Apartment Sessions Builds Community Among Musicians

Caught by phone one recent Saturday, Evan Tyor is eating a late breakfast and getting re-acclimated to life in the Big Apple. “[I’m] honestly just sort of coming back down to Earth from our trip to Georgia,” says the former Athenian in between bites. “We all got back and sort of got back into our regularly scheduled lives, and it’s a little bit of a comedown.” Tyor, who moved to New York roughly three years ago, recently ventured back South to film and record several musical performances for a series he and a slew of others release under the name Apartment Sessions.

Tyor has continued to push the bounds of the audio-visual project over the years, leaning on friends and collaborators to help with the organizational and technical aspects required to corral an ever-growing group of musicians. The creative undertaking has moved from the tight confines of a New York City apartment building to the vast, scenic reaches of transatlantic countrysides, garnering nearly 30,000 YouTube subscribers in the process, but it was time back in the Peach State that reaffirmed the project’s underlying focus: community.

In 2016, Tyor reconnected with an old friend, Luke McGinnis, who became his roommate upon relocating to Brooklyn, and the two began collaborating musically almost immediately. A week after playing a gig together in the city, McGinnis invited over many of the other musicians involved to their apartment to play an arrangement of a song for fun, setting up a video camera to capture the room’s magic.

The duo got a few more sessions under their belt, but it didn’t take long for Tyor and McGinnis, with collaborators Drew Krasner and Liz Maney, to start experimenting with recording outside of their apartment, taking their gear and crew on the road to film on location in Pennsylvania and Nashville, TN. “While maintaining our musical integrity, we also tried to expand what these sessions could do, to try and innovate and bring more people in,” Tyor says.

After nearly two years of building upon their initial concept, the group began crowdfunding for its largest undertaking to date: a trip overseas to Iceland involving almost 40 musicians and crew members. 

“It was crazy,” says Tyor. “It was definitely a lot. I hesitate to say it was a full-time job, but there were definitely some weeks where it was a full-time job, especially the couple of weeks leading up to the trip.”

The large group set out in the fall of 2018 and recorded a treasure trove of material over 10 days. The ensemble took on The Decemberists’ “The Crane Wife 3” in a room graciously larger than a Brooklyn walk-up, covered the Dirty Projectors-Bjork collaboration “On and Ever Onward” with a small waterfall as backdrop, and scaled things back down for The Mountain Goats’ “The Mess Inside.”

“We also had a lot of help, of course,” says Tyor, acknowledging the efforts of a now vast public body. “That’s been so consistent for all of it. The whole project is a community project, really. Everybody donates their time.”

As the group has grown and democratized, Tyor has begun to imagine where the project can go from here—or rather, what more can it do. During the group’s travels between Athens and Atlanta in September, they recorded five sessions here in the Classic City, in addition to a few unplanned interludes. Among those were a cut from singer-songwriter LeeAnn Peppers’ new album, a session with violinist and pop songsmith Kishi Bashi at his home, and a medley of tunes at Taylor Chicoine’s Pity Party, a house show venue with a like-minded propensity for filming live performances of local bands.

But it was a stop between cities, at the Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia, that provided Tyor with one of those “what more” moments. The center, whose population eclipses that of the nearby town of Lumpkin, holds immigrants awaiting trial for deportation. Tyor and company viewed the facility and toured a community center, El Refugio, that provides legal advice and shelter for visiting relatives. The center served as a setting for a session.

“[It] sort of revitalized everyone, making us sort of focused on how privileged we are to get to do what we do, and maybe where there is value in doing what we do,” says Tyor. “It’s a good question we ask ourselves all the time: Why are we doing this?”

Moving forward, with plans to apply for nonprofit status and funding grants, the Apartment Sessions players are well on their way to determining just what they can achieve.

WesdaRuler Has Something Important to Say

For years, Wes Johnson has been a go-to in the Athens hip-hop community for his signature laid-back beats. A pivotal figure in the Space Dungeon collective, his production work as WesdaRuler has served most notably as the foundation for emcee turned county commissioner Linqua Franqa’s raps. And while Johnson has stepped out from behind his laptop from time to time to share verses of his own—most notably on the 2017 EP 4da99—with a new full-length album at the ready, Athens is poised to discover that often, the supporting players have something important of their own to say.

Even a cursory listen to Ocean Drive, WesdaRuler’s debut long-player, gives the impression that the boom-bap impresario is wise beyond his years. Sure, he has two boys of his own, aged 6 and 3, so you know he’s relayed his fair share of fatherly advice. But the nuggets of knowledge encapsulated in songs like “Butterfly” and “GeturAssintheCar” are so clearly communicated that they comprise one of the strongest, most cohesive musical mission statements to come out of Athens in some time. 

