Archers of Loaf
Due to unforeseen circumstances The Truth Club have had to cancel their opening performance tonight, but Archers of Loaf are pleased to welcome Cor De Lux as their replacement. As sculpted shards of guitar—tumbling, tolling, squalling— shower the jittery bounce of a piano on opener “Human,” it’s obvious that Reason in Decline, Archers of Loaf’s first album in 24 years, will be more than a nostalgic, low-impact reboot. When they emerged from North Carolina’s ’90s indie-punk incubator, the Archers’ hurtling, sly, gloriously dissonant roar was a mythologized touchstone of slacker-era refusal. But this, the distilled shudder of “Human” (as in “It’s hard to be human / When only death can set you free”), is an entirely different noise. In fact, it’s a startling revelation.A few distinctions between 2022 Archers and the Clinton-era crew—whose “South Carolina” could be heard blaring out of Jordan Catalano’s car radio on ABC teen-angst epic My So- Called Life. First, guitarists Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, once headstrong smartasses inciting a series of artful pileups on the band’s four studio albums and EP, are now a fluidly complementary, sonically advanced unit. Notably, Johnson’s signature trebly lines peal clearly above the din instead of struggling to be heard. Second, singer-songwriter Bachmann, after throat surgery, relearned how to sing (this time from his diaphragm); as a result, he no longer howls like the angriest head cold on the Eastern Seaboard. And now, his lyrics balance righteous wrath with a complex tangle of adult perspective. He still spits bile, but it’s less likely to concern scene politics, music trends, or shady record labels thwarting the dreams of a young rock band.Bachmann puts it bluntly: “What I really think about going back to the Archers and doing a new record is that the three other members of this band are awesome. It’s not aboutresponding to the past or whatever our bullshit legacy is. I just wanted to work with these guys because I knew the chemistry we had and that we still have. I knew that was rare. I didn’t care what it ended up sounding like.”Archers of Loaf’s first tour of duty ended after 1998’s White Trash Heroes. The album did not raise the band’s once touted commercial roof, and the members—Bachmann, Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price—were a bedraggled bunch of coulda-beens. Price was unable to play without extreme pain due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Bachmann itched to try a different musical approach. Everyone was tapped out in one way or another. Though the four remained good friends and convened for occasional reunion gigs (to support Merge’s 2011–12 album reissues, for instance), they never worked on new music. Gentling had joined Band of Horses; Johnson, now a criminal defense attorney in Asheville, North Carolina, contributed guitar to projects when he had the time. On his own, Bachmann thrived, releasing 11 albums of atmospheric, folky rock/pop under his own name or “group” moniker Crooked Fingers. In recent years, he’d toured as a sideman/foil for torch-country star Neko Case.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
John Craigie Winter Tour 2023
This is a seated show.Portland, OR-based singer, songwriter, and producer John Craigie adapts moments of solitude into stories perfectly suited for old Americana fiction anthologies. Instead of leaving them on dog-eared pages, he projects them widescreen in flashes of simmering soul and folk eloquence. On his 2022 full-length album, Mermaid Salt, we witness revenge unfurled in flames, watch a landlocked mermaid’s escape, and fall asleep under a meteor shower.After selling out shows consistently coast-to-coast and earning acclaim from Rolling Stone, Glide Magazine, No Depression, and many more, his unflinching honesty ties these ten tracks together.The album comes from the solitude and loneliness of lockdown in the Northwest. Someone whose life was touring, traveling, and having lots of human interaction is faced with an undefinable amount of time without those things. So, he began writing new songs and envisioning an album that was different from his past records. The sound of everyone playing live in a room together was traded for the sound of song construction with an unknown amount of instruments and musicians—a quiet symphony.Rather than steal away to a cabin or hole up in a house with friends, Craigie opted to set up shop at the OK Theater in Enterprise, OR with longtime collaborator Bart Budwig behind the board as engineer. A rotating cast of musicians shuffled in and out safely, distinguishing the process from the communal recording of previous releases. The core players included Justin Landis, Cooper Trail, and Nevada Sowle. Meanwhile, Shook Twins lent their signature vocal harmonies, Bevin Foley arranged, composed, and performed strings, and Ben Walden dropped in for guitar and violin plucking parts.