Failure

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Cosmic Charlie – High Energy Grateful Dead from Athens, GA

“Cosmic Charlie really is a great band – these guys do this music the way it should be done: having the conversation in their own voices.” -David Gans, Grateful Dead archivistCosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band 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. Links: Website | Facebook | YouTube

Matt Heckler

MATT HECKLER is a solo multi-instrumentalist that barely fits into any ordinary musical category. He tends to keep to the darker side of Appalachian mountain music and early bluegrass but listen long enough and you’ll soon be transported to the mountains of Eastern Europe or a dimly lit bar in Ireland where they honor those who have passed with a gently swaying a cappella ballad.After touring almost nonstop for years in support of bands like Devil Makes Three, Lost Dog Street Band, Flogging Molly, and others, HECKLER, like the rest of us, got sidelined by the ongoing global pandemic. With the newfound time off, he set to pushing creative boundaries in his home recording studio as far as his mind would allow. Each fiddle, banjo, and guitar track carefully put in place all the while retaining the grit and energy reflected in his live shows. Paired perfectly as the sequel to After The Flood, the Blood, Water, Coal album is a defining release in his career.Blood, Water, Coal was performed and recorded by MATT HECKLER with upright bass and backing vocals provided by Jeff Loops (Lost Dog Street Band). While recording Blood, Water, Coal, MATT HECKLER released The Magnolia Sessions outdoor live set – the maiden release for the now popular series – which made it to #9 on the Bluegrass Billboard Charts. The Magnolia Sessions was still charting upon the release of Blood, Water, Coal, which debuted at #3, leaving HECKLER with two albums running on the Billboard Charts simultaneously.HECKLER writes, “I started working on this album over a year ago in my home. Ran into a lot of snags and problems inherent in self-recording, but being alone, just a mic and my instruments, was the only way to capture the raw emotions this collection of songs holds for me. Some of these tunes were written over a decade ago, most of them in more recent years. Others took years to write. But now that it’s done, I can confidently say this album is the perfect sequel to After The Flood.”Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify

Pedro The Lion

Pedro the Lion has always been David Bazan, but it took a long time to get back there.In August 2016, during what he now recognizes as his lowest point, Bazan was touring the country alone in an aging minivan and found himself in his hometown of Phoenix, AZ. In need of a break from the road, he spent a night off at his grandparents’ house instead of driving on to San Diego. Before leaving town the next morning, after realizing that even the most familiar places can become unrecognizable, Bazan gave himself the gift of a quick detour past the house he grew up in, and on the way, experienced a breakthrough — one that would lead him both forward and back to another home he had built many years before.From the beginning, Pedro the Lion didn’t work like the bands Bazan had played drums in, where each player came up with their own parts. Instead, like scripting scenes of dialogue for actors to play with, Bazan recorded and arranged all of the skeletal accompaniments for his obsessively introspective lyrics and spare melodies. Each player would then learn their parts and, together as a band, they brought the skeleton to life. While bandmates played on a few recordings, Bazan often played all or most of the instruments himself.”I found so much joy working this way,” Bazan remembers. “It came naturally and yielded a feeling and a sound that couldn’t have existed by any other process. At the same time, I was also aware that not everyone wanted to play in a band where the singer wrote all the parts and might perform them on the record. Someone even suggested it might not be a valid approach to having a band in the first place. Being insecure and wanting to find camaraderie, I became conflicted about my natural process.”By 2002, after recording Control, the high rate of turnover in the band finally caused Bazan to ditch his “natural process” in favor of a collaborative writing process. When, after a couple more years, this move did nothing to stabilize turnover, Bazan was perplexed. In November 2005, Bazan decided to stop doing Pedro the Lion altogether.Ironically, Bazan didn’t see “going solo” as a chance to revert back to his original process of writing and playing all the parts. For the next decade Pedro the Lion felt off limits, even forgotten, like a childhood home Bazan had moved out of. He pushed forward with releasing solo albums & relentless touring in living rooms and clubs, through every part of the US and beyond, sometimes with a band, but mostly on his own. It took a toll on his family and more acutely on himself. By the summer of 2016, he still hadn’t found the personal clarity or the steady collaboration he’d been seeking and was at the end of his rope.”I had abandoned my natural way of working in the hopes of creating space for a consistent band to write with…and it hadn’t worked. So I got a rehearsal space, mic’d up drums, bass, and guitar, and really leaned into my original process again. It immediately felt like like home. Before long I realized it also felt like Pedro the Lion.”In June 2018, with Bazan on bass, vocals, and arrangement writing, Erik Walters on guitar and backing vocals, and Sean Lane on drums, Pedro the Lion went into Studio X and Hall of Justice with producer Andy Park to create Phoenix , the first new Pedro album in 15 years.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