“To me, it was kind of like a quick trip through me addressing some things that were going on over the past few years, and some things that were going on, period, that I’ve just never addressed,” Johnson says of making the album.

A large part of Johnson’s outlook—and by extension, Ocean Drive—has been shaped by his proximity to and experiences with mental health struggles. What started as a personal test to step out of the boom-bap box quickly turned personal.

“By that point, a lot of cats thought of me as the boom-bap guy—that was strictly my production style,” says Johnson. “So, I was just trying to do some different styles a little bit, still rooted in hip hop. But then, some personal stuff happened with my family, and with my mother in particular, and that kind of started to shape what was happening, just because I couldn’t help but be thinking about it.”

Johnson says several of the tracks on the album have been finished for about two years, but it took a while to get to a place where he felt comfortable putting them out into the world due to how close to home the subject matter was.

“It took some time. It took me a little bit to be willing to just talk about it, especially without getting super emotional,” he says. “You’ve got to put it out, and you’ve got to be able to perform it, and it took me a little time to get to a place where I could do that and not cancel the set,” he adds with a hearty laugh. 

Ocean Drive’s second track, “Butterfly,” grapples with the range of challenges Johnson faced over the course of creating the album. His introductory refrain of, “Let’s take a ride through the mind/ One time, one time” floats over a sea-breeze synth pad before he launches into a series of raps about friends’ check-in calls, the performer’s unique challenge of providing listeners with a good time while he himself is having a tough one, and the difficulty of being away from his mother while she struggled with issues of her own. 

As mental health is more openly talked about and grows progressively less stigmatized—especially within the world of hip hop, where artists like Kanye West and Kid Cudi opened up the conversation 10 years or so ago to a younger generation of listeners and artists—Johnson acknowledges that there’s still more to learn.

“[There’s] still progress to be made,” he says. “I feel like certain realms of it come up. I know a lot of people are willing to talk about depression or anxiety and things like that, but you don’t hear much talk about schizophrenia or the fact that we actually know very little about the human brain, period,” he adds. Johnson even brings up the fact that he takes his sons for physical check-ups, but mental health screenings aren’t yet commonplace, as an example of how society has yet to take a holistic view of health as seriously as it should.

With a manifesto designed to resonate with the masses, WesdaRuler is seizing his opportunity to make sure the conversation keeps moving forward. Above all, he wants listeners to know that they’re not alone, and there’s still happiness to be found.

“You can still find those good things that are goin’ on,” says Johnson. “At least, that’s the message I’m trying to portray. At the end of the day, you can still depend on family, depend on friends or just depend on yourself and go out and have a good time. And it’s OK to do that—even if you’re going through something.”

Grand Vapids Plow Ahead With Eat the Shadow

In January 2015, local alt-rock quartet Grand Vapids released a stunning, slowcore-steeped debut album, Guarantees. Though it likely wasn’t intended as a statement, putting out a record that early in the year—before much of Athens’ college-aged population is back in town and the music industry has time to snap out of its year-end-list holiday coma—implies at least a modicum of confidence that it’s going to stick. And it did—Guaranteeswas named Flagpole’s No. 1 album of the year, with Grand Vapids landing support slots on lots of bills featuring need-to-know touring bands. 

But while the band became a citywide name, it never quite gained the traction to propel it to the national stage. The years since have been characterized by losses of momentum due to lineup changes, the dissolution of romantic relationships and other forces beyond the group’s control. Now, refashioned and renewed, the group is set to release a long-awaited second album, Eat the Shadow, a disaffected yet triumphant testament to the power of plowing ahead.

The band’s chief setback came on the heels of the release of Guarantees, when fellow up-and-comers Mothers were beginning to turn heads beyond Athens. Grand Vapids singer and guitarist McKendrick Bearden had assisted with Mothers’ breakout debut, When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired. When it came time to tour, he recommended his friend, Patrick Morales, for the role of bassist. “I kind of quit everything in my life to sort of chase that for a while, because it seemed to be going somewhere,” says Morales. “And then it exploded.”

Mothers quickly climbed the indie ladder, garnering critical acclaim for their album and touring their asses off as a result. The stress of that attention, coupled with various personal issues, led to Morales being replaced, ironically, by Grand Vapids’ bassist at the time, Chris Goggans.

