John Howie Jr and the Rosewood Bluff Album Release Show

When North Carolina’s honky-tonk heroes the Two Dollar Pistols broke up in 2008- leaving behind a legacy that included five full-length CD’s, an EP of duets with Grammy nominee Tift Merritt, and several US and European tours- lead singer/songwriter John Howie Jr. already had the seeds planted for a new group, one that would continue the Pistols tradition of making soulful honky-tonk based music for contemporary times. Bringing drummer Matt Brown over from the Pistols, John recruited pedal steel guitar ace Nathan Golub, christened the new band John Howie Jr and the Rosewood Bluff, and set about writing a new batch of songs. After a solid year of playing live, opening for everyone from Junior Brown to Lucero, plans were made for the band to enter the studio. Brian Paulson (Wilco, The Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo) was called on to take the producer’s chair, having done a stellar job in that capacity on the Two Dollar Pistols 2004 Yep Roc release, Hands Up! Studio time was blocked off at Kudzu Ranch, owned and operated by Rick Miller (Southern Culture on the Skids). Several months later, the band emerged with Leavin’ Yesterday, an album that expands upon the Pistols trademark sound, adding prominent pedal steel guitar, piano (by DB’s/REM member Peter Holsapple), and strings to the mix for a landmark country music collection that should please Pistols fans, while breaking new ground at the same time. Album opener “Watch Me Fall,” a defiant, ringing kiss-off in the grand tradition of country music, sets the tone for Leavin’ Yesterday. Straight-ahead country-rockers, “Trying Not to Think,” and, “Last Great Guitar Slinger,” sit comfortably next to ballads like, “Downhill,” and classic honky-tonk shuffles like, “Handful of Heartaches,”and, “Back to Basics.” The Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell influenced “Dead Man’s Suit” comes off “like it could have been Gene Clark…if he’d packed a string section,” according to Shuffle Magazine, while “I’ve Found Someone New,” also featuring a string quartet, bears the influence of Billy Sherill’s 1970’s “Countrypolitan” productions as found on the George Jones and Charlie Rich records of the day. The album-closing title track rings out with 12-string Rickenbacker, pedal steel, and gorgeous harmonies. With Leavin Yesterday finished, Howie put together a crack band capable of capturing all of the moods in the country music idiom and doing full justice to his songs. Along with Golub on steel and Brown on drums, electric/upright bassist Billie Feather (The Bo-Stevens, Darnell Woodies) signed up, as did telecaster hero Tim Shearer (Hearts and Daggers), with Howie front and center on lead vocals and acoustic guitar. Response to the album – as evidenced by great reviews, airplay on Little Steven’s Outlaw Country, and choice slots at the Ameriserv Flood City Music Fest and an opening spot for country music legend George Jones – has been overwhelmingly positive. The fan base Howie built with Two Dollar Pistols and prime song placement in hit films like Jeepers Creepers and hot TV shows like Weeds and United States of Tara continues to grow. Two Dollar Pistols fans mourning the loss of North Carolina’s finest traditional country/honky-tonk band need not have worried. While the Pistols may be gone, one listen to Leavin’ Yesterday by John Howie Jr. and the Rosewood Bluff should prove that, as the Charleston City Paper says, “Howie’s best years may still be ahead of him.” Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram

Arm’s Length

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Pet Symmetry

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L.A. Witch

L.A. Witch have always exuded an aura of effortless cool, whether it manifested as the Americana noir and laconic back-to-basics rock n’ roll of their self-titled debut or the blistering austere adventurism of their sophomore album Play With Fire. The band—comprised of Sade Sanchez (guitar/vocals), Irita Pai (bass), and Ellie English (drums)—began as an informal affair, but the sultry and beguiling reverb-draped songs they created caught on with the public, moving the project beyond the insular space of the band’s friends and peers in Southern California into the broader world. On their latest album, DOGGOD, the trio push their craft beyond their previous creative and geographical confines, opting to craft the material in Paris, recording the tracks at Motorbass Studio on the Rue de Martyrs. DOGGOD explores broader swaths of sonic terrain, employs a greater arsenal of tones, and probes larger existential and cosmic themes, all while retaining the band’s signature sense of the forbidden, the forsaken, and the foreboding. DOGGOD is a way of tackling the universal riddle tangled in the spiritual nature of love and devotion. “I feel like I’m some sort of servant or slave to love,” says Sanchez. “There’s a willingness to die for love in the process of serving it or suffering for it or in search of it… just in the way a loyal, devoted servant dog would.” The album title is a palindrome fusing together DOG and GOD—an exaltation of the submissive and a subversion of the divine. It’s a nod to the purity of dogs and an acknowledgement of their unconditional love and protective nature that’s at odds with the various pejoratives associated with the species. “There is this symbolic connection between women and dogs that expresses women’s subordinate position in society,” Sanchez explains. “And anything that embodies such divine characteristics never deserved to be a word used as an insult.” These conflicted explorations of love and subservience manifest themselves in L.A. Witch’s fusion of their trademark smooth and smoky garage alchemy with a newfound utilization of post-punk’s disciplined reserve and icy instrumentation. Album opener “Icicle” captures the band journeying out of the proto-punk, psychedelia, and gritty riffage of the ‘70s into the chorus-drenched guitars and forlorn minimalism of Joy Division and early The Cure. A parallel is drawn between romantic suicide and martyrdom that carries over into the second song, “Kiss Me Deep.” Here Sanchez describes a love so pure that it transcends time and carries over into multiple lifetimes. It’s a song about passion delivered in the worldly and wounded stoicism of early goth pioneers. From there, the band segues into the lead single “777,” a song about devotion to the point of death. A propulsive beat, a driving distorted riff, and Sanchez’s ethereal vocals come together to create a song that’s both dire in its fatalism and sensual in its faithful passion. Website | Facebook | Instagram | Linktree | YouTube

