Cat’s Cradle

Rescheduled from March 26th. Whether seen on HBO’s Treme or at their legendary Tuesday night gig at The Maple Leaf, Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band is a true New Orleans institution. Formed in 1983 by the Frazier brothers, the band has evolved from playing the streets of the French Quarter to playing festivals and stages all over the world. While committed to upholding the tradition of brass bands, they’ve also extended themselves into the realms of funk and hip-hop to create their signature sound. “Rebirth can be precise whenever it wants to,” says The New York Times, “but it’s more like a party than a machine. It’s a working model of the New Orleans musical ethos: as long as everybody knows what they’re doing, anyone can cut loose.” In the wake of the sometimes- stringent competition amongst New Orleans brass bands, Rebirth is the undisputed leader of the pack, and they show no signs of slowing down. Links: Website | Facebook

After 15 years of recording and performing, Thao Nguyen, of San Francisco-based band Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, was exhausted. She had been touring the band’s 2016 album A Man Alive, a critically acclaimed, bone-shaking reckoning about her relationship with her absent father. She was scoring commissions, guest-hosting the podcast Song Exploder, and exploring other paths as an artist. She bought a house with her girlfriend; they’re married now. In the past 15 years, Thao has avoided being fully out in her public career, having been raised in-and deeply loving-a family and culture distanced from mainstream America’s social progress. As she confronted the division, shame, grief, and silence in her life, Thao found new ways to live in her own skin, and forced her own hand to make a new, different record. In doing so, she created a space wherein she can finally exist as her full self. Temple is the fifth full-length album from Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. Produced by Thao and bandmate Adam Thompson, who shares songwriting credit on five tracks, it is also their first self-produced album. Mixer Mikaelin “Blue” Bluespruce (Solange, Skepta, Carly Rae Jepsen) widens the band’s register with beat-forward mixes and immersive, lush tones. Kaleidoscopic and danceable, grounded by Thao’s singular voice, Temple feels boldly dissonant while still highly accessible. Golden, longing pop meets punk roots. Rock draws from hip-hop, funk, and folk rhythms for intricate, danceable beats. The poetic lyrics are expansive, yet shatteringly personal, inspired in part by the work of writers like James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Yiyun Li.. Rage, honesty, clear-eyed regret, and optimistic wisdom run parallel, finding a new way forward.  A temple is a place of worship and sanctuary. We spend our lives searching for temples where we can belong and be loved, but those spaces can also be a kind of confinement. Temple is an album that pushes open boundaries for a different kind of sanctuary, where you don’t have to whisper. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

