much watching someone on stage. His pure joy in his art was blinding. I also remember telling her that I couldn’t wait because something was going to “hit”. And it did. The Lone Bellow came together and more and more ears caught on. But in hindsight, I misspoke. Zach’s music was hitting in the beginning just as it’s still hitting now…it’s just sometimes hard to see the journey’s process working when you’re in it or witnessing it. One always thinks the next one is going to do it when in reality the one now IS doing it.Fifteen years later I am proud to say I have a friendship I’ll take to my last day, and from it comes music that makes my cheeks hurt, wakes my spirits and changes the rhythm of my day. Dirty Camaro makes your heart do the dance. From soulful crooning about relationships that yearn for transformation and missing pieces to ones that speak of adoration and a love that is anchored in the depths that only love can explain, to everyday happenstance that puts a smile on your face and a laugh in your belly…just listen and let it have you. Because it will. And if you were to ask me, I’d point to influences of the late great John Prine and Guy Clark, Springsteen and Chris Smithers. You’ll find a church where everyone speaks the same language no matter who you are and you won’t want to leave.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

together Pangea

Since they began jamming back in William’s Santa Clarita bedroom, Los Angeles indie band Together Pangea have continually challenged themselves with each subsequent offering. Jelly Jam [2010] poured the gasoline, Living Dummy [2011] struck the match, and Badillac [2014] lit the fire with its revved-up nineties rock-inspired flames. Along the way, fan favorites like “Sick Shit,” “Badillac,” and “Offer” would rack up millions of Spotify streams, while the group received support from Consequence of Sound, Pitchfork, MTV, Stereogum, and more. Following the 2015 release of The Phage EP, produced by The Replacements’ Tommy Stinson, these working class boys embarked on the journey to what would become 2017’s Bulls and Roosters, which evidenced their growth as a tried-and-true rock band with just the right amount of “brattiness,” as they like to say. Together Pangea—William Keegan, Danny Bengston, and Erik Jimenez—return in 2021 having made the most of 2020’s turbulence by writing and recording DYE, an upbeat, undeniable collection of hooks, anthems, and power-pop garage-rock catchiness that is unmistakably the album of their career. DYE is an amalgam of the band’s last three records: the inward looking and self-pleasing experimentation of 2017’s Bulls and Roosters, the frantic and scream-y Badillac with its inspiration from emotionally raw grunge, and the 50’s pop heavy 2011 album Living Dummy. After more than a decade as Together Pangea, the band know how their bread is buttered and made an effort to focus on what they know they do best.Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Langhorne Slim (Solo)

Langhorne Slim didn’t write a song for more than a year. A battle with clinical anxiety disorder and prescription drug abuse, which came to a head in 2019, had dimmed the light within. The man who once seemed to ooze spontaneity was now creatively adrift, stumbling along in the fog. Knowing he was struggling to write songs and make sense of it all, Slim was finally able to flesh out a throwaway ditty one afternoon. His close friend Mike then suggested he try penning a song a day. Slim didn’t like the idea, but he gave it a shot. To his surprise, the songs came. In a flurry of stream-of-consciousness writing, the new tunes tumbled out, one after another, like little starbursts of joy, gifts from the gods you might say. Slim was tuning out the noise and finding beauty in the madness of a world coming undone. Over the course of a couple of months from March to May 2020, Slim penned more than twenty that were certified keepers. These songs make up his new album, Strawberry Mansion, which is being released this winter on Dualtone Records. The road to Strawberry Mansion, which was recorded at Daylight Sound in Nashville with longtime compadres Paul DeFigilia (Avett Brothers) and Mat Davidson (Twain), began in 2019 with Slim’s decision to get sober. That experience and his ongoing recovery program have given him a framework for grappling with the personal demons that have always skulked in the shadows, and helped him find light in the void.Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Avail, Hot Water Music

Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Reverend Horton Heat

Loaded guns, space heaters, and big skies. Welcome to the lethal littered landscape of Jim Heath’s imagination. True to his high evan- gelical calling, Jim is a Revelator, both revealing & reinterpreting the country-blues-rock roots of Ameri- can music. He’s a time-travelling space-cowboy on a endless inter- stellar musical tour, and we are all the richer & “psychobillier” for get- ting to tag along.Seeing REVEREND HORTON HEAT live is a transformative ex- perience. Flames come off the gui- tars. Heat singes your skin. There’s nothing like the primal tribal rock & roll transfiguration of a Rever- end Horton Heat show. Jim be- comes a slicked-back 1950′s rock & roll shaman channeling Screamin’ Jay Hawkins through Buddy Holly, while Jimbo incinerates the Stand- Up Bass. And then there are the “Heatettes”. Those foxy rockabilly chicks dressed in poodle-skirts and cowboy boots slamming the night away. It’s like being magically transported into a Teen Exploita- tion picture from the 1950′s that’s currently taking place in the future.Listening to the REVEREND HOR- TON HEAT is tantamount to injecting pure musical nitrous into the hot-rod engine of your heart. The Reverend’s commandants are simple. ROCK HARD, DRIVE FAST, AND LIVE TRUE.And no band on this, or any other, planet rocks harder, drives faster, or lives truer than the Reverend Horton Heat. These “itinerant preachers” actually practice what they preach. They live their lives by the Gospel of Rock & Roll.From the High-Octane Spaghet- ti-Western Wall of Sound in “Big Sky” — to the dark driving frenetic paranoia of “400 Bucks” – to the brain-melting Western Psyche- delic Garage purity of “Psychobilly Freakout” — The Rev’s music is the perfect soundtrack to the Drive-In Movie of your life.Jim Heath & Jimbo Wallace have chewed up more road than the Google Maps drivers. For twenty- five Psychobilly years, they have blazed an indelible, unforgettable, and meteoric trail across the globe with their unique blend of musical virtuosity, legendary showman- ship, and mythic imagery.“Okay it’s time for me to put this loaded gun down, jump in my Five- Oh Ford, and nurture my pig on the outskirts of Houston. I’ll be bring- ing my love whip. See y’all later.” – Carty Talkington Writer/DirectorRev your engines and catch the ser- mon on the road as it’s preached by everybody’s favorite Reverend. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the 11th studio album from REVEREND HORTON HEAT, boldly titled Rev, due out January 21st.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Cursive

Over the past two decades, Cursive has become known for writing smart, tightly woven concept albums where frontman Tim Kasher turns his unflinching gaze on specific, oftentimes challenging themes, and examines them with an incisively brutal honesty. 2000’s Domestica dealt with divorce; 2003’s The Ugly Organ tackled art, sex, and relationships; 2006’s Happy Hollow skewered organized religion; 2009’s Mama, I’m Swollen grappled with the human condition and social morality; and 2012’s I Am Gemini explored the battle between good and evil. But the band’s remarkable eighth full-length, Vitriola, required a different approach — one less rigidly themed and more responsive as the band struggles with existentialism veering towards nihilism and despair; the ways in which society, much like a writer, creates and destroys; and an oncoming dystopia that feels eerily near at hand.Cursive has naturally developed a pattern of releasing new music every three years, creating records not out of obligation, but need, with the mindset that each record could potentially be their last. 2015 came and went, however, and the band remained silent for their longest period to date. But the members of Cursive have remained busy with solo records, a movie (the Kasher-penned and directed No Resolution), and running businesses (the band collectively owns and operates hometown Omaha’s mainstay bar/venue, O’Leaver’s). The band even launched their own label, 15 Passenger, through which they’re steadily reissuing their remastered back catalogue, as well as new albums by Kasher, Campdogzz, and David Bazan and Sean Lane. And like many others, the band members have been caught up in the inescapable state of confusion and instability that plagues their home country, and seems to grow more chaotic with each passing day.Which brings us to 2018 and Vitriola. For the first time since Happy Hollow, the album reunites Kasher, guitarist/singer Ted Stevens and bassist Matt Maginn with founding drummer Clint Schnase, as well as co-producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, M. Ward, Jenny Lewis) at ARC Studios in Omaha. They’re joined by Patrick Newbery on keys (who’s been a full-time member for years) and touring mainstay Megan Siebe on cello. Schnase and Maginn are in rare form, picking up right where they left off with a rhythmic lockstep of viscera-vibrating bass and toms, providing a foundation for Kasher and Stevens’ intertwining guitars and Newbery and Siebe’s cinematic flourishes. The album runs the sonic gamut between rich, resonant melodicism, Hitchcockian anxiety, and explosive catharsis — and no Cursive album would be complete without scream-along melodies and lyrics that, upon reflection, make for unlikely anthems.There’s a palpable unease that wells beneath Vitriola’s simmering requiems and fist-shakers. Fiery opener “Free To Be or Not To Be You and Me” reflects the album’s core: a search for meaning that keeps coming up empty, and finding the will to keep going despite the fear of a dark future. The album directs frustration and anger at not only modern society and the universe at large, but also inward towards ourselves. On “Under the Rainbow,” disquiet boils into rage that indicts the complacency of the privileged classes; “Ghost Writer” has a catchy pulse that belies Kasher chastising himself for writing about writing; and “Noble Soldier/Dystopian Lament” is a haunting look at potential societal collapse that provides little in the way of hope but balances beauty and horror on the head of a pin.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Kishi Bashi

