St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Founded in Birmingham, Alabama in 2011, St. Paul & the Broken Bones consists of Paul Janeway (vocals), Jesse Phillips (bass), Browan Lollar (guitar), Kevin Leon (drums), Al Gamble (keyboards), Allen Branstetter (trumpet), Chad Fisher (trombone), and Amari Ansari (saxophone). The eight-piece ensemble burst into the world with their 2014 debut Half the City, establishing a sound that quickly became a calling card and landing the band a slew of major festivals including Lollapalooza, Coachella and Glastonbury. Critical praise from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, SPIN and NPRfollowed, leading to shared stages with some of the world’s biggest artists—Elton John and The Rolling Stones among them—and launching an impressive run of headlining tours behind what Esquire touted as a “potent live show that knocks audiences on their ass.” The group has continued to expand their sound with every record, branching out well beyond old-school soul into sleek summertime funk and classic disco on albums like 2018’s Young Sick Camellia. Their forthcoming LP, Angels In Science Fiction, stretches their limbs further afield, building on the shadowy psychedelia and intricate, experimental R&B of 2022’s The Alien Coast.
ANDY GRAMMER – MONSTER TOUR
You might be surprised Andy Grammer called his new album Monster. He was too. Long known as one of the most optimistic bright lights in the pop singer-songwriter sphere, Grammer found himself fighting demons and finding new corners of himself, places he hadn’t wanted to venture before. “Being happy, anger is my vulnerability,” he says. “I didn’t know how to deal with getting in touch with anger. I just pretended it wasn’t there.” Grammer embarked on a long mental health journey that mirrored an exploratory five-year interim between albums which, of course, happened to coincide with a particularly tumultuous five years for all of us. After everything, Monster, arriving October 4, became a document of someone walking through a fire they never wanted to even look at, and what happens when they emerge on the other side. In the half decade since 2019’s Naive, Grammer lived a lot of life. There were heart-bursting highs, like welcoming his second child, and harrowing trials, including the rupture of an important relationship. During the bleak pandemic years, he sought therapy for the first time, and began realizing there were all kinds emotions he was just beginning to process for the first time. Originally, Grammer experimented with capturing an era dynamic with both struggle and growth in smaller snapshots: A host of steady singles across 2020-2023, as well as 2022’s The Art Of Joy EP. Back then, Grammer planned to collect the singles alongside a few new songs for his fifth album. Instead, he picked up a mandolin. Grammer wasn’t intending to make an album built around mandolin, but it happened. He wrote one song called “Bigger Man,” the genesis and skeleton key to what became Monster. It was an uncustomary track for him: grappling with anger, but striving to remain bigger than the darker sides of that emotion. Suddenly a new album began pouring out of Grammer. The folk pedigree of the mandolin proved inspiring. “There’s something about Americana and the twang that felt real to me when singing about struggle,” he explains. Grammer struck a careful balance on Monster: He laid it all out there lyrically, but it’s not as if Monster is uncharacteristically heavy in aesthetic. Complex feelings were filtered through rousing instrumentals, reflective ballads and rejuvenating jams alike. Across the album, Grammer takes on a spectrum of human experience — the mandolin rippling alongside him, like old wisdom surfacing to lead him to some kind of answer. Now 40, Grammer’s seen his fair share of real shit, and the songs on Monster capture it all — the ugly and the beautiful sitting alongside one another, each making no sense without its counterpart. From the hurt and confusion of the album’s opening, these songs trace Grammer’s process of re-centering himself with what really matters in life before concluding with “Friends And Family.” Grammer sings of all the wild turns his life has taken, but decides “It all means nothing without friends and family.” It’s a portrait of a man who has wrestled with parts of himself, and found what’s really important.