Hamilton Leithauser – This Side of the Island Tour

Hamilton Leithauser, the hard-hitting, Carlyle-crooning frontman of The Walkmen, has worked the last eight years in the heart of Bedford Stuyvesant, writing and recording his new breakthrough solo record, This Side of the Island. Known for his evocative lyricism, quick wit, and distinctive voice, Leithauser has been a significant force in rock ‘n’ roll since the early 2000s NYC scene, transitioning smoothly from his band’s successes to a flourishing solo career. This Side of the Island boldly turns away from the folk-rockvibes of his two previous records I Had a Dream That You Were Mine and The Loves of Your Life; and introduces a groovier, bass-heavy, modern sound—a sound undoubtedly influenced by several decades of music: Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, SZA’s SOS, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, Randy Newman’s Trouble in Paradise, Prince’s Parade, Panda Bear’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and Neil Young’s On the Beach (to name a few). Hamilton loves working on his own schedule at his home studio, The Struggle Hut, but after eight years of playing myriad instruments, a visit to his old friend Aaron Dessner’s upstate Long Pond Studio in the Spring of 2024 is what finally brought the album home. (Leithauser and Dessner originally met when the National opened for the Walkmen in 2001). Dessner, renowned for his work with The National, Taylor Swift, and Gracie Abrams (among many others), introduced an enormous modern sound, and played many different instruments on nearly every track. Leithauser says Dessner “raised the ceiling, and lowered the floor on the whole thing,” expanding the record’s emotional and sonic depth. The collaboration resulted in a record that is both timeless and contemporary, cementing both as versatile and enduring artists in contemporary music. “It took me eight years to make this,” Hamilton says, “Longer than any other record I’ve ever worked on. Barack Obama was president when I started “Fist of Flowers”! So much in my life has changed since I started—my daughters grew, I lost a lot of friends, and I lost my mother…and it seems like the whole world’s been turned upside down—I live a very different life now, but I still truly love writing, recording, and performing music.” The lyrics on This Side of the Island showcase Hamilton’s unrelenting optimism and biting humor and as they consider heavy themes of solitude, love, loss, and resilience. Inspired by events in Hamilton’s personal life, the songs resonate deeply both in today’s polarized social and political world, as the title track says “It’s not a beautiful country/as much as I’d like it to be”. “What do I know?” “What do I know?” “What do I know?” “What do I know?” —emphasize any word in that title and you’ll change the meaning. Kind of silly questions…until you start digging in. “When the singer burns her torch/no she will not be ignored, and I love her pain, and her pride and her shame/but what do I love now?” he asks himself. Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