Eric Slick, Black Haus, Jenny Besetzt

Boy Harsher

You make me feel like falling through.I disappear, in my mind.Boy Harsher return with their second LP Careful – a wild ride that celebrates abandon, while mourning attachment + love.Boy Harsher began as an urgent need to produce and consume. In the winter of 2014, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller started to experiment with sound, video, and text. The advent of Boy Harsher! Born out of this tumultuous relationship in swampy Georgia, their first EP Lesser Man is sexy as it is sulking. Lesser Man determined their morose, pop sound. In their second album, the full length Yr Body is Nothing, Matthews and Muller took that dark and ran with it. Both releases reflect the fervor present in their adolescent lust and anger. Yet, before Matthews and Muller recorded any song, their chaos made the project vulnerable and invariably lead to momentary destruction . In what was at the time believed to be their last performance, Matthews had “careful” tattooed across her back, while Muller fried the speakers. A lit candle was thrown. They were not on speaking terms.At that time “Careful” was meant as a warning: the cautionary understanding of love. The duo felt as though they were disappearing within one another. But, if Boy Harsher’s first two releases narrated the pain and desperation that follows after something goes awry, then this LP, Careful, describes what loves gives you: fear and joy, tenderness and pain. For Boy Harsher, Careful attempts to detail the enveloping trauma of loss combined with the fantasy of escape (a reckless abandon).Matthews and Muller certainly made amends since that fateful live tattooing, loud as hell performance, however both still have complex relationships to attachments. In 2017 Matthews’ mother was diagnosed with dementia and as the symptoms began to take hold the essence of “careful” became relevant in a new way. Matthews’ relationship with her parents has always been complicated: her father past away when she was a teenager and her mother is an alcoholic, consistently unpredictable with affection and stability. The loss of her father was extreme, yet acute, whereas the persistent sadness of losing her mother (the memories that defined their relationship) is a slow, chronic suffering. The trauma of losing someone is almost in tandem to Matthews’ understanding of love. It with these intensely personal struggles Matthews and Muller began developing their new album. With Careful, Boy Harsher use the medium of minimal electronics to create a compelling narrative of a deteriorating family and the reaction to run away from it.Careful splits its time between songs that study the trauma imbedded within loss and the compulsion to flee. The track “The Look You Gave (Jerry)” is named after Matthews’ deceased step-father, who passed right before her mother was diagnosed with dementia. The song mourns Jerry, as described through her mother’s perspective: “I close my eyes and I can almost see: The look u gave / when u / you ran from me.” For Matthews the fiercest pain in relation to her mother’s disease is her mother’s loss of comfort, a grasping at an image that slowly fades away. Death for Matthews and her mother has become synonymous with abandonment. Not unlike the pain of losing her father, Matthews conceives the hollowness where intimacy once was – the melancholy of disappearance.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | FacebookClub Music: body music evangelist from Chicago.Permanent is a hardware producer making gristly and danceable electronic music infused with ecclectic references, from minimal synth to techno.

Thao

Thao Nguyen is a veteran artist, songwriter, touring musician, and producer based in Oakland, California. Her latest album, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down’s ‘Temple’, was released in May of 2020 on Ribbon Music. She will be touring with her backing band throughout 2022.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Osees

Psych-punk psychic warrior, ear worm-farmer, and possessor of many stamped passport pages John Dwyer does not let up. His group Oh Sees (aka Thee Oh Sees, OCS, The Oh Sees, etc) have transmogrified to fit many a moment – from hushed druggy folk to groovy demonic pop chants to science fictional krautrock expanse and beyond – to suit his omnivorous whims. Links: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp

Tré Burt

Sacramento songwriter Tré Burt’s sophomore album, You, Yeah, You, is a narrated collection of songs featuring a cast of invented characters; heroes, villains, those destitute of salvation and those seeking it. The plots merge for an ultimate reckoning with the archetypal mother of these songs on the final track, “Tell Mary”, “say what you want, it’s alright child / little’s left behind / beating the drum at the wrong time / look at what you’ve done.” Like a bruised fighter, Burt goes 12 rounds in the ring against a shapeshifting and seemingly otherworldly opponent. The album represents a summoning of will to fight the unknown rather than surrender to fear and fatigue. Like his late label mate and songwriting hero John Prine, Burt showcases his poet’s eye for detail, surgeon’s sense of narrative precision and his songwriters’ ability to transpose observation into affecting verse. You, Yeah, You is a cohesive body of work that illustrates the ever expanding space in which Tré Burt’s voice belongs.From his humble roots working menial day jobs; as a maintenance technician, servicing airplanes at SFO International, taping boxes as a UPS worker, Burt has been, and always will be, a working class musician. His clear-eyed vision of America, it’s deep faults and the beauty of the humanity that resides within its borders, comes through with compassion and tenacity.Tré wrote his protest anthem, “Under The Devil’s Knee”, in 2020 which features Allison Russell, Sunny War and Leyla McCalla, in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and the unmitigated police violence across the country. His work caught the attention of scholars and activists, namely Dr. George Yancy, Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Khalil Muhammad, and garnered an invitation to speak on a panel with the latter two at Harvard’s Kennedy School through Dr. Muhammad’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.Burt finds the exported packaging of Black culture en masse tiresome, claustrophobic and boring, especially when applied to art and expression. Like literary writers Baldwin and Angelou, Burt acknowledges the limitless expanse of Black narrative. He is committed to the rich continuum of the tradition of Black expression claiming the space of artistic weirdness, often reserved for non-Black artists.Tré Burt teamed up with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Nathaniel Rateliff) to produce and collaborate on his sophomore album. Brad’s brother Phil Cook (Megafaun, The Guitar Heels), label-mate Kelsey Waldon and Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath all appear throughout the 12 songs on You, Yeah You.On the first single, “Sweet Misery”, the album title acts as an appeal and a call to action; “You, Yeah You / who else am I talking to”. Burt speaks both to himself and the listener, conjuring a fighter’s scrappy disposition. The protagonist fights his shapeshifting opponent in the form of Misery, a foe whose shadow has cast darker and harder to ignore in the past year. “There is something kinda beautiful about people who are experiencing tragedy in chorus” Burt says. In this collective tragedy he recognizes the bedrock to build something new, a deepened understanding of oneself in relation to community and a well of compassion.Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Drew Baldridge

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Genre: Miscellaneous