The Wingtips
Housewares
Dragged Into Sunlight
In a world where everyone knows everything, Dragged Into Sunlight evoke intrigue and mystery.Since 2006, Dragged Into Sunlight have built a reputation for their dark, atmospheric, and often disturbing sound, combining heavy, pulverising riffs with raw, abrasive vocals and intricate arrangements. The collective explore themes of violence, despair, and the macabre, blending the extremity of black metal’s dissonance with the weighty,oppressive spirit of doom. Their compositions are best characterised by a relentless,chaotic atmosphere, often eschewing traditional death metal song structures in favour of long, immersive tracks that defy genre standards.Dragged Into Sunlight’s sonic warfare is accompanied by an equally obscure and mystifying live performance, delivering striking, minimalist visual aesthetics in the cover of darkness. The band’s enigmatic and ritualistic approach to their stage presence further enhances their dynamic sound. https://draggedintosunlight.bandcamp.com/ Mizmor Mizmor is a one-person heavy music project that started in 2012 as a way to express the mental and spiritual anguish of A.L.N., the project’s creator. The project is a fusion of black metal and doom metal that explores existential themes such as purpose, cause, self, and god. The content comes from a broken, confused, and embittered heart, and is a fight for survival when reason and foundation have crumbled. A.L.N. began writing Mizmor while losing his faith in Christianity, which had been a paradigm shift that left him feeling ruined. For example, the song “Inertia, an Ill Compeller” from 2016 was written during a time when A.L.N. felt ideologically ambiguous and was questioning whether being alive was enough. https://mizmor.bandcamp.com/ meth. – powerviolence / black metal / screamo from Chicago https://methil.bandcamp.com/ Living Conditions – punk / hardcore / post-hardcore / screamo from Omaha https://livingconditions.bandcamp.com/ Amolador – Death Metal from Lincoln, NE
Ten O’Clock Scholars
Alt rockers Ten O’Clock Scholars, who were staples of the Omaha and Lincoln music scene in the 2000’s, celebrate 25 years as a band with the release of their new album, “Sit Down Next to Me.” This new batch of songs will not only have original fans reminiscing about the good ol’ days and late nights gone by, but will also serve as a great introduction to the band for newer fans who enjoy the sound of late 90’s and early aughts power pop rock. Over the years, the band has shared the stage with Deep Blue Something, Marty Casey & the Lovehammers, and The Alternate Routes, as well as played festivals with Sister Hazel and Toadies. Look for a fun night of rock with special guests Brothers Tandem and Two Drag Club.
Online Blunt – TICKETS AT THE DOOR
fish narc x GAG
Holy Fawn
Arizona quartet HOLY FAWN bring an amalgamation of blackened-shoegaze and atmospheric post-metal; imbued with their somber textures, crushing wall of sound, and haunting imagery of nature and dream-like states, HOLY FAWN has made waves touring alongside bands like Thrice, Deafheaven, Rolo Tomassi, across North America and Europe.
Florist
On Jellywish Florist invite listeners to question everything — to imagine a world where magic, surrealism, and the supernatural are our companions in day-to-day life. It dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful. The album finds Florist exploring life’s big questions without offering silver linings, morals, or definitive answers. Instead, the band asks perhaps the most difficult of questions: Is it possible to break free from our ingrained thought cycles and pedestrian way of life? That, Florist posits, may be the only way to be truly happy, fulfilled, and free. Singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Emily Sprague says that the record is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” she explains. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.” “We enter an observational fever dream about floating through liminal space between lifetimes, individual perceptions. There is reflection on our connectedness in joy and suffering through the wish for a peaceful place for our spirits to live and land,” Sprague explains. “‘Have Heaven’ establishes the world of the album to be not quite always lucid, but rather a perspective that is blended into the worlds of the magic and death realms swirling around us. The chorus is a chant that pleads for a better symbiosis between these worlds, and between our earthly forms trying to survive alongside each other, bound to the systems we must exist within.” Jellywish is an exercise in multidimensional world building. The album’s panoramic cover art, which looks like something out of a Henry Darger volume, wraps the music in a collage of color that presents as science fiction-adjacent, hinting at something mysterious, fantastical, and mythological. Inside the album’s jacket, however, are tender and catchy sonic meditations on life’s most knotty subjects: life, death, earth, reality, relationships, joy, and pain. Taken together, Florist offers an acute sense of the band at this moment, one that worries about the world and its place in it. In contrast, it also presents an alternative to the doldrums of day-to-day life, and the necessary suggestion that very different things may be true at the same time. With Jellywish, Florist offers a complex album in a time that is anything but simple. In mining the chaos and wonder of physical and spiritual worlds, the band holds a mirror to itself to the great benefit of all. It tells us that we are not alone, and challenges us to believe in magic.