“Instruments were scattered around the theater and microphones placed in various spots,” he recalls. “It’s hard to say who all played what exactly.”As such, the spirit in the room guided everyone. On “Distance,” warm piano glows alongside a glitchy beat as he softly laments, “I could lose you to the loneliness, vast and infinite.” Then, there’s “Helena.” A jazz-y bass line snakes through head-nodding percussion as he relays an incendiary parable of a mother and son in exile. He croons, “She said fire was how we’d make ‘em pay. As I ran across the fields, she would scream, ‘Light it up son’,” uplifted in a conflagration of Shook Twins’ harmonies. Strings echo in the background as his vocals quake front-and-center on “Street Mermaid.”Elsewhere, the guitar-laden “Microdose” beguiles and bewitches with an intoxicating refrain dedicated to a time where he “Microdosed for months and months, dissolve my ego in the acid.” Everything culminates on the glassy beat-craft and glistening guitars of “Perseids” where he sings, “There’s always a new heart after the old heart. Maybe a new heart is enough.”During this period, he explored the environment around him “from the Oregon coasts to the waterfalls” and read books about Levon Helm, Billie Holiday, and Ani DiFranco.“I got time to silence all the noise and chaos of touring and look inward,” he observes.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
10 String Symphony, Vivian Leva & Riley Calcagno
Two years after releasing Weight of the World, the sophomore recording which earned them attention from NPR: All Songs Considered, a #3 slot on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts, and took them on tour all over the US, UK and Australia, 10 String Symphony felt the desire to expand their acoustic, stripped down sound. Named for their unique instrumentation of two five string fiddles alternated with a five string banjo, 10 String Symphony is the collaboration between GRAMMY nominated fiddle player Christian Sedelmyer (The Jerry Douglas Band), and acclaimed songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Baiman. Since their inception in 2012, the duo has gained the attention of NPR’s Jewly Hight, who listed them among “The Newest and Best Voices in Americana” for their unique and compelling vocal and string arrangements, which are at once traditionally informed yet completely avant garde. Their new album, “Generation Frustration”, produced by Scotland’s Kris Drever, digs even deeper into the potential for experimentation with stringed instruments while highlighting new depths in the pair’s original songwriting. Unafraid of pushing boundaries, the resulting songs are as challenging as they are beautiful.It’s been an exciting couple years for Baiman and Sedelmyer, both individually and collaboratively. Having gained a reputation for string arrangements in Nashville, 10 String Symphony’s unique sound has been enlisted for albums by Kelsey Waldon, Caroline Spence, Special Consensus, and Missy Raines, as well for live strings with Kacey Musgraves at the Ryman Auditorium. Their tour schedule has included stops in Hong Kong and Australia as well as opening slots for Sarah Jarosz and Sierra Hull. Sedelmyer spent the better part of 2017 touring with Jerry Douglas and recording on his new album “What If”, which culminated in a GRAMMY nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album this past February. Baiman released a politically charged solo album, “Shame”, which was featured on Noisey and NPR’s “Song’s We Love”, and took her on tour around the country, including a stop at The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, and numerous shows opening for Mandolin Orange. Time spent working together and apart influenced the direction of the duo’s new recording, which reaches new heights of maturity in sound and depth.Website | Instagram | Twitter | YouTubeVivian Leva & Riley Calcagno play old-soul roots music, fluidly melding a backbone of Appalachian traditional music with fresh iconic melodies and the tightly wound vocal harmonies of indie folk. Both Vivian Leva and Riley Calcagno, now just out of college, grew up steeped in old-time music, Leva in Lexington, Virginia and Calcagno in Seattle, Washington. After meeting in 2016 they soon collaborated on Leva’s debut record Time is Everything which Rolling Stone wrote “shone a light on the past without giving up its place in the present.” In support of the record, they embarked on an extensive tour that stretched to the most northern reaches of Canada and overseas to Europe. Over the course of these varied and occasionally lonesome shows and travels, the pair developed their collaboration into a distinct sound that led to the imagination and writing of their new eponymous record Vivian Leva & Riley Calcagno, out now on Free Dirt Records.Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Durry
Formed in 2020 in the depths of the pandemic, quarantined siblings Austin and Taryn Durry joined forces to make music together for the very first time. In 2021 their careers were launched by their tiktok viral track Who’s Laughing Now. Quickly gaining notoriety on social media and beyond, Durry is poised and ready to take on the music scene with their unique brand of Nostalgic Indie-Rock.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok | Soundcloud