Kishi Bashi is the pseudonym of singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Kaoru Ishibashi. Born in Seattle, Washington, Ishibashi grew up in Norfolk, Virginia where both of his parents were professors at Old Dominion University. As a 1994 graduate of Matthew Fontaine Maury High School, he went on to study film scoring at Berklee College of Music before becoming a renowned violinist. Ishibashi has recorded and toured internationally as a violinist with diverse artists such as Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche, and most recently, the Athens, Georgia-based indie rock band, of Montreal. He remains based in Athens.Kishi Bashi is also the singer and founding member of the New York electronic rock outfit, Jupiter One. In 2011, he started to record and perform as a solo artist, opening for Sondre Lerche, Alexi Murdoch, and of Montreal. He supported of Montreal on their spring 2012 tour.Shortly after Ishibashi debuted his full-length solo album “151a” on Indianapolis label Joyful Noise Recordings, NPR All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen listed Kishi Bashi as his favorite new artist of 2012 noting that he created “a radiant, uplifting soundscape” with songs such as “Bright Whites.” Kishi Bashi has since been invited to play in major festivals such as SXSW and Austin City Limits and gone on an extensive US tour with supporting acts such as The Last Bison (from his native Hampton Roads, Virginia). In early 2013, Kishi Bashi held a North American tour across the United States and Canada, continuing in EU and UK in spring 2013.In 2014 Kishi Bashi released his own line of coffee through Jittery Joe’s called Royal Daark Blend. Each purchase comes with an exclusive song download. 2016 saw Kishi Bashi release his new album “Sonderlust” live on NPR’s All Songs Considered. His latest album, Omoiyari (a Japanese word for the idea of creating compassion toward other people by thinking about them), was released in 2019. He is currently co-directing a feature length documentary of the same name about minority identity and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII. In 2020 Kishi Bashi scored the entire soundtrack for the touching Apple TV+ kids show “Stillwater” with composer Toby Chu, and released it as an album featuring 18 tracks of uplifting orchestral tunes.His new Emigrant EP, a very special companion piece to ‘Omoiyari’ is out physically and digitally now. Arranged and recorded over the last year, ‘Emigrant EP’ serves as a time capsule of the 2020 condition and a continuation of the concepts explored in ‘Omoiyari’.Links: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