The Mystery Lights, Levitation Room

The Mystery Lights story begins in 2004 in the small town of Salinas, California when friends Michael Brandon and Luis Alfonso — whose shared fondness for groups like The Mc5, Velvet Underground, Dead Moon, and The Fall (to name a few) — joined forces to craft their own brand of unhinged rock and roll. From there they spent the better part of 10 years touring relentlessly before migrating to Queens, New York in 2014. With a live show known for its visceral energy and relentless assault — leaving little to no stoppage between songs — they barreled through countless NYC haunts and DIY venues, quickly amassing a fervent local following. The buzz soon caught the attention of Daptone Records execs who were in the beginning stages of launching a new rock-centric imprint, Wick Records. Impressed by the groups’ groove, endless supply of energy, and understanding of musical history, The Mystery Lights were quickly signed to Wick. Though a rock band at heart, the parallels to what Daptone Records had traditionally looked for in their soul artists was undeniable. The Mystery Light new LP Purgatory released September 13th 2024. Instagram | Facebook | YouTube In Los Angeles, where the weight and pressure of the city’s fast paced culture can make your legs feel like pillars, emerges psychedelic quartet, Levitation Room, to break the bonds of gravity with their cosmic wall of sound and thought provoking lyrics. “Just as their name suggests, Levitation Room’s music instills the listeners ears with a light feeling of floating. The dreamy guitar and Lo-Fi projections of psychedelic rock and garage are reminiscent of a deep 1960’s era, but still grounded in an alternative dreamgaze flavor that permeates modern indie music today.” – OC Weekly. Their decidedly hallucinogenic songs whisper and hum the same gentle refrain of their summer of love influences, conjuring up the cognitive imagery of sunny days at the park, spent with friends in a euphoric haze along with lyrical and sonic meditations on life, love, society and self-awareness. In tradition, and much like the bands and musical troubadours that inspired them, Levitation Room started out with late night jam sessions in a dimly lit garage between fellow musicians and long time friends, Julian Porte and Gabriel Fernandez. Julian, a dedicated street musician who felt he needed a broader platform, found chemistry with Gabriel, who he knew as a guitar player in various teenage punk and garage bands around town. Coming together in 2012, they bonded over a shared love of British Invasion groups (The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones) and 1960’s psychedelic outfits like The Grateful Dead, Electric Prunes, The Pretty Things and began drafting their earliest tunes. It wasn’t until the late summer of 2012, that the band came to fruition when they found a rhythm section in two individuals with almost identical names; drummer, Johnathan Martin, and bassist, Jonathathan Martin. The four began writing songs, playing gigs and recording music out of a quaint studio in East LA. Website | Instagram | YouTube

Phoneboy

Lucius

Teen Mortgage

Washington DC’s Teen Mortgage climbed from the city’s primordial punk soup in 2017 after guitarist/vocalist James Guile relocated to the nation’s capital from Liverpool, UK and by a stroke of luck was quickly able to find hard hitting drummer Ed Barkauskas via a desperate craigslist post. As a two piece they stood out – crossbreeding east coast hardcore aggression and garage/surf sleaze with a focus on pop sensibility. This sonic blend perfectly set the scene for vocalist and guitarist James Guile to illustrate what he describes as “the absurdity of living in the era of late stage capitalism and tech feudalism.” He adds, “it’s even woven into our name, like Mortgage in latin means ‘death pledge'” Teen Mortgage’s acerbic intensity was noticed by Brooklyn, NY label King Pizza Records, who released the duo’s 2019 EP Life/Death and 2021’s Smoked. Songs from the EPs earned Teen Mortgage placements with Shameless, Vans Park Series, and Evil Bikes and support slots with notable bands like The Chats, Mike Krol, Bass Drum Of Death, Jeff The Brotherhood, etc. Known for their rowdy live shows, Teen Mortgage detonates a sonic bomb that leaves no room for apathy, let alone time to breathe. Guile’s caustic riffs and sneer paired with Barakauskas’s brawn have fostered a new established meeting ground for those looking for a place to mosh. Their DIY headline national tours have seen crowd members become rabid as soon as the pair kick in the first riff of the set, like a pack of coyotes chasing down their prey. The group’s infectious fuzz bonded with Jello Biafra and George Carlin inspired lyrics ignite audiences into a primal frenzy, sweating out the drudgery of living through, once again in Guile’s words, “the era of late stage capitalism and tech feudalism.” “These guys have got it going on” – Iggy Pop, BBC6’s The Confidential Show Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud | TikTok

Rivalry Night: UNC vs NCSU!

Greenroom || Raleigh, NCFrom parking decks to bars, Greenroom began at NCSU when drummer Tyler Bowman, guitarist Will Smith, and singer Hunt Clark got together and started jamming. Keyboardist Oliver Bold and bassist Josh Friedman joined shortly after. The 5 have been together since January 2025 playing a mix of indie rock, classic rock, and grunge. The Wallabies || Chapel Hill, NCThe Wallabies are an indie rock band formed in Chapel Hill, NC in the fall of 2024. Focused on high energy guitar-driven melody lines, mixing multiple genres with their songwriting. Le Lotus || Raleigh, NCLe Lotus is a 4 piece from Raleigh, NC with a shoe-gaze and fast punk undertone. Consisting of Russell Barron on guitar, Linz Godwin on vocals, Tyler King on drums, and Colin West on bass. The group was formed in the late summer of ’24. They start recording and gigging in January of 2025. Stay tuned for what’s to come and future updates! Watch us bloom! Last Date || Chapel Hill, NCLast Date is an alternative and pop-rock band based in Chapel Hill, NC. The band consists of lead singer Sarah Brooks, lead guitarist Nate Hicks, bassist Joy Frost, rhythm guitarist Thomas Ferguson, and drummer Kevin Pacas.

Genre: Miscellaneous