flipturn
flipturn makes indie music for endless summers, sun-streaked days, and introspective nights. It’s a cinematic sound rooted not only in the Florida towns where the musicians first banded together as teenagers, but also in the anthemic live show that’s taken flipturn from coast to coast. In the time since their formation, flipturn has mushroomed to reaches far beyond the walls of the Fernandina Beach garage they first practiced in. Built up by Dillon Basse (lead vocals/rhythm guitar), Tristan Duncan (lead guitar), Madeline Jarman (bass), Mitch Fountain (synth), and Devon VonBalson (drums), the band is gearing up for the August 19 release of their debut album Shadowglow; a snapshot of a band caught halfway between youthful optimism and adult precision, with songs that target the head as well as the heart.With over 60 million streams on Spotify alone, countless sold-out headline shows across the US, and tours with Mt. Joy, Rainbow Kitten Surprise and Wilderado, the band has more than proven their place in the indie scene. This year has seen flipturn join the prestigious lineups of Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Shaky Knees, Hangout, SunFest, and Levitate. flipturn recently signed with Dualtone Records to further amplify the release of their debut project, joining their legendary roster of the likes of The Lumineers, Chuck Berry and Shakey Graves.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
An Evening with Yo La Tengo
Night OneTime keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and, to my ears, they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ever-ticking clock. This is music that’s not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings in “Fallout.” “Reach back, unwind.” Part of how Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown.” In the séance-like “Until it Happens,” Kaplan plainly intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time – bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later in the same song. “Look away from the hands of time.” Of course, times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. Yo La Tengo made This Stupid World all by themselves, though. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. Another new thing about This Stupid World: it’s the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in a while. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. Take the signature combination of hypnotic rhythm and spontaneous guitar on “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” or the steady chug of “Tonight’s Episode,” a blinkered tunnel of forward-moving sound. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has been made a touch more direct. The songs on This Stupid World were still journeys, though. An example is the absorbing, three-dimensional “Brain Capers.” To construct this swirl, the band blends guitar chords, bass loops, drum punches, and various iterations of Hubley and Kaplan’s voices into shifting layers. Simpler but just as dense is closer “Miles Away.” A dubby rhythm lurks below Hubley’s vocal, which brushes across the song like paint leaving bright blurs. Throughout the album, these touches, accents, and surprises intensify each piece. It’s a rarity – a raw-sounding record that gives you plenty of headphone-worthy detail to chew on. This Stupid World gives your brain a lot to digest, too. All the battles with time drive toward some heavy conclusions. In the gripping “Aselestine,” Hubley sings about what sounds like a friend on death’s door: “The clock won’t tick / I can’t predict / I can’t sell your books, though you asked me to.” In “Apology Letter,” time turns simple communication into something fraught and confusing: “The words / Derail on the way from me to you.” Not everything is so serious, though. The absurdist “Tonight’s Episode” helps McNew learn to milk cows, steal faces, and treat guacamole as a verb. And somehow Alice Cooper, Ray Davies, and Rick Moranis show up in “Brain Capers,” all telling us time isn’t finished yet. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
An Evening with Yo La Tengo
