Black Country, New Road at Baltimore Soundstage

Emerging from London’s vibrant Windmill scene with their debut album For the first time, Black Country, New Road quickly made inroads as ones to watch in 2021.  The album brought an eclectic influence spanning genres and winning critical acclaim across the board, garnering support from both fans and critics, the album was also shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.

Second album Ants From Up There quickly followed on 3rd Feb 2022, landing at #3 in the UK Albums Chart - their second Top 5 UK album debut in 12 months.  The record was once again lauded by fans and critics alike, gaining numerous 5* reviews and went on to appear on end of year lists across the globe, including being voted #1 by fans on r/indieheads, Rate Your Music and #3 by Pitchfork readers. All of this despite being released just days after frontman Isaac Woods announced his decision to step away from the band.

Fresh from the success of Ants From Up There, with a full touring schedule ahead of them in 2023, the band, now as a six-piece, remaining members Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Georgia Ellery, Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde and Charlie Wayne decided to write an entire new set of material to perform.  They played to swelling crowds at festivals, including triumphant performances at Primavera, Green Man and Fuji Rock, entering a new musical phase as they navigated and developed songs that were just weeks old. They also toured the US with black midi and headlined two sold-out shows in New York.

As the songs continued to develop on the road they decided to avoid conventional next steps.  People waiting on new material have eight new, excellent songs to hear, but not in the way they might have expected. “We didn’t want to do a studio album,” says BC, NR pianist May Kershaw, who is one of the three band members, along with saxophonist Lewis Evans and bassist Tyler Hyde, now taking on vocal duties. “We wrote the new tracks specifically to perform live, so we thought it might be a nice idea to put out a performance.”

with Camera Picture (Cameron Picton (black midi), guitar, voice, new songs.

Brontez Purnell with Friday Junior, Clear Channel & Kaz

BRONTEZ PURNELL HAS BEEN MAKING MUSIC SINCE THE ‘90S. HE STARTED IN THE SOCIAL LIES, A HARDCORE AFRO-PUNK DUO IN ALABAMA IN HIS TEENS, AND LATER GRAVY TRAIN!!! HE THEN WENT ON TO LEAD HIS LONG RUNNING PROJECT THE YOUNGER LOVERS. HE IS ALSO A DANCER, FILM MAKER, CHOREOGRAPHER (THE BRONTEZ PURNELL DANCE COMPANY), AND AUTHOR OF 8 BOOKS.

Earth

with Esther Blue

Doors at 6pm, show at 7pm

Over the course of their thirty trips around the sun, Earth has remained diligent in their commitment to monolithic minimalism. The sonic vocabulary may have changed—from their early years churning out seismic drone metal on albums like Earth 2 (1993) to the dusty Morricone-tinged comeback album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005) to the meditative rock approach of Primitive and Deadly (2014)—but the underlying principle of austerity and restraint remains a constant. With their latest album Full Upon Her Burning Lips, Earth purges the layers of auxiliary instrumentation that embellished some of their previous records and deconstructed their dynamic to the core duo of Dylan Carlson on guitar and bass and Adrienne Davies on drums and percussion. In the process, they tapped into the Platonic ideal of Earth—an incarnation of the long running band bolstered by the authority of purpose, where every note and every strike on the drum kit carries the weight of the world.

Full Upon Her Burning Lips opens with “Datura’s Crimson Veils”, a twelve-minute opus that adheres to Earth’s 21st century approach with Carlson’s sepia-toned Bakersfield Sound guitars lurching across a barren landscape while Davies punctuates the melodies with death knell drums. It’s a sound that harkens back to the riff-constructed vistas of their Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light albums, but stripped of their ornateness. “It was definitely a very organically developed record,” Carlson says of the process. “I limited the number of effects I used. I always like the limiting of materials to force oneself to employ them more creatively. Previous Earth records were quite lush sounding, and I wanted a more upfront and drier sound, using very few studio effects.” In less capable hands, these kinds of limitations might diminish the aural scope of the compositions, but Carlson and Davies have always thrived on reductive methods.