While Morales, who would eventually step in to play bass for Grand Vapids, describes the whole scenario as an “emotional clusterfuck,” he now looks back on what transpired and sees his addition to the group as “weirdly fitting… I’ve always been a fan of my friends’ music, and this was a really awesome opportunity to get to play on all the songs I’d kind of been backseat driving.”

“To quantify it,” though, adds Bearden, “I feel like it more or less took a year out of our band’s life. It was still productive, but it was just a year of hard work and some healing.”

The band committed to getting back on solid ground, rehearsing and tightening up again as a live unit while also writing new material as time allowed. (Full disclosure: I heard most of these songs being demoed, as I shared an apartment at the time with the band’s other songwriter, Austin Harris.)

In early 2018, Grand Vapids stepped into Chase Park Transduction to begin recording their sophomore album. The group enlisted producer David Barbe to helm the process, explaining that they wanted a set of fresh ears on the material. Barbe’s approach proved to be a natural conduit for the band’s restored energy. 

“I think he assumes your ability and your confidence, and he’s just like, ‘OK, well, you like this sound, so let’s do that,’” Bearden says. “Maybe it’s sort of in the line of Steve Albini’s school of thought, to let the band be what they are.”

Many of Eat the Shadow’s nine songs were recorded live to tape, with Harris’ writing credits outweighing Bearden’s by a slight five-to-four margin. Stylistically, the album retains many of the more gauzy elements of Guarantees, but Eat the Shadow balances them with post-punk influences, conveying an immediacy indicative of the band’s behind-the-scenes goings-on. New York transplant Jesse Lafain has since replaced original drummer Paul Stevens, and he proves a natural fit in accentuating those elements in a live setting. 

As much as the band now wants to do the record justice in terms of promoting and touring behind it, Bearden acknowledges that, given all that delayed and then informed its creation, releasing this highly personal document into the world is bittersweet.

“It’s perfect until someone hears it,” he says. “I get a lot of joy out of the making of it, and I’m excited for it to be out and for people to hear it and have it. But yeah, I think the unknown is more tantalizing than the known.” 

“It’s like the Schroedinger’s cat of recordings,” Morales chimes in with a smile. “You enjoy it until it leaves the box.”

“It’s more thrilling in that way,” Bearden adds. “I guess where I’m at is, ‘Cool, I’m ready to do it again.’ This has been a few years of our time. It represents a lot for all of us, and now it’s like, ‘Well, it’s not ours anymore.’”

Athens Resonates Aims to Enrich the Local Music Ecosystem →

Locals and outsiders alike are familiar with Athens’ rich musical history. The Classic City has been fortunate to serve as a breeding ground for pop creativity for nearly 40 years, fostering boundary-pushing talent and allowing them a life of growth and prosperity. But with Athens’ past serving as its primary tourist draw, some residents are asking whether there are enough resources currently available to provide the tools and opportunities artists need in order to learn, produce and make a real living at their craft.

As with many big, head-scratchingly complex problems, the solutions usually come in piecemeal, and sometimes without the intention of addressing the problem in the first place.

“I would be lying if I didn’t say the start of it didn’t just come from being freaked out by down time,” says Drew Vandenberg, the founder of the new local organization Athens Resonates. “As a freelance recording engineer, I’m really lucky most of the time [that] I’m crazy busy. But it’s either on or off. It’s either you’ve got 30 days in a row of work, or there’s a month and a half where you work one day.”

It was during one of these slower stints at the beginning of 2018 that Vandenberg began to conceptualize how he would pay it forward. “It’d been in my head for a long time,” Vandenberg says. “I was wanting to get to a place where I could give back to the community in some way. And so I was like, ‘OK, this is going to be the down-time period where you stop throwing yourself a pity party and be constructive.’” 

Vandenberg believed he could make the biggest impact by focusing on what he knew best. “I zoomed in: OK, well you’re not a billionaire, and you can’t build a ship to clean all the plastic out of the ocean,” he says with a laugh. “That’s not you. Think about your scope and your skill set.” 

The excitement and immutability of live recording appealed to Vandenberg, as did shining a light on local creative businesses, so he decided that the basis of his fundraising efforts would involve recording two singles for local musicians live to half-inch, two-track tape and pressing the songs to vinyl to sell to the general public. 

Vandenberg had pinpointed how he would raise money, but for whom would he raise it? 

“Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind for me—always, since I was a kid who grew up here—is Nuçi’s Space,” he says. “That place has always been near and dear to my heart, and it’s an amazing cause that goes beyond music. The mental and physical well-being of people is humongous.”

In addition to Nuçi’s, Vandenberg wanted to prop up another organization just as integral to the health and well-being of Athens’ musically inclined youth. Years ago, Vandenberg had approached the Boys and Girls Clubs of Athens to see how he could help start a learning studio at their Fourth Street facility, but his schedule didn’t line up at the time. Now, he had his chance.