Night TwoTime keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and, to my ears, they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ever-ticking clock. This is music that’s not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings in “Fallout.” “Reach back, unwind.” Part of how Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown.” In the séance-like “Until it Happens,” Kaplan plainly intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time – bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later in the same song. “Look away from the hands of time.” Of course, times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. Yo La Tengo made This Stupid World all by themselves, though. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. Another new thing about This Stupid World: it’s the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in a while. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. Take the signature combination of hypnotic rhythm and spontaneous guitar on “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” or the steady chug of “Tonight’s Episode,” a blinkered tunnel of forward-moving sound. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has been made a touch more direct. The songs on This Stupid World were still journeys, though. An example is the absorbing, three-dimensional “Brain Capers.” To construct this swirl, the band blends guitar chords, bass loops, drum punches, and various iterations of Hubley and Kaplan’s voices into shifting layers. Simpler but just as dense is closer “Miles Away.” A dubby rhythm lurks below Hubley’s vocal, which brushes across the song like paint leaving bright blurs. Throughout the album, these touches, accents, and surprises intensify each piece. It’s a rarity – a raw-sounding record that gives you plenty of headphone-worthy detail to chew on. This Stupid World gives your brain a lot to digest, too. All the battles with time drive toward some heavy conclusions. In the gripping “Aselestine,” Hubley sings about what sounds like a friend on death’s door: “The clock won’t tick / I can’t predict / I can’t sell your books, though you asked me to.” In “Apology Letter,” time turns simple communication into something fraught and confusing: “The words / Derail on the way from me to you.” Not everything is so serious, though. The absurdist “Tonight’s Episode” helps McNew learn to milk cows, steal faces, and treat guacamole as a verb. And somehow Alice Cooper, Ray Davies, and Rick Moranis show up in “Brain Capers,” all telling us time isn’t finished yet. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Kula Shaker
Yea, though we walk through the valley of dark shadows… and though there is a famine of supercharged, spirit jangling, fractal protest rock, there are good tidings. The battle has not been lost to average digital earworms; the zeitgeist has gone into a spin and Kula Shaker have been called forth to deliver their most inspired album in years. 1st Congregational Church Of Eternal Love and Free Hugs is a firebrand double-album, energised and purposeful in a way that few guitar bands currently manage. It spills over with blazing songs (15 in total), cross-genre sonics and a renewed super confidence in its wish to joust into the big themes: Love vs Fear; Lucifer vs St Michael; freedom vs autocracy; Colonials vs The Indians: The Empire vs The Rebellion.All quite surprising for an album that wasn’t part of the plan. Kula’s previous album, ‘K.2.O’ (2016) was a 20th anniversary marking of their Britpop-slaying debut ‘K’, which, according to Crispian Mills should have been a ‘closing of the circle’, coming to an end-point after a year-long world tour. Three years further on however, Crispian and the band’s bassist and studio guru Alonza Bevan; drummer Paul Winterhart and keyboardist Henry Broadbent were drawn back together.“There had been vague talks about ‘a ukulele project with our kids’ and half an idea to record some sacred Kirtan chants, but then the world went into lockdown, and the backdrop changed.”“Obviously, it’s been a very weird time for everyone,” says Crispian,“I think the whole experience reinforced a lot of beliefs we shared about why we started playing music together in the first place. It was a kind of a reawakening.”“Whatever that spark of life was that inspired us in the beginning, it seemed to come back. We were ‘filled with the holy spirit’, so to speak.”With little opportunity to be together in the same room, demos and re-writes happened in advance, slotting-in recording in Alonza’s studio in Belgium around travel restrictions. The gestation of songs was gradual, many were initially written on ukulele, because Crispian was teaching the instrument to his kids. But the album also has some of his most inspired guitar playing — for connected reasons:“Seeing my kids playing noisy rock and roll really brought me back to life, without a shadow of a doubt. I fell in love with guitar playing all over again.”Wrapped within an eye-popping sleeve fresco depicting mankind’s stuggle with The Beast and populated by heroes and villains, angels and Ganeshas, clowns, warriors, knights and The Marx Brothers (yes) – as if Hieronymus Bosch had dropped mushrooms after a week of the History Channel and Bible/ Mahabharata studies.There is also a theatrical framing to the songs, with all the ‘action’ taking place under a badly leaking roof in the quaintly imagined village church of Little Sodbury. Starting with the introductory Dearly Beloved, the church pastor presides over a bronchially challenged congregation while an epic thunderstorm rages overhead. ‘Kula Shaker 6’ is ardent, but it’s far from solemn.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Patty Griffin