The title of Barns Courtney’s new album will no doubt be familiar to anyone who’s ever searched for something online and found themselves face to face with nothing. But 404 is an album that explores feelings of loss and bereftness inspired by life’s habit of throwing up its own error pages, with Barns exploring absence, frustration, and the never-ending search for something that seemed like it would always be there until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t: his childhood. “It’s painful knowing that something has gone, whether it’s a good time, a good feeling, a pleasant section of existence, or something physical. I’m always wondering: if you were to go back and find places you knew as a child, what would they look like?” Barns says. There was a time not so long ago when a 16-year-old kid who’d spent his teens ricocheting between Seattle and Ipswich thought he was about to be the biggest star in the world. He and some mates got a deal with the biggest of all the big labels, then spent three years working with one of the planet’s hottest producers. What could go wrong? Well, plenty. “My entire life since I was 14 had been an upward trajectory,” is how Barns remembers it. “Then suddenly at the age of 22 I’m dropped, I’m totally, woefully unprepared for the real world. No qualifications. I didn’t bother learning to drive, because I thought I’d be driven everywhere. Thank God I didn’t have any success – I would have been a complete ass.” The years in the wilderness that followed formed the basis of Barns’ 2017 debut album The Attractions Of Youth, a blistering shot of blues-driven rock that got this singular pop performer’s foot back in the door. Songs like Glitter & Gold and Fire became viral smashes, prompting a swell of support on both sides of the Atlantic that saw Barns performing on Conan O’Brien and opening for everyone from The Who, to Blur, to Ed Sheeran. Which brings us to 2019 and a body of work that finds this reflexive, meticulous pop storyteller delivering a minutely crafted album with big tunes, flashes of humour and no shortage of ambition. Kickstarted by 2018’s sparky, Atari-referencing single 99, it’s an album that delves back beyond the arrested development of Barns’ early-20s and into the teens he spent in Seattle and then Ipswich. “The record’s partly about the bizarre modern formalisation of fun, and the strange ritual that we all go through from childhood into adulthood,” is how Barns describes one aspect of the music. And layered on top of that all, because there really is quite a lot going on in this album, is Barns’ experience of being out of town – and taking time out of real life – then coming back down to earth with a bump. “You go off and live this fantastical existence, play these shows and have fun, and you come back and you expect everyone to be the same as they were when you left,” he notes. “But they’ve all grown up. It’s like Peter Pan coming back from Neverland.” Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Poolside began as a recording project in a converted Los Angeles backyard pool house in early 2011, producing sunny tracks of subaquatic indie dance music in this makeshift recording studio. Surfacing first in the form of a YouTube video for the catchy track “Do You Believe?” Poolside were soon gaining local and national attention, with DJs like James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, techno legend Derrick May, and disco don Todd Terje spinning these tracks at events and a growing online following. Throughout 2011 Poolside continued making waves with a sound called “daytime disco” through tracks like their cover of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and original tunes. In 2012 Poolside worked on a remix for longtime disco punks The Rapture and held fans over with a new single and video for a song called “Slow Down” as they prepared to release their debut album. That album, Pacific Standard Time, was self-released in July of 2012. After the album’s release, remixes for artists like Matthew Dear, Little Dragon and Fool’s Gold soon followed, as well as rehearsing and touring with a live band and doing DJ sets around the world. As thoughts turned to a second album, Poolside went on ice for a year to regroup, beginning to work in earnest on another album in the Fall of 2016. While still revolving around the sunny, laid-back disco sound of PST, these sessions yielded the additions of up-tempo dance songs and more guitars, and generally more fleshed-out arrangements. Poolside surprise released their second album Heat in 2017. Poolside returned in July of 2019 with “Can’t Stop Your Lovin’ (feat. Panama),” their first new music in over two years. They spent the summer and fall touring with Kacey Musgraves and Tycho and released a second standalone single “Greatest City” in October. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube

Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Guided By Voices, Space Gun: Robert Pollard is the greatest rock songwriter of the last thirty years, an uninhibited explorer of the four Ps: pop, punk, psych, and prog. It’s easy to take him for granted when he’s releasing multiple records a year with various projects, as he has pretty steadily since disbanding GBV the first time in 2004. So it really meant something that Space Gun was the only GBV release of the year, and boy was it a great one — another sign that the current lineup, along with producer Travis Harrison, might be the strongest band Pollard has ever played with. They unleash anthemic classic rock that harkens back to the best of mid-period GBV (“Space Gun,” “See My Field”), impossibly catchy and sleazy ’70s riffs (“Colonel Paper,” “Daily Get Ups”), majestic reverb-drenched curios (“That’s Good,” “Blink Blank”), Kiwi Rock pop gems (“Ark Technician,” “I Love Kangaroos”) and heavier prog rock (“Sport Component National,” “Evolution Circus”). If you haven’t seen them live, I can’t recommend it enough — they hit you with one would-be smash hit after another on a Miller Lite-fueled high, which can ensnare even on-the-fence observers. – Ben Yakas, Gothamist, “The Best Albums Of 2018” Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

100 gecs is a duo between Laura Les and Dylan Brady. Scavenging scraps of musical influences and welding them into dangerous machines, they destroy the competition with their army of lethal bangers. Critically heralded as “very good” and “music”, their ambition knows no bounds. Links: Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube

47SOUL is an Electro Arabic Dabke (Shamstep) band formed in Amman Jordan in 2013. The members are rooted in Bilad Al-Sham, spanning the divides from Amman to the Galilee to Ramallah and the rest of the Palestinian Diaspora. This new sound of 47SOUL has rapidly amassed fans in the Arab World and Europe by blasting the electric Arabic Dabke sound through underground music scenes. On top of the beats that have been bumping in the Arab World for centuries, 47SOUL hypes it up with analog synthesizers, hypnotic guitar lines, and shattering verses from the four singers. Every show ends in relentless dance and trance from all parties involved. Their lyrics, mixing Arabic and English, call for celebration and freedom in the struggle for equality, inside Bilad Al Sham and throughout the world. The current lineup of 2016 includes: Z the People (vocals & synths) El Far3i (darouka, Mc/Vocals) Walaa Sbeit (percussion, Mc/vocals) El Jehaz (guitar & vocals). Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube