Cat’s Cradle Back Room

Lifelong friends and deep-north natives, musical group Michigan Rattlers play heavy- hearted folk-rock with an aching dose of Midwestern nice. Graham Young (guitar), Adam Reed (upright bass), and Christian Wilder (piano) began writing music and performing together in their Northern Michigan high school. “Petoskey is a small place. Beautiful, but secluded. It’s hard to start a musical career in a place where there are more deer than people.” Still, they regularly played every bar, cafe, and stage in town, developing a musical chemistry informed by the likes of AC/DC, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bob Seger, and more. After a few years apart, Reed and Young settled down in Los Angeles, recorded a short demo, and began playing locally. The demo found its way into the hands of super-producer Johnny K (Plain White T’s, 3 Doors Down), and they cut the bulk of their first EP at NRG Studios in just one day. “My favorite music is recorded that way,” continues Reed. “You get in a room, plug in, and cut songs live. The energy of the recording comes directly from the physical performance, and it puts the listener into that specific time and place.” This self-titled Michigan Rattlers EP attracted glowing reviews from No Depression, Bluegrass Situation, B3 Science, and Rolling Stone, who named the band one of their “Ten New Country Artists You Need To Know” in 2016. They spent the rest of that year and much of the next touring in support of this release. In September 2017, Pianist Christian Wilder was added to the band’s lineup. Now a trio, the group headed into the studio to record their newest EP, Wasting the Meaning. Comprised of three cover songs, the project was conceived as a way to explore deeper into the recording process and pay homage to some of their favorite songwriters. Currently, the group is hard at work recording their first full-length release. It is slated for release in the summer of 2018. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify

Free for UNC students with ONE-Card Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

DRAG QUEENS ARE COMING is BACK and it’s here to take your ENTIRE LIFE! Naomi Dix has returned to the stage of Cats Cradle for her much anticipated drag filled show and this show is so bigger and better that even Beyonce might have to take a step back and Bow Down to the Queens and Kings of the Triangle. When it comes to sheer innovation, showmanship and creativity, Naomi Dix is the one and only. She never disappoints with her high energy boundary pushing. She is risqué and provocative but always drizzles a touch of class in her performances. Your favorite performers are are back and joining the stage: Stormie Daie might be able to bring rain showers but she always brings the sunshine with her lighting bolt performances and her wind twirling dance moves. Dustin Reams never disappoints, so if you are willing to take a trip on the love boat of his passionate performances and slick moves then all aboard because it’s about to be a smooth ride. We also have as special guest performance from the King himself, Ben Ether, who has come back to take names and take lives with their controversial boundary slaying performances. You can thank the heavens above that we now have the one the only DJ One Durran on the turn tables giving you an after show dance party that you might just sweat out those new Fenty boots honey. So don’t you try to be no flake because the Queens are here to set you children straight, and read you from lash to chipped toe nail HUNTY!

$10 Suggested Donation. We are thrilled to announce a Khouri Family Benefit Concert on Thursday, February 13th at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room. Jad Khouri, friend to many in the Triangle music scene, has reached out to his community for help. His father, Hani, suffered a stroke that has left him with limited movement and speech. His father was also primary caregiver to his mother, Mary Lee, who herself suffers major neurological deficiencies after 3 brain tumors in the past few years and a coma of an undiagnosed cause most recently in July. In the upcoming months, Jad and his siblings (Marguerite, Nicholas, Omar) are going to be moving their parents into long-term care services. This is a long and expensive process, and, on top of their already costly round-the-clock care, the family will need the support of a team of experts for anywhere from a few months to a year. The music community is coming together to support the Khouri family, featuring performances by: T. Gold Anne-Claire Chatham Rabbits A raffle for works by local visual artists will also be featured. If you cannot attend, please consider giving a donation to their gofundme page. Links: Facebook