The Pink Stones, Teddy & The Rough Riders

The Pink Stones deliver a full serving of Peach State picked country-rock from Athens, Georgia with the release of their debut album, Introducing… The Pink Stones, via the New West Records imprint Normaltown Records. Mixing elements of classic cosmic country, raucous rock’n’roll and fresh humor and heartaches, The Pink Stones are authoring a new chapter in the annals of Cosmic American Music.The Pink Stones Links: Website | Twitter | FacebookTeddy and The Rough Riders were born in Nashville, TN. A group of childhood friends who grew up in the spotlight of “music city”, they’ve cut their teeth in the local honky tonk/ country scene, as well as rock clubs across the US. They play their own modern style of Country Rock that sets them apart from the Americana folk scene encompassing New Nashville.TRRs newest release “The Congress of Teddy and The Rough Riders” was recorded at their home in the alleys behind legendary Music Row, and combines heavy hitting rockers full of screaming pedal steel with their Appalachian bluegrass style close harmony. Country-Rock is just a genre, but Teddy and The Rough Riders are able to truly branch both sides of the spectrum, turning Rock fans into cowboys, and hillbillies into head bangers.Teddy and The Rough Riders Links: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

John Craigie

Covid Policy for this show: Upon entry, all patrons must provide proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or a negative test for COVID-19 taken within 48 hours of the show. Purchaser agrees to require all staff to provide proof of vaccination for COVID-19 upon entry. Purchaser agrees to require all staff to be masked at all times while inside the venue. This is a seated show.A lot of life can happen over the course of one record. Lyrics immortalize those characters, exploits, and memories. On his 2020 Asterisk The Universe, John Craigie awkwardly encounters previous flames, mistakes a Catholic School custodian as a saint (and prays to him anyway), pays tribute to modern-day revolutionaries, and explores what it all means to live in the 21st century where infinite possibility does not necessarily equate infinite understanding. He soundtracks these stories with a score of smoked-out soul, tender folk, and American songbook eloquence billowing right from the heart of California. Progressing once more, the interplay of live drums and bass hold the music in the pocket as it simultaneously emanates an acoustic campfire glow.With these ten tunes, his journey unfolds in between organic instrumentation and lyrical observation. “As with any album, I want the lyrics to be heard, first and foremost,” he exclaims. “This is pretty similar to other versions of who I’ve been and who I am. It’s just one with a fresh batch of songs I’ll add to my setlist and new stories to tell from the road.”Those stories from the road have endeared Craigie to the devoted fans he has earned, song by song, show by show since 2009. A Craigie performance is not just a music show, it’s a collective experience. Craigie shines by telling candid stories, humorous anecdotes, and leaving everything on the stage. Fiercely independent, Craigie prolifically unveiled one highly personal album after another while logging enough miles on the road to give The Grateful Dead a run for their money. Venues got bigger and bigger as audiences clamored for more. Capturing that electric feeling on 2016’s Capricorn In Retrograde… Just Kidding… Live in Portland, Craigie wound up on Jack Johnson’s car stereo on a road trip up the coast. Thoroughly impressed by what he heard, Johnson took Craigie on tour during the summer of 2017.2017 would be a watershed year for Craigie. From No Rain, No Rose, “I Am California ” [feat. Gregory Alan Isakov] eclipsed 4.5 million Spotify streams followed by “Highway Blood” [feat. Shook Twins, Gregory Alan Isakov] with 3.5 million Spotify streams. Additionally, he performed everywhere from High Sierra Music Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, and Kate Wolf Music Festival to Burning Man and Summer Camp Festival. He attracted the admiration of not-so secret admires a la Chuck Norris, while earning acclaim from No Depression, SF Weekly, AXS, Seattle Times The Portland Tribune, and The Stranger who christened him, “the lovechild of John Prine and Mitch Hedberg.” 2018’s Scarecrow was originally plotted as a “vinyl only” release, but the diehard fanbase wasn’t having it. An onslaught of emails and social media messages demanded Craigie shared the music online. It appeared on DSPs shortly thereafter.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Genre: Miscellaneous