Promoting and strengthening the artistic and cultural development of Orange County, North Carolina
Swing & Blues Wednesdays with Richard Badu – (Sept 2019)
The Big Book Sale! Thousands of books, CDs, DVDs, and vinyl records for sale with prices starting at 50¢. Proceeds benefit Chapel Hill Public Library. Friday September 13, 2019 3:00 pm - 5:30 pm Friends only, memberships sold at the door ($10 for students, including college and grad students) Saturday, September 14, 2019 10:00 am... Read More →
“Almost everything changed for us in these last two years,” says Andy Baxter, one half of the acclaimed duo Penny & Sparrow. “It was a painful experience in a lot of ways, but it was also a joyful one.” Joy and pain walk hand in hand on ‘Finch,’ Penny & Sparrow’s magnificent sixth album. Written during their first major break from the road in years, the record finds the band reckoning with a prolonged period of intense personal transformation, a profound awakening that altered their perceptions of masculinity, sex, religion, divorce, friendship, vanity, purpose, and, perhaps most importantly, self. Deeply vulnerable and boldly cinematic, the resulting songs blur the lines between indie-folk and alt-pop, with dense string arrangements and atmospheric production underpinning soaring melodies and airtight harmonies from Baxter and his longtime musical partner, Kyle Jahnke. Texas natives, Baxter and Jahnke first crossed paths at UT Austin, where they developed both a fast friendship and a deeply symbiotic musical connection. Jahnke was a gifted guitarist with an ear for melody, Baxter an erudite lyricist with a mesmerizing voice and crystalline falsetto, and the duo quickly found that their vocals blended together as if they’d been singing in harmony their whole lives. Beginning with 2013’s ‘Tenboom,’ the staunchly DIY pair released a series of critically lauded records that garnered comparisons to the hushed intimacy of Iron & Wine and the adventurous beauty of James Blake, building up a devoted fanbase along the way through relentless touring and word-of-mouth buzz. NPR praised the band’s songwriting as a “delicate dance between heartache and resolve,” while The World Café raved that they’ve “steadily built a sound as attentive to detail as Simon & Garfunkel and as open to the present day as Bon Iver,” and Rolling Stone hailed their catalog as “folk music for Sunday mornings, quiet evenings, and all the fragile moments in between.” In addition to the mountain of glowing reviews, the band also earned high profile fans-including The Civil Wars’ John Paul White, who produced 2015’s ‘Let A Lover Drown You’-and extensive tour dates with everyone from Josh Ritter and Johnnyswim to Drew Holcomb and Delta Rae.
“We went through a pretty dramatic shift with this record,” says Seratones frontwoman AJ Haynes. “The band lineup, the creative process, the sound: all of it changed in ways that really reflected our growth and evolution.” One listen to ‘Power,’ Seratones’ spectacular sophomore album, and it’s clear just how much of an evolution has taken place. Produced by Cage The Elephant guitarist Brad Shultz, the record finds the Shreveport five-piece trading in the brash proto-punk of their critically acclaimed debut for a timeless brand of gritty soul, one that takes its cues from vintage Motown and Stax even as it flirts with modern synthesizers and experimental arrangements. Haynes’ captivating voice remains front and center here, but her delivery this time around is more measured and self-assured than ever before, a beacon of confidence and clarity amidst a sea of social and political turmoil. Perhaps even more marked than the any sonic development on the record, though, is Haynes’ lyrical turn, which points her gaze inwards for the first time as she grapples with race, gender, and justice, writing with an unfiltered honesty that at once exudes strength and vulnerability, hope and despair, beauty and pain. “I learned to tap more into my own stories with these songs,” says Haynes. “I came to recognize that I have this lineage and these inherited experiences that are beautiful and worthy of exploration. The more personal my writing got, the more deeply I was able to connect with people.” Seratones have been chasing those kinds of deep connections since 2016, when they first rocketed into the national spotlight with their breakout debut, ‘Get Gone.’ Rolling Stone called the album a “fitful collision of punk, soul and jazz echoing out of a shed strewn with whiskey bottles,” while Pitchfork praised the collection’s “soulful grease and punky grit,” and NPR hailed it as “lean and compact, with an impressive assortment of anthemic stompers.” The music earned the band dates on the road with artists as varied as St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, The Dandy Warhols, and Drive-By Truckers, along with festival slots from Hangout to Newport Folk and invitations to perform on national television and at NPR’s Tiny Desk. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
There are few voices more deeply embedded in the iconography and mythology of American indie rock than that of Chan Marshall. Under the musical nom de plume of Cat Power, Marshall has released music for nearly 25 years now and her prowess as a songwriter, a producer, and most notably-as a voice-has only grown more influential with time. On her 10th studio album, Wanderer, Marshall resets her dials, offering a collection of songs that function as pristine examples of her still-evolving creative practice. Held aloft primarily by Marshall’s own guitar and piano, Wanderer is a collection of winding, wondering narratives all perfectly imbued with the kind of yearning and warmth that have made her one of the most distinctive and beloved artists of her generation. Produced by Marshall and mixed by Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck), the album includes appearances by longtime friends and compatriots, as well as guest vocals courtesy of friend and recent tourmate Lana Del Rey. Wanderer is, in many ways, a kind of quintessential Cat Power record, with Marshall’s clarion voice front and center in a set of songs that are remarkably stark and straightforward. Tracks like “Black” and “Me Voy” have the kind of haunted quality that recall the most emotionally harrowing moments of Moon Pix or You Are Free, while the elegant lilt of “In Your Face” and the minimalist blues of “You Get” (“You Know there’s nothing like time, to teach you where you have been” Marshall sings on the latter) have the same kind of playful, soulful timbre of The Greatest. Meanwhile, the album also showcases Marshall’s uncanny abilities as one of the great interpreters of songs, with a stunning version of Rihanna’s “Stay”. “I love the tradition of interpreting songs”, she says. “I think it’s one of the highest compliments you can pay another artist. It’s one of the great traditions in American music and one of the great pleasures.” While Wanderer represents a hard-won stability for Marshall, it’s also evidence that stability -emotional, physical, financial -is often fleeting. It’s a thing that must be cared for, protected, and can easily evaporate. Songs like “Robbin Hood” and “Nothing Really Matters” confront duplicity and hopelessness in equal measure, examining what it means to be taken advantage of (“Who Robbing, who robbing who?”) and the nihilism of trying to do the right thing in a world where it often feels as if it truly makes no difference. In stark contrast, the album’s first single, “Woman,” (featuring backing vocals from Lana Del Rey) is a full-throated push back against doubters and critics, as well as a righteous claiming of space. “The doctor said I was not my past, he said I was finally free,” sings Marshall, “I’m a woman of my word, or haven’t you heard? My word’s the only thing I’ve ever needed.” Defiant, unbowed, and fantastically steadfast, the song ends with the perfect, beautiful coda: “I’m a woman.” If old Cat Power records might have easily been viewed as repositories for pain, Wanderer is, at its heart, a testament to the transformative nature of songs, an album-length imagining of alternate paths, redemptions, connections, and open-ended possibility. This is most evident on “Horizon”, the album’s emotional centerpiece, in which Marshall sings about the complicated, emotionally elastic bonds between family members. For someone whose entire life has been predicated on movement -years of comings and goings with little time to pause and connect – the song offers a bittersweet reconciliation: “You’re on the horizon / I’m on my way / You’re on the horizon / I’m headed the other way.”