The stripped down approach had another advantage. “I really wanted the drums to be present,” Carlson says. “I felt with previous Earth records that other instrumentation took up so much of the sonic space that the drums were kind of pushed to the side.” The absence of a pre-existing narrative guiding the compositions meant that the songs were more open and intuitive. Yet subconscious impulses gradually created their own subtext for the album. “I wanted this to be a ‘sexy’ record, a record acknowledging the ‘witchy’ and ‘sensual’ aspects in the music… sort of a ‘witch’s garden’ kind of theme, with references to mind altering plants and animals that people have always held superstitious beliefs towards.”

“I feel like this is the fullest expression and purest distillation of what Earth does since I re-started the band,” Carlson says in reflection of Full Upon Her Burning Lips. And indeed, anyone that’s followed Earth on their journey will bask in the unadulterated hums, throbs, and reverberations conjured by Carlson and Davies.

Narrow Head

Wishy

Dazy

Doors at 8, show at 9

Liturgy is the project of Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, whose yearning, energetic “transcendental black metal” exists in the space between metal, art music and sacred ritual. Its current lineup includes Mario Miron (guitar), Tia Vincent-Clark (bass) and Leo Didkovsky (drums). Celebrated for their fusion of sincere emotion, compositional complexity, stylistic daring and intense live energy, the band is simultaneously a medium and platform for drama and theology. It was founded in the context of Brooklyn DIY as a solo project by Hunt-Hendrix in 2005 while she was studying philosophy and classical composition at Columbia. After expanding to a quartet they made waves globally with their 2011 sophomore album Aesthethica for introducing the style of Scandinavian black metal into the world of experimental art rock. Their ambitious 2015 album The Ark Work was controversial for its incorporation of IDM and trap production into their musical language. In fall 2019 released their highly acclaimed fourth studio album H.A.Q.Q., which is tied to an ongoing philosophical YouTube lecture series. Their fifth studio album Origin of the Alimonies was released in November 2020 in advance of the forthcoming eponymous video opera directed by and starring Hunt-Hendrix

***Protomartyr***

Since their 2012 debut No Passion All Technique, the Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr have mastered the art of evoking place: the grinding Midwest humility of their hometown, as well as the x-rayed elucidation of America that comes with their vantage. Protomartyr—vocalist Joe Casey, guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard, and bassist Scott Davidson—have become synonymous with caustic, impressionistic assemblages of politics and poetry, the literal and oblique.

The group’s sixth album, recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, is called Formal Growth In The Desert. And though frontman Joe Casey did have a humbling experience staring at awe-inspiring Sonoran rock formations and reckoning with his own smallness in the scheme of things – as recounted in the single “Elimination Dances” – the title is not necessarily a nod to the sandy expanses of the southwest. Detroit, too, is like a desert. “The desert is more of a metaphor or symbol,” Casey says, “of emotional deserts, or a place or time that seems to lack life.” The desert brings an existential awareness that is ultimately internal.

ML Buch is Marie Louise Buch, a Copenhagen-based composer, producer, guitarist and

vocalist. Following the EP ‘Fleshy’ in 2017 she released her critically acclaimed debut album

‘Skinned’ on Danish imprint Anyines in 2020. ‘Suntub’ is her second full length release, a

double album consisting of 15 tracks, which will be released in October 2023 on 15 love.

In her compositional practice ML Buch sketches up her music in an almost architectural way.

The raw material is generated through immersion in playing and assembling as a way of

triggering random magic. Her live performances, both in solo and group formations, is

reflective of her love of combining 7-string electric guitars in open tunings with synthetic

instruments and electronic experiments. ML Buch has performed at the likes of Pitchfork

Paris Avant-Garde, Roskilde Festival, Fuchsbau Arts Festival, and the sound and vision

programme at CPH:DOX, as well as performing as part of Laurie Anderson’s Talking Choir

project. ML Buch has done commissioned work with poet Ingvild Lothe and contributed to

releases by artists like CTM, Jura and Astrid Sonne, with whom she’s also performed live.

All Under Heaven, Polarview, So Perfect & Roxy 2

Teethe

Teethe is a band from Texas. The members of Teethe met while attending the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, a small college town outside of Dallas with a fertile music scene. Before forming Teethe, its core members Boone Patrello, Grahm Robinson, Madeline Dowd, and Jordan Garrett all played in various other groups in Denton, releasing music under different pseudonyms. Patrello released solo music via his Dead Sullivan moniker, while Robinson released under MAH KEE OH. Patrello and Robinson linked up with Dowd to record an album for her project, Crisman, in 2019. They all eventually moved in together, leading the group to start recording more as a whole unit, and subsequently Teethe was born.