Florida Guilt is the debut album by Boston based trio Bay Faction (comprised of James McDermott, Kris Roman, and Alex Agresti). Sonically a departure from their released body of work, the band explores the duality between bedroom pop intimacy and the subdued energy of soft rock. Despite the band’s prolificity, Bay Faction have remained relatively quiet since their EP released in 2015, focusing on honing their craft as both songwriters and recording artists. Forgoing the formal studio environment, the band tracked the album out of their Bushwick apartment with weekend retreats to drummer Agresti’s home studio. The quiet New Jersey suburb offered time for the band to mull over every detail and meticulously craft the sound design for the album. Growing up in the post dot-com bubble, the up cycling of pop culture’s trends accelerate with today’s generation fervent for the nostalgia of kitschy consumer electronics and burgeoning social media. Deconstructed and repurposed, these artifacts manifest as a playfully ironic nod to early 2000’s electro pop and indie rock. For the band, Florida Guilt is a cathartic release. The decrepit state, harboring a decaying population, embodies the ethos of McDermott’s religious upbringing. Plagued by Catholic guilt stemming from the repression of his queer identity, McDermott wrestles with inner turmoil and a longing for the innocuous pleasures of youth. Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

MC Lars is the creator of post punk laptop rap and lit hop, which he has extended and powered into a fusion of rap, punk, rock, ska, pop, and other genres. He is post-modern — combining his music with powerful and present lyrics, and packing concert venues with raps about everything from the iGeneration to Guitar Hero to Edgar Allen Poe to Game of Thrones, the Simpsons and Cyberbullying. He speaks to and for people of all ages, lifestyles, and perspectives, and is a story-teller, covering love, life, loss, confusion, and hope. He does so with energy and wit, joined with a strong sense of humor and perspective. He is an engaging, exciting and compelling performer, and was selected by 12 Street Press as one of the top 7 nerd rock artists to see live. He tours in the US, the UK and the rest of Europe, Australia, and Japan. His latest tour, the fall 2017 MC Lars Awesome Adventure Friendship Tour, opens in Denver in September, and continues through 20 shows in the US, England, and Scotland. In addition to touring, he has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, at South by Southwest, ComicCon, Slam Dunk Festival, Truck Festival, Orlando Nerd Fest, and as part of Vans Warped Tour. He has performed on stage with numerous artists, including Bowling for Soup, MC Frontalot, mc chris, Wheatus, Say Anything, Gym Class Heroes, Brand New, Simple Plan, T-Pain, Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Koo Koo Kangaroo. He is a DIY Indie artist and a number of his albums have been funded by his fans through Kickstarter, at record-breaking levels. His work (albums, EPs, and music videos) includes collabs with a wide range of musicians – among them, “Weird Al” Yankovic, KRS-One, Sage Francis, Watsky, Mega Ran, Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup, Wheatus, the Matches, Ash Wednesday, Kool Keith, Spose, MC Chris, MC Frontalot, YT Cracker, E 40, Schäffer the Dark Lord, Beefy, and K.Flay. He is an active and successful player in the music industry’s new media digital world; and has a strong presence with his fans through Patreon, Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and his own label, Horris Records. He is wired and connected, worldwide, through his active social media presence, his website, and his online store at Hello Merch. His “MC Lars: The Video Game,” accessible through Steam, showcases his songs in an engaging and fun-to-play beat-driven story about the compelling triumph of indie music. Lars teaches and lectures, too, and his songs are used by fellow teachers in classrooms throughout the US. He has presented on TEDx and at numerous colleges and high schools. He has worked on a public-service basis with the American Heart Association, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Nantucket Historical Association, the Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum, the New York City public school system, and the Los Angeles public school system through the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is one of the artists featured in the Cambridge University Press “Companion to Hip-Hop,” and has close relationships with faculty members at Stanford and USC. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Get Gone, the potent debut album by the Shreveport, Louisiana natives in Seratones, makes a strong case that this little-known corner of the state is fertile ground, musically speaking. A.J. Haynes (vocals), Connor Davis (guitar), Adam Davis (bass) and Jesse Gabriel (drums) serve up a combination of Southern musicality, garage rock ferocity, and general badassery. Haynes’s powerful singing voice, first honed at Brownsville Baptist Church in Columbia, Louisiana at age 6, rings across every track. Davis’s bass and Gabriel’s playing propel every song with the grit, energy, and rawness of punk, the feeling of soul, and occasionally, a little jazz swing. The other Davis offers a clinic in guitar riffs, from swaggering blues to searing interstellar leads. Recorded at Dial Back Sound studios in Mississippi, Get Gone is all live takes, a portrait of the Seratones in their element. Add the soul and swagger of a juke joint with the electricity coursing through a basement DIY show, and you’d begin to approach the experience of seeing this foursome live. The well-paced, multi-faceted set showcases a band dedicated to sonic exploration. “Don’t Need It,” which opens with a muscular swing and tight guitar lines, builds into a monster finish with a nasty corkscrew of a guitar line. “Sun,” a brawny thrasher, courses with huge, raw voltage riffs. “Chandelier,” a mid-tempo burner and vocal workout by Haynes, goes from croon to a crescendo that would shake any crystals hanging from the rafters. Shared history in the city’s music scene brought the Seratones together a few years ago. All four had played together with one or another in various local punk bands, bonding through all-ages basement shows, gigs at skate parks and BBQ joints, and late nights listening to jazz and blues records. In a city of multiple genres, no fixed musical identity and a flood of cover bands, these adventurous musicians carved out their own path, personifying the do-it-yourself ethos. The group was quickly recognized after forming, winning the Louisiana Music Prize in 2013. “Shreveport is always shifting its identity,” says Haynes. “You can do a lot of different things when it seems like every band is its own genre.” Seratones’s music, created with collaborative songwriting and spontaneous creativity, is certainly their own, due perhaps in part to Shreveport’s unique sonic geography. The city sits at a nexus roughly equidistant from Memphis soul, Mississippi Delta Blues, and New Orleans jazz, with Texas swing located just over the nearby state border. The band’s sound draws from those touch points and more, ranging from Black Sabbath’s Paranoid to Kind of Blue. They’ll happily connect the dots between Ornette Coleman and Jello Biafra. Seratones have different names for the amalgamation of styles found on their debut: Their own “expression of freedom,” music that’s “all about waking people up,” a safe space to feel what you want. However you choose to describe it, Get Gone is unexpected and unbowed, a head-snapping showcase of the twin pillars of Southern music, restlessness and resourcefulness. by Patrick Sisson Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Adventure Metal since 2005. Twin guitar leads like an eagle screeching through space, fantasy inspired lyrics from the dustiest old book collection, and the raw power of metal to make you grin with pleasure as you pour beer on your own head, this is Mega Colossus! Links: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp

On his Polyvinyl debut ​Born Hot​, Chris Farren opens with a question he’ll spend much of the album trying to answer: ​Why do I feel out of place in my own outer space? ​Telegraphing his inner narrative with a childlike candor, the Florida-born artist lays bare his most intense anxieties and-in the very same breath-documents the mildly soul-crushing minutiae of everyday life: the strange indecency of blasting AC/DC bangers through an iPhone speaker, the inexplicable bleakness of a Starbucks franchise tucked inside a Target. But with his irrepressible sense of humor and utter lack of self-seriousness, Farren defuses the pain of even the deepest insecurity, gracefully paving the way for pure pop catharsis. On ​Born Hot​ Farren fully embodies the sensitive-goofball dichotomy found in all his work, especially his exuberant live show: a solo performance in which he plays to live-recorded backing tracks while projecting purposely wacky visuals (his own face duplicated thousands of times, text that reads “ANOTHER PERFECT SET” at the end of each closing song). By the same token, Farren went full-on tongue-in-cheek in choosing ​Born Hot​’s title and cover art-a crudely drawn self-portrait that captures him lounging shirtless, looking every bit the ’70s-pop Lothario. “In my lyrics there’s so much self-examination that teeters on self-loathing, and I like to juxtapose that with an aesthetic that’s completely the opposite,” says Farren. “It’s a defense mechanism, because I feel embarrassed talking about my feelings so very plainly, but at the same time I also just find the idea of having that much self-confidence really funny.” In the making of ​Born Hot​, Farren recorded in his L.A. apartment and worked entirely on his own, embedding his inventive take on classic power-pop with flashes of folk and punk and ’50s doo-wop. On “Love Theme from ‘Born Hot,'” he slips into a sunny synth-pop reverie, bringing bouncy rhythms and radiant synth tones to a heart-on-sleeve message of romantic determination. “I wrote that when two different couples in my life were splitting up, and I felt kind of rattled but also so lucky to have my wife,” says Farren. Moodier and more darkly charged, “Search 4 Me” reveals his struggle to live in the present, articulating his anxiety in pieces of fragile poetry (e.g., “And you glared at me so loudly that I burst into confetti”). And on “Surrender,” ​Born Hot t​ urns exquisitely melancholy as Farren details the specific hurt of a sudden friendship breakup. “I was friends with their ex, and they told me it was too painful to stay friends with me,” Farren recalls. “‘Surrender’ is about that feeling of wanting to respect someone’s wishes, but also missing that person and just wishing you could talk to them again.” Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music

This is a seated show. In their early days, Damn Tall Buildings didn’t rehearse – they busked. Now, whether live or on record, the band still radiates the energy of a ragtag crew of music students playing bluegrass on the street. But anchoring that energy is their instrumental chops, their strong songwriting, and their varied influences that stretch beyond bluegrass, even beyond American roots music altogether. Whether sharing lead vocals and instrumental solos or blending their voices into high-spirited harmony, Damn Tall Buildings are a tight unit that contains more than the sum of its parts. Primary vocalist and lyricist Max Capistran’s singing recalls old blues and The Band-style roots-rock, whereas Sasha Dubyk’s time studying musical theater is evident in her rich vocal tone and soulful flair. The interplay between Avery Ballotta’s fiddle and Jordan Alleman’s banjo brings stratospheric dimension to the churning rhythm section of Capistran’s guitar and Dubyk’s bass. The band’s harmony singing is tight without being too slick – they sound like four individual voices joined together in celebration, not a perfectly polished machine. Their choruses are the kind you sing along to with a glass raised into the air. Their lyrics find beauty and glory in the mundane, workaday struggle of everyday life: time keeps passing, you don’t like your job, you drink too much, you laugh with your friends, you search for a home, and you dream about what else might be out there. You carry on. This is what Damn Tall Buildings sings about, what they seek to share with their audience. This has long been the case, even when their audience was simply whoever happened to be passing by. In 2013, then students at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, the band took their instruments to nearby street corners and jammed for hours on old bluegrass and blues songs, traditional fiddle tunes, and eventually their own original music. They had become fast friends: Ballotta and Alleman met playing frisbee on Boston’s Revere Beach, while Capistran and Dubyk met in class, when they were wrongfully accused of cheating off each other on a test because they had put down the exact same incorrect answer. Busking, a continuous test of one’s ability to command an audience’s attention, cemented their closeness and fostered their infectious, captivating performance style. It’s how they learned half of their repertoire, and it’s where Dubyk first picked up the bass. Since then, they’ve made three albums: 2014’s Cure-All, 2015’s self-titled, and their forthcoming third album, Don’t Look Down. The band has also relocated to Brooklyn, NY and toured widely, sharing stages with Sierra Hull and the California Honeydrops and appearing at festivals like Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, Philadelphia Folk Festival, and Freshgrass Festival, where they took second place in the 2016 band competition. Links: Website | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music