Everybody in your life will write his or her own chapter in your story. Take a step back, and you’ll see the influence of your loved ones, mentors, and friends in your decisions. Shook Twins refer to these folks in the title of their fourth album, Some Good Lives. Throughout fourteen tracks, the duo-identical twin sisters Katelyn Shook and Laurie Shook -pay homage to everyone from a late grandpa and godfather to Bernie Sanders. “We realized there was a theme,” Katelyn reveals. “Even though our minds are mostly on the women of today and wanting the monarchy to rise up, we have several men in our lives who have been such positive forces. We wanted to thank them and honor the good guys who showed us the beauty in this crazy world we live in. So, it’s an album for Some Good Lives that have crossed paths with ours-and to them, we are grateful.” Laurie agrees, “It’s also an acknowledgment of our thankfulness of the good life that we get to live.” However, the pair derived their own strength from these relationships. Over the course of three full-length releases and a handful of EPs since 2008, acclaim would come by way of everyone from USA Today and Baeble Music to Langhorne Slim, The Lumineers, Mason Jennings, and iconic best-selling author Neil Gaiman who enthusiastically decreed, “They make music that twines through your soul the way vines cover an abandoned shack in the woods.” Beyond gigs with the likes of Gregory Alan Isakov and Ani DiFranco, they captivated crowds at High Sierra Music Festival, Lightning In A Bottle, Bumbershoot, Hulaween, Summer Camp Music Festival, and Northwest String Summit, to name a few. During 2016, they planted the seeds for what would become Some Good Lives by thinking bigger. The girls intermittently recorded at Hallowed Halls in Portland, OR. Within this old library building, “which feels full of stories,” they tapped into palpable energy like never before, locking into a groove inside of the spacious, reverberant live room. Moreover, the full band-Barra Brown , Sydney Nash , and Niko Slice -expanded the sonic palette. “It took us a long time to find the band that we wanted to record these songs with and for the songs to fully mature,” admits Laurie. “Once Barra, Sydney, and Niko joined us, we really started to explore what our music could be. These amazing players helped us realize that we could be more than just ‘folk pop’. We started adding other genres to the word like ‘disco,’ ‘psychedelic,’ ‘funk,’ and ‘soul.’ We really honed in on a new sound.” They initially teased that evolution with the single “Safe.” Its airy acoustic guitar and delicate harmonies materialize as a heartfelt and hypnotic rumination on love. The track quickly surpassed 1 million Spotify streams and stoked excitement among audiences for the eventual arrival of Some Good Lives. “‘Safe’ was written up at a cabin in the woods,” recalls Katelyn. “I had the line ‘a love that feels safe’ in my mind for a while. That’s the only kind of love truly possible and healthy when you’re touring and away from your person all the time. You feel like you can trust it, and it’s not going to change within either of you-no matter how long and far you are away from each other.” “I was struggling to find that kind of love at the time, and Katelyn had this other perspective,” adds Laurie. “It’s my breakup song my sister wrote for me,” she laughs. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube
The new album by Tinariwen could well have been called Exile on Main Street. But other people have already thought of that. It also could have been called A la recherché du pays perdu (‘Remembrance of a lost country’). Except that would have been a tad Proustian for musicians who grew up pretty much between a rock and a sand dune, in the midst of their goat herds and camel caravans. But the idea is apt. As is the painful paradox, if you consider that while Tinariwen were busy criss-crossing the globe on their recent triumphant tours (160 concerts played in the past three years), expanding their audience on all five continents, becoming one of the latest musical phenomena of truly universal calibre, the frontiers that encircle their desert home were closing down and double-locking, forcing them into exile to record this their 8th album. Over the past five years, their beloved homeland in the Adrar des Ifoghas, a Saharan mountain range that straddles the border between north-eastern Mali and southern Algeria has, in effect, been transformed into a conflict zone, a place where nobody can venture without putting themselves in danger and where war lords devoted either to jihad or trafficking (sometimes both at the same time), have put any activity that contradicts their beliefs or escapes their control in jeopardy. Even though the 12 songs on this new record evoke those cherished deserts of home, they were recorded a long way away from them. And, as a result of this separation, at a time when the political, military and humanitarian situation in the region has never been so critical, the feelings and the emotions that the band managed to capture on record have never been so vivid. In October 2014, making use of a few days off in the middle of a long American tour, the band stopped off at Rancho de la Luna studios in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. The place has become the favoured refuge of the stoner rock tribe. Josh Homme and his Queens of the Stone Age were the first to make it their hive, and since then, whether in use by P J Harvey or the Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop or the Arctic Monkeys, neither the mixing console nor the kitchen ovens have had a moment to cool down. For Tinariwen, the geographical location of the studios – lost in the middle of that horizontal desert, that mineral immensity, where Man is reminded of his own insignificance in ways that can only, in the end, either kill him or sublimate him – proved to be particularly propitious in terms of creativity. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
"Under the looming threat of death, how might we inspire life? Through what mechanisms could we resist the psychological violence and despair inspired by the threat of violence while at the same time usher in hope?" DO or DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance features the work of visual artist Fahamu Pecou, who elevates and re-contextualizes Black... Read More →
Bilingual rapper and singer Claudia Feliciano, who goes by the name Snow tha Product, switches between hardened rhymes and bright melodic hooks with an emphasis on the former. Easily mistaken for a drug reference, Feliciano’s performing alias was inspired instead by Disney character Snow White and the artist’s desire to prevent her musical and personal lives from blurring into one another. Born in San Jose and raised in San Diego, she appeared as Claudia White on “Alguien,” a 2009 single by Latin pop artist Jaime Kohen, prior to basing herself out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. For several years she was an underground artist, though she eventually attracted some high-level guest appearances on her mixtape releases, including the likes of Tech N9ne and Ty Dolla $ign. In 2013, she went aboveground and started issuing singles for major-label Atlantic, such as “Play,” “Doing Fine,” and “Hola,” which alternated between pop-oriented material and more aggressive, lighter-hearted tracks tailored for club play. In 2016, Atlantic released an eight-track EP, Half Way There…, Pt. 1. From there Feliciano had success with a series of singles and featured appearances. 2017 included the viral breakup anthem “Waste of Time,” as well as “Nuestra Cancion, Pt. 2,” both showcasing a smoother and more pop-friendly side of her style. The next year she continued with trappy singles “Help a Bitch Out (featuring O.T. Genasis),” “Dale Gas,” and “Today I Decided” as well as the more lighthearted “Goin’ Off” and “Myself (featuring DRAM).” She ended the year by contributing to several tracks on the VIBE HIGHER mixtape with Castro Escobar, Lex the Great, Jandro, and others. ~ Andy Kellman Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube
KOLARS is one of those rare acts which descends from another dimension, struts its sequin skin, blares it’s unabashed musical thrill ride and leaves audiences with their mouths on the floor. Rob Kolar twists and turns as he sings imaginative lyrics with a raw swagger. He spins his guitar as notes sail and scramble through the room. A presence that embodies elements of Elvis and Marc Bolan with a ragged punky edge. The magnetic, one of a kind, Lauren Brown uses her whole body as a percussion instrument, tap dancing rhythms with her feet while simultaneously playing a full stand up kit with her arms. An alluring hybrid of Mo Tucker and Gene Kelly with a dash of Iggy Pop wildness. Yes, there have been iconic duos before but none like this. On record KOLARS are slightly more subtle and nuanced. Rob produces and mixes the music and has created a genre melding soundscape influenced by his film scoring. The band has inspired evocative descriptions such as “space blues,” “glam-a-billy” and “desert disco.” The style combines elements of new wave, blues, pyschedelia, glam, folk, disco and punk. The production experiments are infused into the live show. In essence, the duo are a hybrid of modern technology and raw rock and roll. KOLARS have toured extensively across the US, Canada and Europe, playing many festivals and concerts in front of thousands. They have headlined national tours and have shared bills with Spoon, LP, Julian Casablancas & The Voidz, STRFKR, The Kills, Best Coast, Shonen Knife, RZA, Pussyriot, Built To Spill, The Horrors, The Growlers, Alanis Morissette, Funkadelic, The Revivalists, Father John Misty, The Roots, Nikki Lane, Strawberry Alarm Clock and many others. The Sh-Booms There’s this dynamic that churns hard in The Blurred Odyssey, the debut full-length album by ascendant Orlando garage-soul enterprise The Sh-Booms, out March 22, 2019 on Limited Fanfare Records. The music pumps with the hot, red blood of life irrepressible. But there’s a cloud on the horizon, the doomed sense of life’s finitude, that fueled these songs. Rather than dead-end nihilism, though, it’s resulted in the kind of urgent, creative friction that Hunter S. Thompson could get down with. In making this album, The Sh-Booms have dug through the blur of life, swam through a sea of booze, to find love and truth in the shadow of the void. Although a soul band through and through, the grease and bite they’ve been picking up in the years leading up to this big step out have been forged in the bad company of punk and garage bands. From that underground now rises a new hurricane of big orchestration, maximum stomp and fresh intent. It’s a little ache and a lot of party all wrapped up in a wrecking ball. Since their 2011 inception, The Sh-Booms have become kind of a thing in their native scene and beyond. Besides perennial winners of “Best Soul Act” in the Orlando Weekly’s big annual Best of Orlando issue, they’ve been tapped to share the stage with national names like The Roots, Of Montreal, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, Jacuzzi Boys, Budos Band, Big Freedia, Lee Fields, St. Paul & the Broken Bones and The B-52’s (whom the band toured with in 2017 and 2018). They’ve been featured on NPR, their music has been made it on TV (CW’s Supergirl) and they’ve played Austin City Limits, Okeechobee Music Festival, SunFest and Gasparilla Music Festivals.
Beatles tribute featuring: The Backbeat, Sam Frazier. Rebecca Newton, Nancy Middleton, Jefferson Hart, Barry Gray, Glenn Jones, Lance White, Steve Eisenstadt, Jim Roberts, Tim Smith, Armand Lenchek, Mike Nicholson, Rob Sharer, Mike Babyak, Tom Collins-Meltzer, Charles Latham, Danny Gotham & many more.
Oakland based garage rock sweethearts Destroy Boys are showing expansion and demanding reaction on their latest newest EP, “Crybaby/Vixen”. The female founded and fronted hi-fi rock band has grown since crossing the radar of music fans after a mention in the pages of Rolling Stone. After releasing their first album, band members Alexia Roditis and Vi Mayugba were then introduced to rock fans worldwide. Their new EP is a departure from the angsty relationship driven anthems of their debut album “Sorry, Mom” and a look into the inner thoughts of this generation’s riot girls. Since inking their deal with Uncool Records in 2016, Destroy Boys has been rocking stages and festivals throughout the country including an invitation to House of Vans at 2017’s SXSW. Destroy Boys’ new EP “Crybaby/Vixen” showcases the duo’s growth as songwriters and musicians with Mayugba’s driving sonic guitar creating a raw, gritty canvas for Roditis’ ethereal, haunting, and sometimes comical vocals. A raucously introspective road trip to early adulthood, with the feeling of a cross between Blondie and Tragic Kingdom-era No Doubt. Destroy Boys are the perfect soundtrack for slaying the patriarchy or going skating with your friends. Words by Andru Defeye Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram
Our first late-night musical event is a dance party. Raleigh-based DOTWAV are classified as Punk Hip-hop. Should be amazing. $5 cover.
From the moment Bryce Avary, better known as The Rocket Summer, exploded onto the scene as a teenager in the early 2000s at the forefront of a wave of indie pop he has been a musical force. Charging out of Texas and onto the international stage he has never been in short supply of ear-worm hooks and effortless charm. Fans have flocked to Avary’s optimistic and exuberant songcraft and the community it inspires for years. Now, with a new album, Sweet Shivers, Avary’s musical evolution and the breadth of his songwriting is on full display. The album is stunningly expansive, with hallmarks of Avary’s familiar songwriting style in lyrics that manage to be both extremely personal and universally applicable. “Writing is where I feel most normal, it’s where I come alive” he reflects. As with previous records, Avary’s musical virtuosity is apparent. He wrote, produced, recorded, mixed, and performed every instrument on the album. Seven albums into his career, Avary is just hitting his stride and leaving his mark as one of the most reliable songwriters and multi instrumentalists in rock music. Links:
Whitney make casually melancholic music that combines the wounded drawl of Townes Van Zandt, the rambunctious energy of Jim Ford, the stoned affability of Bobby Charles, the American otherworldliness of The Band, and the slack groove of early Pavement. Their debut, Light Upon the Lake, is due in June on Secretly Canadian, and it marks the culmination of a short, but incredibly intense, creative period for the band. To say that Whitney is more than the sum of its parts would be a criminal understatement. Formed from the core of guitarist Max Kakacek and singing drummer Julien Ehrlich, the band itself is something bigger, something visionary, something neither of them could have accomplished alone. The band itself is something bigger, something visionary, something neither of them could have accomplished alone. Ehrlich had been a member of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, but left to play drums for the Smith Westerns, where he met guitarist Kakacek. That group burned brightly but briefly, disbanding in 2014 and leaving its members adrift. Brief solo careers and side-projects abounded, but nothing clicked. Making everything seem all the more fraught: both of them were going through especially painful breakups almost simultaneously, the kind that inspire a million songs, and they emerged emotionally bruised and lonelier than ever. Whitney was born from a series of laidback early-morning songwriting sessions during one of the harshest winters in Chicago history, after Ehrlich and Kakacek reconnected – first as roommates splitting rent in a small Chicago apartment and later as musical