The Spits
Electric Chair

Doors at 8/ show at 9

In an era that relies so heavily on quick-hit bands, there are very few things that are truly part of the subculture and not just the passing zeitgeist du jour. Closing in on three decades, The Spits have signified the crossroads between punk mayhem and well-honed songwriting, creating some of the most unhinged and anthemic tracks in underground music while standing tall enough to be uttered in the same breath as names like Jay Reatard, Dead Moon, Ty Segall and more.

The Spits are readying their highly anticipated VI, due May 1 via their own Thriftstore Records imprint. Recorded by Erik Nervous on cassette four track, the band’s new LP VI is ten hummable tracks, shrouded in chainsaw punk that mesh the wild showmanship of party-rock legends Van Halen and the leather-clad toughness and songwriting chops of the Misfits. Marking a “return to roots’’ approach for the LP, the band decided to record and write VI in the basements of Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, Michigan over the course of several spurts of activity, each yielding a few new songs from a terrible drum kit with a literal thrift store guitar. “We’ve only been into an actual studio like three times,” admits Sean Wood. “I don’t think we’ve had one record that was recorded all in one place, this may be the closest thing. And for these songs we’d record a couple tracks, step away and go back at it later– sometimes weeks later. You know, take our time.”

Originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, brothers Sean and Erin Wood formed The Spits with Lance Phelps in 1993 after realizing rock had gone limp, hated partying and just plain wasn’t fun anymore. And even though they didn’t even know how to play, the self-professed deliquents who grew up with New Orleans–style jazz and bluegrass “got cultured” and formed a band dead set on reminding the world how to have a good time. By the late 90s/early 00s, The Spits were almost as famous for rowdy shows and outrageous costumes as they were for their acid-fried melodic rippers. Releasing five LPs over the next decade-plus, in addition to EPs and 7-inches, the gospel of The Spits spread far and wide, expanding the band’s live legend further and further while giving more fans the chance to hear their uniquely catchy songwriting and punk mayhem. And while several band members have come and gone since their formation, including Wayne Draves and Josh Kramer, The Spits have never lost their edge, never lost their live chops and most importantly, never lost that sense of beer-soaked chaos.

Rather than pick up where they left off, Grails take the sky-high riff-based heaviness of their earlier albums and distill it into a nuanced, widescreen opus. The perennial influences of mid-20th century Western film scores, obscure library music, and psychedelic krautrock are indelibly imprinted, but Chalice Hymnalexudes an eerie patience in unfurling the many layers of its subtle details. Produced by the band over the past five years, Chalice Hymnal bears some of the European psych and experimental hip-hop production techniques of founding members Alex Hall and Emil Amos’ other group, Lilacs & Champagne. Amos’ meditative metal band, Om, and longtime singer-songwriter project, Holy Sons, also naturally find their way into the Chalice cauldron. Rounding out their line-up, cofounder Zak Riles (also of experimental kraut-psych trio, Watter) layers synths and programming into an electronic-prog hybrid that pushes Grailsfurther into the deep end, displaying a profound resonance, both musically and emotionally. No one else sounds like Grails, and on Chalice Hymnal they sound more like themselves than ever before.

Cola with M(a)hol

From their inception Cola have expanded on the d.i.y. ethic of the Dischord and SST eras, creating potent sounds from a minimal palette of drums/bass/guitar and lacing their songs with winsome one-liners and societal commentary. What’s another word for commentary? Gloss, apparently. Never basic, the lyrics reward repeated listening for deeper meanings. David Berman’s poetry-via-garage light pennings are an inspiration, as equally so are the lighter side of UK first-wave New Wave and the Dunedin sound. The results are in the pudding: at times sparse and poetic, at others a thrilling, hook-laden good time, as with the cheeky romantic sketch of a one-night stand that is so overflowing with innuendo-cum-journalism talk that it almost teeters over into self-parody. It’s an album bursting with energy and wit and ideas–filled to the margins.

Fiddlehead

Gel

Milly

Redeye

at Zika Farm