Cat’s Cradle

John R Miller is a true hyphenate artist: singer-songwriter-picker. Every song on his thrilling upcoming debut solo album, Depreciated, is lush with intricate wordplay and haunting imagery, as well as being backed by a band that is on fire.  One of his biggest long-time fans is roots music favorite Tyler Childers, who says he’s “a well-travelled wordsmith mapping out the world he’s seen, three chords at a time.” Miller is somehow able to transport us to a shadowy honkytonk and get existential all in the same line with his tightly written compositions. Miller’s own guitar-playing is on fine display here along with vocals that evoke the white-waters of the Potomac River rumbling below the high ridges of his native Shenandoah Valley.Miller grew up in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia near the Potomac River.  “There are three or four little towns I know well that make up the region,” he says, name-checking places like Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Hedgesville, and Keyes Gap.  “It’s a haunted place.  In some ways it’s frozen in time. So much old stuff has lingered there, and its history is still very present.” As much as Miller loves where he’s from, he’s always had a complicated relationship with home and never could figure out what to do with himself there. “I just wanted to make music, and there’s no real infrastructure for that there.  We had to travel to play regularly and as teenagers, most of our gigs were spent playing in old church halls or Ruritan Clubs.”  He was raised “kinda sorta Catholic” and although he gave up on that as a teenager, he says “it follows me everywhere, still.” His family was not musical—his father worked odd jobs and was a paramedic before Miller was born, while his mother was a nurse—but he was drawn to music at an early age, which was essential to him since he says school was “an exercise in patience” for him. “Music was the first thing to turn my brain on. I’d sit by the stereo for hours with a blank audio cassette waiting to record songs I liked,” he says. “I was into a lot of whatever was on the radio until I was in middle school and started finding out about punk music, which is what I gravitated toward and tried to play through high school.”Links: Website | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

This is a seated show.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music

Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Bandcamp | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music

I never learned how to swim. ​In years of sailing, I never let the water touch me. The ocean was an abstract dread, an obliterating void as untenable as outer space. ​In January 2018 we went on tour. After years of scraping by, we found our footing with our fourth record Yours Conditionally. It was a commercial success that set us up to to play the biggest rooms of our career. But three shows in, I developed a raging case of influenza. Each night I dragged myself onstage and croaked out the set in a delirium. After a particularly bad soundcheck, Patrick asked me if we should cancel the show. I couldn’t imagine giving up the thing we’d work so hard to achieve. “I’ll be on stage even if you have to mic my coffin,” I joked. ​​The next morning I fainted and had a seizure while grocery shopping for breakfast. Patrick carried me through the check-out lanes screaming for a doctor. I woke later in a hospital bed. Patrick leaned over me, crying. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m canceling the tour. I thought you were dead. We’re quitting the band. I’m going to be an accountant.” But I was on the mend. We missed two shows and pressed on. ​​During sound check at the 930 club, Patrick stepped out to take a phone call. His father had been in the hospital all week, but he had cancer and brief hospitalizations were routine. Back at the hotel that night, Patrick poured two shots of whiskey and handed me one. “I’d like to toast my dad.” He said. “The doctors offered to put him on life-support to give me a chance to fly out there, but I didn’t want him to suffer. Instead I said goodbye.” ​​Patrick went home to grieve with his family and rejoined us on the road two days later. I couldn’t believe how quickly our lives had unraveled in the midst of what was supposed to be a milestone in our career. As the tour continued, we found refuge in playing music together. Songwriting had always been an extension of our inner-world. Now we retreated to that world every time we stepped onstage. ​After the final show of our tour in Austin, we received another phone call. Patrick’s mother Karen was in the hospital on the brink of a stroke. We got on a plane and went straight to her bedside. Her recovery took weeks. In the hospital waiting room, I wrote the opening line of “Matrimony II”: I only have certainty when you hold my hand. ​On a hot July day, after Karen’s return to good health, we sailed as a family into the Pacific and scattered Edward’s ashes at sea. I marked our position on the chart with a small x. The album was already well under way. In that moment, I realized what I wanted to call it. ​Swimmer is a tour of the darkest time in our lives. But it is not a dark record. Named for the feeling of suspension and upendedness that characterized this period, it is the story of deep-rooted companionship strengthened by pain and loss. These songs carried us through our grief. It is us at our most vulnerable, so we kept a small footprint, recording everything ourselves in our home studio. I set out to describe the love I have come to know after ten years of marriage, when you can no longer remember your life before that person, when the spark of early attraction has been replaced by a gravitational pull. Swimmer is available everywhere February 14, 2020. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify | SoundCloud

Stephen Malkmus, Traditional Techniques Is that a goddamn bouzouki? you may ask. A pedal steel guitar? What kind of Stephen Malkmus album is this, anyway? It’s called folk music, and it’s taking the country by storm. Stephen Malkmus is only the latest popular artist to apply this old new approach to their rock and roll sounds. Take the name Traditional Techniques with as much salt as you’d like or dig the Adorno reference, Malkmus’s third solo LP without the Jicks (or Pavement) is as organic as they come. It’s packed with handmade arrangements, modern folklore, and 10 songs written and performed in Malkmus’s singular voice. An adventurous new album in an instantly familiar mode, Traditional Techniques creates a serendipitous trilogy with the loose fuzz of the Jicks’ Sparkle Hard (Matador, 2018) and the solo bedroom experiments of Groove Denied (Matador, 2019). Taken together, these three very different full-lengths in three years highlight an ever-curious songwriter committed to finding untouched territory. Perhaps some of these “folk” musicians could take a lesson or two. Created in the spontaneous west coast style adopted so infectiously by young American musicians in this time of global turmoil, Malkmus took on Traditional Techniques as a kind of self-dare. Conceived while recording Sparkle Hard with the Jicks at Portland’s Halfling Studio, Malkmus had observed the variety of acoustic instruments available for use. The idea escalated within a matter of weeks into a full set of songs and shortly thereafter into a realized and fully committed album. When he returned to Halfling, Malkmus drew from a whole new musical palette–including a variety of Afghani instruments–to support an ache both quizzical and contemporary. Stephen Malkmus isn’t one of those “hung up” musicians one reads about so frequently these days, sequestered in a jungle room of the heart. The jukebox in Malkmus’s private grotto remains fully updated. Not only is the artist present, but he’s on Twitter. Traditional Techniques is new phase folk music for new phase folks, with Malkmus as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the ever-evolving lingual slipstream. Instead of roses, briars, and long black veils, prepare for owns, cracked emojis, and shadowbans. Centered around the songwriter’s 12-string acoustic guitar, and informed by a half-century of folk-rock reference points, Traditional Techniques is the product of Malkmus and Halfling engineer/arranger-in-residence Chris Funk (The Decemberists). Playing guitar is friend-to-all-heads Matt Sweeney (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Chavez, and too many other to count), who’d previously crossed paths with Malkmus on the opposite end of the longhairs’ map of the world, most lately gnarling out together back east in the jam conglomerate Endless Boogie. But, buyer beware, no matter how these recordings might be tagged by your nearest algorithm, the expansive and thrilling folk-rock sounds of Traditional Techniques aren’t SM Unplugged. One might even question his commitment to acoustic instruments, but we’ll leave that for somebody else’s hot take. All we’re saying is watch your head. Because alongside all that gorgeous folk music (“The Greatest Own in Legal History,” “Cash Up”), there are also occasional bursts of flute-laced swagger (“Shadowbanned”), straight-up commune rock (“Xian Man”), and mind-bending fuzz in places you least expect it (“Brainwashed”). – Jesse Jarnow Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Brotherhood lasts forever. No matter what happens, those bonds endure in memories and moments. We Came As Romans hold a similar link between them. After nearly 15 years together, countless sold out shows, critical acclaim, and over 250 million streams, the Michigan quintet-Joshua Moore , Dave Stephens , Lou Cotton , Andy Glass , and David Puckett -weather their darkest time and emerge stronger in the name of a fallen brother and member: Kyle Pavone. The group soldier ahead with a sixth full-length opus befitting of his memory. “When Kyle passed away, it changed everything for us personally and, as a byproduct, everything for the band,” says Joshua. “An earth-shattering event puts a lot of things in perspective. We’ve spent so much time together. We’ve been doing this since we were kids. The one thing that won’t change is the way Kyle affected my life. Before we were bandmates, we were essentially brothers. In order to be genuine to our fans and ourselves, we had to write about what we dealt with losing him. At the same time, this isn’t just a bunch of songs soaking in depression. We want to celebrate what we built.” Together, We Came As Romans built a burgeoning empire. Merging chugging metallic force, skyscraping melodies, off-kilter electronic experimentation, and hardcore spirit, the group quietly claimed a place at the forefront of modern heavy music. They put up unbelievable numbers with the likes of “Hope” , and “The World I Used To Know” as well as multiple top ten records on the Billboard Top 200. Meanwhile, 2017’s Cold Like War represented a career peak. The title track “Cold Like War” and “Wasted Age” both surpassed 9 million Spotify streams as the band received its best career reviews to date. Alternative Press cited the album as “a milestone,” and Metal Hammer praised their penchant for unpredictability by affirming, “This record is never boring.” Beyond tours with everyone from A Day To Remember, Bring Me The Horizon, I Prevail, The Used, Sleeping With Sirens, Parkway Drive, and more, they packed houses on headline dates around the world. After Kyle’s death in 2018, they made a careful decision to push forward, returning to the road with Bullet For My Valentine before gathering themselves in the studio with longtime collaborator Nick Sampson and seeking perspective from Drew Fulk . “Nick has been part of the family forever, because he was an engineer on our first record,” Joshua continues. “We also had to involve Drew. He produced Cold Like War, and it was Kyle’s favorite record. It felt like it needed to happen, since that was the last great memory Kyle made with us. Everyone was a big part of the process.” We Came As Romans introduce this next chapter with a pair of singles, “Carry The Weight” and “From The First Note.” Evocative clean guitar echoes at the beginning of “Carry The Weight” before giving way to a hammering groove and cathartic screams that culminate on a hypnotic chant-one of the band’s most irresistible. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music

This show has been rescheduled from December 8th. Few artists are storytellers as deft and disarmingly observational as Andy Shauf. The Toronto-based, Saskatchewan-raised musician’s songs unfold like short fiction: they’re densely layered with colorful characters and a rich emotional depth. On his new album The Neon Skyline (out January 24 via ANTI-), he sets a... Read More →