Citizen’s Ball 2025
Rushadicus the Infamous Cello Goblin
Rushad Eggleston was born a snethy and robust child in a redwood cabin, in a redwood canyon, in Big Sur, CA (a very mystical zone). He began playing stringed instruments at the age of three and has basically done so, all the time, for all of his life, ever since. Rushad is now a cello playing adult goblin man (still snethy and robust), who facilitates global bejickment and glee. He is currently undergoing rigourous wizard training (his uncle is a wizard). Listen to what Rushadicus considers his best recorded work: HERE
EDGE OF LEGENDARY: The Showcase! Part 2!
with DJ Surreal the MC
Southall
Read Southall can sure turn a phrase. “This record is the gasoline for the love machine,” he says of his band’s new album, the exhilarating and self-titled Southall. The proud Oklahoma workingman isn’t exaggerating. The record sparks and burns with 11 crank-it-up songs that expertly combine country, rock & roll, and the dust and grit of the band’s native Red Dirt scene. But there are also glimpses of hard rock and metal, along with easygoing back-porch vibes, the result of a drastic change in the way the group formerly known as the Read Southall Band now makes music: Every member of Southall brings lyrics, melodies, and even full songs to the table. Produced by Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan’s American Heartbreak) and recorded at Leon Russell’s iconic Church Studio in Tulsa, Southall manifests the true band album that singer Read Southall first envisioned when he released his debut, Six String Sorrow, in 2015. That was a mostly acoustic record, but Southall, the band’s fourth album, roars with raw and loud collaborative power. Reid Barber, the group’s resident metalhead, hammers his drums. Bassist Jeremee Knipp provides a brooding low end. Keys player Braxton Curliss adds both tasteful accents and off-the-rails barroom piano. And guitarists John Tyler Perry and Ryan Wellman wring wild sounds from their instruments. All of it is tied together by Southall’s scrappy, yearning voice. While Southall released three other studio albums, including their 2017 breakout Borrowed Time, the band’s namesake regards the records as just the building blocks of Southall’s future. He wrote all of those songs, including the fan favorite “Why,” just to get the train moving. Today, they’re charging ahead. “That was my contribution: our back catalog,” Southall says. “Now, we have this steam built up and we’re rolling down the tracks, and I want the guys to all grab a shovel, load some coal, and keep us rolling.” The six-piece has been up to the challenge. Their song “Stickin’ n Movin’,” off 2021’s For the Birds, appeared on the CBS series Fire Country, and they’ve established themselves as a band-youneed-to-playlist on the streaming services: Southall have more than 133 million streams on Spotify and more than 101 million on Apple Music, with nearly 1 million monthly listeners across all platforms. It’s not only the success story of a band, but of a region, according to Southall, who was first inspired to write and sing country songs after having a revelation while working on a farm. “I grew up at a really cool time when country music was good in the Nineties, and I spent a lot of radio time on the tractor. So whatever was happening in country music then was in my ears,” he says. “But then country started to change and became more about partying. That’s when I thought, ‘I could represent my people better than this.’” To Southall, that meant writing about work, and he sells that message hard in the rambunctious “Get Busy (Till It’s Done),” a centerpiece of the album and one of its most ferocious tracks. “They say anything worth having is worth fighting for/and I know that is true,” he howls. “It’s gonna take a little time, a little grind, to get what’s coming to you.” “My dad always said to me, ‘You’re not just going to sit there on your pockets and do nothing. That still rings true to me,” Southall says. “Work is what makes you who you are.” For Southall the band, that work began a long time ago — and it’s about to pay off in a big way.
Fallen Reign
The Impulsive
Mini KISS
Omaha Rocks Unplugged
Our annual Omaha Rocks Unplugged event is finally returning to the Waiting Room Lounge on Friday August 8th. As always the event is wide mix of local musicians from our metal and hard rock scene as well as singer/songwriter. Each act performs for 15 minutes doing a wide range of covers and or original material. Always a fun night and always a CHILL night. Please come join us and support your local music scene. Featuring: Kyle McCarthy, Surreal The MC, Blake Jones w/ Tony Stanton, Mike Wolhutter w/ Ricky Szablowski, Arcade Riot, Save The Hero, In Bloom, Ryan Lieb, and more TBA!
Plague of Carcosa
Plague of Carcosa – Cthulhu doom / noise from the forgotten corners of Chicago. Downtuned, heavy, atmospheric. https://plagueofcarcosa.bandcamp.com/ Weaving Shadows – 4 piece Existential Dread Inducing Sludge/Doom from Nebraska WeavingShadows.bandcamp.com Phantom Crypt – Sludge/Doom Metal From Omaha, NE https://www.instagram.com/phantom__crypt/ Phuzz – Stoner rock from Lincoln nebraska https://www.instagram.com/phuzz_420/
Cloakroom
Cloakroom released their last album “Dissolution Wave” into the world on January 28th, 2022, commemorating their 10th anniversary as a band. The trio spent the months that followed embarking on a number of tours, growing together as a cohesive unit and pushing the boundaries of what could be accomplished in a short amount of time together. At one point, the troupe traveled from Chicago to Salt Lake City and back in a mere six days, playing six shows in the process and traveling no less than 600 miles a day. As the calendar flipped to 2024, Cloakroom launched on their most ambitious schedule to date, playing 27 shows across Europe in just over four weeks time. While this is being written, the band is resting their bones after a 34 date North American run that was completed in 37 days. By their own standards, their new album ‘Last Leg of the Human Table’ is a couple of years early. After an upstate New York evening spent with Closed Casket Activities owner Justin Louden, the group agreed upon a deal to work together with the label on their next LP. Initially setting out to test the waters with a four-song EP, Cloakroom booked three days at the famed Electrical Audio studio in Chicago in December of 2023 and set out to write a batch of new material. The composing sessions between singer/guitar player Doyle Martin and bass player Bobby Markos proved more fruitful than expected though, and soon the band was faced with the dilemma of picking which songs to include on an abbreviated release and which to save for the future long play. No doubt inspired by their hectic touring schedules, Cloakroom decided to set out on tracking an entire LP in the three days of booked studio time while on the way to Chicago. After a few long nights of rehearsing and writing with drummer Timothy Remis, the group entered the house that Albini built with longtime collaborator and engineer Zac Montez to begin tracking the ten song effort. Through a rigorous work schedule over the next 72 hours, the band was able to capture the skeleton of the album before driving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana for a couple of end of the year gigs. The band would round out the week by spending some time at Rec Room Studios in Palos Hills, Illinois to lay down some overdubs and further complete the record. “Last Leg of the Human Table” is not a post-apocalyptic record or a work of science fiction like Cloakroom’s previous LP. If Dissolution Wave was a space western following an asteroid miner protagonist, Last Leg brings the observer back to Earth where most things are not as they’re cracked up to be. For Cloakroom the world of modernity is in polycrisis and America has lost its soul. Narrative fetishism is all too usual of a literary mechanism for Cloakroom. If you listen closely you can hear the concern; not just for the teetering social structure but for what it means to be human and the high cost of the human experience. The album is truly sonically inspiring. Shoegaze, doom, post-punk, folk just scratch the surface on the band’s shortest yet seemingly most substantial release to date. “Last Leg of the Human Table” can sound sardonic in its nature and it probably is, but this group has always found some wonder in the scurrying chaos of modern life. In 37 minutes, the album almost imbues a sense of responsibility to the listener as if one leg were to falter the whole table will fall. With “Last Leg of the Human Table” finally releasing into the world, the band seeks some hard earned rest and hopes to raise enough album sale royalties to fix the heat in the beloved tour van “War Sled”.