“There’s people doing a great thing over here. There’s people doing a great thing over here. They don’t really talk,” says Vandenberg. “On paper, they’re not saying we serve two different communities, but they do, intended or unintended. I felt like, what could I do in my little corner to try to help with that, also? Servicing these two great causes, but also getting those two people to talk to each other.”

Vandenberg began talking with friends and colleagues about his plans in hopes of bringing additional talent and angles to the project. One of his first recruits was Kindercore’s director of sales, Micki Windham, who assisted Vandenberg with looking at costs and feasibility. 

“There are so many parts of vinyl that come from outside sources,” says Windham. “Getting the metal stampers made and the artwork and all of that. So, it was trying to figure out how we could keep costs as low as possible.”

The plant already saves excess vinyl trimmed from each record during the pressing process, so Windham suggested they utilize and re-use that material, making each Athens Resonates release a unique blend of colors.

Even with Kindercore’s involvement, Vandenberg and Windham had to brainstorm how they would get the additional funding necessary to get things off the ground. Lisa Love, director of music marketing and development at the Georgia Department of Economic Development, suggested approaching the Georgia Music Foundation. According to Love, the grant arm of GMF has donated nearly $400,000 to school music programs and nonprofit organizations since 2015.

With funding acquired and all systems go, Vandenberg began recording his first band for the project, Futurebirds, at the beginning of 2019. He also roped in DT Productions CEO Cartter Fontaine to have a two-camera crew on hand to film the session, incorporating an interview with the band in the video’s final cut.

Athens Resonates made its first public presentation at this year’s SXSW music conference in Austin, TX, where Vandenberg tabled and sold the 7-inch records, along with screen-printed posters of its album art, courtesy of Ruby Sue Graphics. A second 7-inch, from Linqua Franqa, aka Athens-Clarke County Commissioner Mariah Parker, has since been completed and will be released this Friday on the Georgia Theatre Rooftop.

With the gears now turning smoothly, Vandenberg aims to record and release a total of six singles, including contributions from twangy, Athens-born rock quintet Neighbor Lady and Cracker frontman David Lowery. 

In addition to raising money, Vandenberg fleshed out a music curriculum for the local Boys and Girls Clubs' MusicMakers program, written alongside Partials singer and percussionist Adriana Thomas, where kids can learn more about music production and recording. The program started this spring, and a six-week camp is planned for summer.

Parker explains the significance of bringing these resources to her East Athens district: “[M]y constituents are deeply concerned about the young people in our neighborhoods,” she says. “…We need more programs like this that give kids a safe, productive community to find identity, kinship and build the creative and critical thinking skills that will help them express themselves in healthy ways and become healthy adults.”

Mariah Parker a.k.a. Linqua Franqa (Photo by Jessica Silverman)

Athens Resonates is also working towards ensuring that its fundraising efforts can continue for years to come. After speaking with other philanthropic initiatives around town, like Creature Comforts’ Get Comfortable community outreach program, Windham approached the Athens Area Community Foundation for help setting up a bank account in order to utilize their 501(c)(3) nonprofit services. The AACF could also potentially help Athens Resonates grow through donations it receives, helping to sustain the project’s operations and mission.

The Athens Resonates vision is unabashedly bold and large in scope, pooling wide swaths of local talent together to create original art, all for the sake of bridging communities and paying it forward to the community’s youth, so they may grow and more easily achieve a life of prosperity, like other locals who came before them.

“How do I be a positive force for keeping people in a good space, where, when they grow and develop and move forward, they’re in a good lane to do that?” asks Vandenberg. “I want to figure out the way here, in our little bubble, to maybe set the wheels in motion to remedy it.”

With Sailors and Ships, Jeremy Wheatley Steps Out From Behind the Drum Kit →

Here’s a little lesson in rock and roll economics: Pretty much everyone wants to play the guitar. Everyone has their own reasons, but whatever the case, this imbalance in instrumentation choice creates a dire demand for reliably solid drummers. As a case in point, see longtime Athenian drummer Jeremy Wheatley. Wheatley’s kept time for a wide variety of acts over the roughly 20 years he’s lived in town, recording and performing with the likes of Blue Blood, Cracker, Crooked Fingers, Ruby the Rabbitfoot, Palace Doctor, Purses… you get the picture. 

When you position yourself as the go-to town drummer, your own songwriting tends to take a backseat. Yet after years of carving out time to write and self-record, Wheatley has managed to prepare the first full-length album of his solo career, for his project Sailors and Ships.