Patty Griffin is among the most consequential singer-songwriters of her generation, a quintessentially American artist whose wide-ranging canon incisively explores the intimate moments and universal emotions that bind us together. Over the course of two decades, the GRAMMY® Award winner – and seven-time nominee – has crafted nine classic studio albums and two live collections, a remarkable body of work in progress that prompted the New York Times to hail her for “[writing] cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…(her) songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.”The Austin, TX-based singer and songwriter made an immediate impact with her 1996 debut, Living With Ghosts, and its 1998 follow-up, Flaming Red – both now considered seminal works of modern folk and Americana. Since then, Griffin’s diverse body of work spans such classic LPs as 2002’s GRAMMY® Award-nominated 1000 Kisses – later ranked #15 on Paste’s“The 50 Best Albums of the Decade (2000-2009),” — to 2007’s Children Running Through, honored by the Americana Music Association with two Americana Honors & Awards including “Artist of the Year” and “Album of the Year.” To date, Griffin has received seven total nominations from the Americana Music Association, affirming her as one of the far-reaching genre’s leading proponents. 2011’s Downtown Church – which blends traditional gospel favorites with Griffin’s own spiritually questioning material – debuted at #1 on both Billboard’s “Folk Albums” and “Christian Albums” charts before winning 2011’s “Best Traditional Gospel Album” GRAMMY® Award, Griffin’s first solo GRAMMY® triumph among seven total career nominations. Griffin’s most recent LP, 2015’s Servant Of Love, marked the first release on her own PGM Recordings label via Thirty Tigers. Applauded by The Guardian as “bravely experimental,” the collection saw Griffin earn still another GRAMMY® Award nomination, this time in the “Best Folk Album” category.Widely regarded among the best pure songwriters of this or any other era, Griffin has had her work performed by a truly epic assortment of her fellow artists, among them Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Solomon Burke, The Dixie Chicks, Kelly Clarkson & Jeff Beck, Martina McBride, Miranda Lambert, Melissa Etheridge and Susan Boyle, to name but a few. Her songs have also been showcased in a variety of film, TV, and theatre projects, with her original music and lyrics featured in the 2007 musical, 10 Million Miles, produced Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theatre Company and directed by Tony Award-winner Michael Mayer. Griffin has also been joined in the studio by a veritable who’s-who of contemporary Americana, including Harris, Buddy & Julie Miller, Shawn Colvin, Jim Lauderdale, Raul Malo, Ian McLagen, JD Foster, and many others. As if her own remarkable career weren’t enough, Griffin has found time to collaborate with a wide range of like-minded artists, among them Joshua Radin, Todd Snider, Dierks Bentley, Robert Plant, Jack Ingram, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings.Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Kimbra
New Zealand-born pop star and two-time Grammy Award winning tour de force Kimbra is readying her fourth studio album, A Reckoning. Produced in tandem with Son Lux’s Ryan Lott, A Reckoning features brand-new singles “Save Me” and “Replay,” which channel heartbreak amidst a global pandemic into bold new sonic territory.This is just the latest chapter in a series of Kimbra’s overall career success: the experimental pop performer’s 2011 debut, Vows, bowed at No. 14 on the Billboard Top 200 and was certified platinum in Australia and New Zealand. She received Best Female Artist two years in a row at the ARIA Music Awards and took home 5 New Zealand Tui Awards including Album of The Year in 2012. That same year, she exploded into the public consciousness with “Somebody That I Used To Know,” a duet with Gotye that earned her two Grammy Awards for “Record of the Year” and “Best Pop Duo/Group Performance,” as well as reaching No. 1 on global charts (across 18 countries) and selling more than 13 million copies.Her 2014 sophomore record, The Golden Echo, highlighted her eclectic style with a diverse set of collaborations from Thundercat, Omar-Rodriguez Lopez of The Mars Volta, Bilal, and John Legend. Likewise, her third LP, 2018’s Primal Heart, saw her touring with the likes of Beck, Odesza and David Byrne.Kimbra has performed on TV shows such as Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Last Call with Carson Daly, Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Seth Meyers, as well as performing at festivals such as Coachella, Austin City Limits and more.Moving forward, Kimbra hopes listeners will find catharsis and connection on A Reckoning, whether they are contending with change in their own lives or processing shifts in the world around them.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Discord | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud | VIP Legal Disclaimer