collaborators passing the guitar and the lyrics sheet back and forth. “We approached it as just a fun thing to do. We never wanted to force ourselves to write a song. It just happened very organically. And we were smiling the whole time, even though some of the songs are pretty sad.” The duo wrote frankly about the break-ups they were enduring and the breakdowns they were trying to avoid. Each served as the other’s most brutal critic and most sympathetic confessor, a sounding board for the hard truths that were finding their way into new songs like “No Woman” and “Follow,” a eulogy for Ehrlich’s grandfather. In exorcising their demons they conjured something else, something much more benign-a third presence, another personality in the music, which they gave the name Whitney. They left it singular to emphasize its isolation and loneliness. Says Kakacek, “We were both writing as this one character, and whenever we were stuck, we’d ask, ‘What would Whitney do in this situation?’ We personified the band name into this person, and that helped a lot. We wrote the record as though one person were playing everything. We purposefully didn’t add a lot of parts and didn’t bother making everything perfect, because the character we had in mind wouldn’t do that.” In those imperfections lies the music’s humanity. Whilst they demoed and toured the new songs, they became more aware of the perfect imperfections of the songs, and needing to strike the right balance, they eventually made the trek out to California, where they recorded with Foxygen frontman and longtime friend, Jonathan Rado. They slept in tents in Rado’s backyard, ate the same breakfast every morning at the same diner in the remote, desolate and completely un-rock n roll San Fernando Valley, whilst they dreamt of Laurel Canyon, or maybe The Band’s hideout in Malibu, or Neil Young’s ranch in Topanga Canyon. Links: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Sculpture in the Garden is a free, annual outdoor sculpture show that unites the work of North Carolina artists with the curated landscapes of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Now in its 31st year, this show invites visitors to experience sculpture, the natural world, and the relationship between the two in a new way. We... Read More →
It has become tradition, but there is nothing predictable about it. The 31st Annual Sculpture in the Garden exhibition opens on Sunday, September 15, at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Since its inception in 1988, Sculpture in the Garden has united the work of local artists with the curated landscapes of the North Carolina Botanical Garden to create a... Read More →
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” is a sharp reprimand, a gentle chiding; it trails from a parental rebuke during childhood sweetness to coming from concerned friends during adolescent recklessness. Or, in Bleached’s case, it’s what Jennifer Clavin asked herself when she hit a turning point in her life. Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough?,... Read More →
Wilmington on Fire is an award-winning documentary directed by Christopher Everett that chronicles the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, considered one of the only successful examples of a violent overthrow of an existing government and left countless numbers of African Americans dead and exiled from the city. This event was the springboard for the white supremacy... Read More →
This special performance brings together three powerhouses of old-time music for a night of collaboration, as Grammy nominee Alice Gerrard joins the banjo and fiddle duo of Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves. Allison and Tatiana are standouts in the next generation of Roots musicians, with de Groot known for her intricate clawhammer banjo work,... Read More →
This special performance brings together three powerhouses of old-time music for a night of collaboration, as Grammy nominee Alice Gerrard joins the banjo and fiddle duo of Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves.
Mandolin Orange’s music radiates a mysterious warmth —their songs feel like whispered secrets, one hand cupped to your ear. The North Carolina duo have built a steady and growing fanbase with this kind of intimacy, and on Tides of A Teardrop, due out February 1, it is more potent than ever. By all accounts, it... Read More →
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