Southern Culture on the Skids

Southern Culture On The Skids has been consistently recording and touring around the world since 1983. The band (Rick Miller – guitar and vocals, Mary Huff – bass and vocals, Dave Hartman – drums) has been playing together for over 30 years. Their musical journey has taken them from all-night North Carolina house parties to late night TV talk shows (Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show), from performing at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan to rockin’ out for the inmates at North Carolina correctional facilities. They’ve shared a stage with many musical luminaries including Link Wray, Loretta Lynn, Hasil Adkins and Patti Smith. Their music has been featured in movies and TV, parodied by Weird Al, and used to sell everything from diamonds to pork sausage. In 2014 the band was honored by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with an exhibition featuring their music and cultural contributions. Their legendary live shows are a testament to the therapeutic powers of foot-stomping, butt-shaking rock and roll and what Rolling Stone dubbed “a hell raising rock and roll party.”At Home with Southern Culture on the Skids is the latest full length album from the band and is due to drop into stores on March 12th. The album consists of 11 tracks recorded and mixed in Rick Miller’s living room with some additional tracks recorded at his studio, The Kudzu Ranch.The first radio single off the album is “Run Baby Run”—a rocking number with deep garage roots. SCOTS bassist Mary Huff provides an urgent vocal while the band pulls back the throttle on a full race fuzz fest—cause she’s gotta to go fast! Run Baby Run!The other songs on the album are a combination of the band’s unique mix of musical genres: rock and roll, surf, folk and country—all a bit off-center, what Rick proudly calls “our wobbly Americana”. Rick goes on, “We put a few more acoustic guitars on this one, as you would expect if you recorded in your living room, but it still rocks like SCOTS. So put your headphones on, get in your favorite chair/sofa/recliner, put on “At Home With” and let’s hang out for a while.”Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram

Chuck Prophet Trio

Since his neo-psychedelic Green On Red days, Chuck Prophet has been turning out country, folk, blues, and Brill Building classicism. After a false start recording in his hometown of San Francisco, Prophet decided to get out of Dodge and found himself re-energized in Upstate New York just a few miles from the Vermont border to make 2020’s The Land That Time Forgot, a record that is much a 21st century exorcism as it is America.Written mostly with Prophet longtime collaborator and co-conspirator klipschutz, the songs that inhabit The Land That Time Forgot come at you from an array of locations both real and imagined including San Francisco’s Tenderloin, an English roundabout, and Nixonland while hanging out with the ghosts of Johnny Thunders, Willie Wonka, and John the Baptist, and contemplating the train that carried Abraham Lincoln home for the final time.To compliment the critically acclaimed album, in early 2022, Prophet released The Land That Time Forgot Revisited, a four-song digital live EP recorded at the Make Out Room in San Francisco featuring “Meet Me at the Roundabout,” “Womankind,” “Fast Kid,” and “Kiss Me Deadly,” with his band, the Mission Express, and a string quartet (the Makeout Room Quartet).“I know a little bit about how to craft a studio LP,” says Prophet. “But recording live with a string quartet on a linoleum floor on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in an empty barroom in San Francisco’s Mission District is something different. For one thing there is an actual “arranger.” Like Nelson Riddle. Or what Randy Newman does, adding his own secret sauce to the compositional gene pool that has scored half the soundtracks in Hollywood history. They’re a new way into the songs—and an adventure finding our way out. There’s still an acoustic Mission Express in the mix, along with the strings. Three songs from The Land That Time Forgot reimagined, plus a Lita Ford cover that has to be heard to be believed.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

JAWNY

Too much thinking can get in the way of good art. That’s the philosophy that indie singer/songwriter JAWNY has embraced. JAWNY has built his career by intuition, letting his music evolve naturally as he grows personally. Instead of chasing the high of past successes — including his 2019 Gold-certified hit, “Honeypie” — he’s following his gut and tapping into a new vision that reflects his growth over the years. Even as he embraces a “first thought, best thought” approach to making music, his songs have grown in scope and scale — elevating him from songwriter to indie-pop auteur with a kaleidoscopic vision and rich sense of narrative that informs everything he does.With the release of the blistering “take it back,” JAWNY’s barreling full steam ahead with a dream collaborator by his side. The iconic alt-trickster Beck contributes guitar and vocals to the track, which resulted in a scrappy and thrashing sing-along that can bring a whole crowd into a frenzy. JAWNY joined Beck on a recent tour of the U.K. this summer. “I know that I’m in love with you,” JAWNY announces on the perky, piano-punching intro, which bleeds into “strawberry chainsaw,” a cheeky metaphor on love’s sweet-sinister dichotomy that’s delivered with a loose, lively swagger. With his recent release “adios,” he unleashes his falsetto as he realizes his relationship’s fate: “Now I feel like a blackout, New York City grid max out, when she said adios.”Born Jacob Sullenger and raised in the Bay Area, JAWNY first picked up a guitar at age 6 after watching his dad jam to the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. At 13, he began making beats with his brother, eventually landing placements with several rappers on SoundCloud. “Since birth, I’ve never wanted to do anything else,” he says.For a while, though, JAWNY got sidetracked. He first convinced himself he was going to be a nurse but dropped out of school almost immediately. Getting back on the music path, he signed up for audio engineering classes but again dropped out in two weeks. “I hated being told that there was a black-and-white way to do things,” he recalls.That rebellious spirit has kept a fire in him that’s only intensified. At age 20, while paying his bills as a chicken shop cook in Philadelphia, he began recording songs with his own vocals, something he’d been hesitant to do previously but which came rather naturally. People started to notice.By 2018, he earned buzz with a self-titled debut EP under the name Johnny Utah and landed on taste-making Spotify playlists like Ultimate Indie and Bedroom Pop. The next year, he dropped “Honeypie,” a track he wrote and recorded in little over an hour. The feel-good, funk-inflected song and its music video garnered instant acclaim. It’s since amassed more than 37 million views on YouTube and more than 738 million streams globally. The attention is well-deserved — across these early releases, he demonstrated a unique spark that shone through no matter what genre he was working with on a given day. Every song is punctuated with a strange magic — an unexpected turn of phrase or an unpredictable production flourish — that makes every song feel wonderfully untamed. Now, with an impressive 950 million career streams overall, he’s honed that energy while also developing a focused and brilliant perspective that resembles few other writers working.TikTok | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

Less Than Jake

The story of ska-rocking’ maestros Less Than Jake isn’t told in their sizable discography. It can’t be calculated by the amount of road miles they’ve logged. (But if were forced to calculate, we think they might be a block or two short of the Van Allen belts.)Nah! Less Than Jake’s cumulative worth is all about what they bring to your party. From sweaty club shows to uproarious festival dates to opening up for America’s most beloved rock acts, these five lifers’ deeds are best measured in the smiles they’ve slapped on the faces of true believers and new listeners, alike. Silver Linings is the name of the new Less Than Jake album, their first full-length for the Pure Noise label and the follow-up to 2013’sSee The Light. It also doubles as a bunch of sonic diary pages and a mission statement that cements their conviction after two decades in this rock ‘n’ roll circus. Indeed, LTJ—front man/guitarist Chris DeMakes, bassist/vocalist Roger Lima, trombonist Buddy Schaub, saxophonist Peter “JR” Wasilewski and new drummer Matt Yonker—have escaped most (but not all) forms of ennui, depression and violence against screen-based objects to create an endorsement of humanity. Silver Linings also does a good amount of myth-exploding in its pursuit of joy. The songwriting core of DeMakes, Lima and Wasilewski wrote all the lyrics. New drummer Matt Yonker, whose former positions included LTJ tour manager and hammering along with such punk outfits as the Teen Idols and the Queers, helps bring a new sense of urgency. And that album title? Yeah, that was decided upon long before bands began to offer face masks in their online merch stores. Pro tip: Dial back your preconceived notions. The only things the Jakes have to prove are to themselves. Their laurels aren’t so comfortable that they’d willingly choose to be painted into a retro-colored corner. While Silver Linings doesn’t skimp on the joy, fun or grooves, careful listeners will sense a bit more reality seeping into LTJ’s escapism. The calisthenic bounce of “Lie To Me” is slightly undercut by Lima’s tales of how “the flames we hold the closest burn the worse.” On the urgent track “The Test,” DeMakes dares to seek some self-examination through someone else’s prism. “Dear Me” might be the first rock song that doesn’t couch its disdain for technology with poetic metaphors. That track addresses the loss of friends via distance and tragedy. The word “love” also appears in the album’s lyrics at three junctures. That detail should not be lost on anyone. “We allowed ourselves to be vulnerable,” offers Wasilewski. “In the past, previous records’ lyrics were about leaving a specific place or time. This is more about the departures in our personal lives: family, friends, relationships. We’ve never really explored that side. With this record, we tried to pull back that curtain. We’re showing some fragility in a time when people seem so hardened. “We’re not looking for silver linings,” he clarifies. “The record is about appreciating them. Nobody appreciates them until maybe it’s too late or maybe it’s after the fact. “Don’t worry. The phrase “woe is we” isn’t in the LTJ lexicon.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify

Rubblebucket

Our Last Night – The Welcome Back Tour

Ella Jane

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Victoria Victoria

Victoria Victoria’s new album, “To The Wayside,” was released on Sept. 9, 2022—completing a beautifully fresh and alluring musical masterpiece that’s been in the making since 2020. Each of the album’s nine songs is a gem, mined through a magical collaboration between Victoria Victoria front woman Tori Elliott, producer/engineer Stephen Lee Price, Jr., and virtuoso guitarist, Charlie Hunter, who plays guitar and bass on all of the tracks. Elliott, who brings an innate effervescence and joyfulness to her live performances, brings equally insightful lyrics and contagious melodies to this album, as she explores and dissects issues surrounding modern female identity. “Songwriting helps me untangle what’s going on emotionally,” said the Winston Salem, N.C.-based singer-songwriter. “It almost feels like doing a puzzle.” “By the time that I got in the studio with Charlie, it just felt like an arrival, musically,” she said. “It felt like my voice was sitting where I always wanted it to be sitting.” Hunter says Elliott’s music draws in people of all ages and walks of life with intriguing narratives, songwriting, singing and instrumentation. “Tori’s work is remarkable because it accomplishes the feat of being accessible but really honest and authentic at the same time, which is rare,” Hunter said. “I just loved being a part of her process.” Victoria Victoria will tour in January 2023 with Tori Elliot on lead vocals, Charlie Hunter on Hybrid guitar, drums, and two back up singers. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Suki Waterhouse

Suki Waterhouse catalogs the most intimate, formative, and significant moments of her life through songs. You might recognize her name or her work as singer, songwriter, actress, and model, but you’ll really get to know the multi-faceted artist through her music. Growing up in London, Suki gravitated towards music’s magnetic pull. She listened to the likes of Alanis Morissette and caught Missy Elliott live as her first concert. Meanwhile, Oasis held a particularly special place in her heart. She initially teased out this facet of her creativity with a series of singles, generating nearly 20 million total streams independently. Nylon hailed her debut “Brutally” as “what a Lana Del Rey deep cut mixed with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’ would sound like.” In addition to raves from Garage by Vice and Lemonade Magazine, DUJOR put it best, “Suki Waterhouse’s music has swagger.” Constantly consuming artists of all stripes, she listened to the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Valerie June, Garbage, Frazey Ford, Lou Doillon, and Lucinda Williams. In late 2020, she finally dove into making what would become her full-length debut album, I Can’t Let Go [Sub Pop Records] with producer Brad Cook [Snail Mail, Waxahatchee]. Now, she introduces this chapter with “Moves” and “My Mind.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

G. Love & Special Sauce and Donavon Frankenreiter

“I’ve been in the game a long time, but I’ve always considered myself a student,” says G. Love. “Finishing this album with Keb Mo’ felt like graduation.” Recorded in Nashville with a slew of special guests including Robert Randolph, Marcus King, and Roosevelt Collier, ‘The Juice’ is indeed diploma-worthy. Co-produced and co-written with GRAMMY-winning icon Keb Mo’, it’s an electrifying collection, one that tips its cap to more than a century of blues greats even as it offers its own distinctly modern pop spin on the genre, mixing programmed beats and hip-hop grooves with blistering guitar and sacred steel. G. Love’s lyrics are both personal and political here, artfully balancing his appreciation for the simple joys in life with his obligation to speak out for justice and equality, and his performances are suitably riotous and rousing to match, with infectious call-and-response hooks and funky sing-along choruses at every turn. Easy as it is to succumb to cynicism these days, the songs on ‘The Juice’ refuse, insisting instead on hope and determination in the face of doubt and despair. “I’ve always tried to make music that’s a force for positivity,” G. Love explains. “It was important to me that this album be something that could empower the folks who are out there fighting the good fight every day. I wanted to make a rallying cry for empathy and unity.” Born Garrett Dutton in Philadelphia, PA, G. Love grew up equally enthralled with folk, blues, and rap, devouring everything from Lead Belly and Run D.M.C. to John Hammond and the Beastie Boys. After migrating to Boston, he and his band, Special Sauce, broke out in 1994 with their Gold-selling self-titled debut, which earned widespread critical acclaim for its bold vision and adventurous production. Over the next twenty-five years, G. Love would go on to release seven more similarly lauded studio studios albums with Special Sauce (plus four solo albums on his own), solidifying his place in music history as a genre-bending pioneer with a sound The New York Times described as “a new and urgent hybrid” and NPR called a “musical melting pot.” G. Love’s magnetic stage presence, meanwhile, made him a fixture on festival lineups from Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza, and his relentless appetite for tour and collaboration landed him on the road and in the studio with artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Dave Matthews, The Avett Brothers, Jack Johnson, and DJ Logic. While G. Love has covered considerable sonic ground during his prolific career, he’s always found himself drawn back to the blues, and to one bluesman in particular. “Keb Mo’ and I got signed to the same label at the same time back when I first started out, and we toured together early on in my career,” G. Love remembers. “He used to introduce me onstage as ‘a true American original,’ and I could tell that he got a kick out of what I did. We didn’t see each other for a while after that, but a few years ago we reconnected and did a co-headline tour, which was really special for me.”Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Soundcloud | YouTube

Genre: Miscellaneous