“It feels good to not play drums,” Wheatley says with a laugh, in between sips at The Old Pal. He’s just walked over from his house in Normaltown, where he was testing out a guitar pedal that North Carolina transplant and Crooked Fingers bandmate Eric Bachmann had brought over. “We talk about music stuff a lot when we travel together,” he says, before providing some backstory for his new musical outlet.

The idea for Sailors and Ships came to Wheatley about 10 years ago. As a songwriter, he played sporadically in town, either solo or as a trio with Thayer Sarrano and pedal steel aficionado Matt “Pistol” Stoessel, but it wasn’t until last year, when he experienced a creative burst and started to get more comfortable with home recording, that the project began to take focus. 

“I had all these old songs, and I would frequently go back and listen to them,” Wheatley recalls. “Then, I just kind of hit a little bit of a burst of writing, where the other half, or the other three quarters, of this record just kind of started happening pretty fast, and I liked them.” 

Wheatley grew more and more excited about the material he was working on, often wanting to come straight home from work at UGA’s College of Engineering to plug into his interface and hit record. With new songs coming along quickly, Wheatley took another listen to those he wrote at the advent of Sailors and Ships to develop a framework for the album.

“I kind of culled back through some older stuff,” Wheatley explains. “There’s probably three on there that are around that old, and then this other stuff on [the album], some of it was written [in 2018],” he says.

With the exception of two tracks recorded with his old friend, Ken Hinsley—“All Is Undone” and “Pass the Nickel,” the only two songs on the album featuring a full drum kit—Wheatley recorded the album on his own, with additional backing vocals from Avery Leigh Draut and mixing assistance from Andy LeMaster.

On an album of 11 songs written over almost as many years, there is a lot of ground covered. Movement and water imagery are a bedrock of the self-titled record, as evidenced clearly in the name of the project, its title track and the deceptively sunny “Mass Migration,” which finds Wheatley crooning, “It’s feeling like a mass migration/ Everyone’s leaving town,” with a mild drawl. 

Elsewhere, the album is more overtly melancholic, grappling with anxiety (“Rooftop Sleeper”), loss and Wheatley’s own battle with oropharyngeal cancer (“Cave In”), which was diagnosed in 2013. “Fortunately, with excellent treatment, everything is fine now,” says Wheatley.

As Wheatley’s album-release house show approaches, where he’ll be playing as a trio with Phillip Brantley and Zack Milster, he expresses a pride and joy tempered in reality. He acknowledges how fortunate he’s been to get chunks of time off from his day job for touring, but doesn’t go so far as to indicate that happening with Sailors and Ships. For now, Wheatley says he will stick to playing around town, with an occasional regional performance in Atlanta or Charleston to round things out.

“This is the first thing for me, and I’m busy with other stuff. I take it seriously, obviously, but I see it more as, right now, a recording project,” says Wheatley. “There’s no reason for me to do a two-week tour somewhere where nobody knows who I am.”

In other words, fret not, guitarists in need: Though he’s likely not anywhere near done proving his chops as a songwriter, this in-demand drummer isn’t hanging up the sticks just yet.

Faye Webster Finds Her Voice on Nuanced New LP →

Atlanta singer-songwriter Faye Webster is nine shows into her first leg of touring behind a new album when I reach her by phone, choking back some Throat Coat herbal tea. “Hi, how are you?” she asks, before catching enough air to laugh. She and labelmate Stella Donnelly just played a show the night before at The Bishop in Bloomington, IN, home to her new imprint, Secretly Canadian, and she’s killing time before hitting the road for Chicago. “What else do you need in life?” she wonders aloud.

Our conversation bobs along fluidly as we talk about her forthcoming album, Atlanta Millionaires Club (to be released May 23), her love for Braves baseball and what she’s currently playing on her neon-yellow-accented Nintendo Switch. Our back and forth is so pleasant that I have to stop and ask myself if I just interviewed the right person after we hang up. There is no trace of loneliness in her voice, no sign of homesickness or longing, just… charm. 

Webster’s music possesses a similar quality, her songs so easy and breezy that one could easily miss their understated moments of sadness. Yet she calls attention to these subtle moments of heartache by paring down extraneous elements in each song’s arrangement. Every instrument sits just right in the mix so her lyrics can be heard softly, yet clearly. That heavy heart is present across much, if not all, of Atlanta Millionaires Club’s 10 tracks. 

“She uses nuance to be impactful,” says album co-producer and Chase Park Transduction engineer Drew Vandenberg. “She forces you to pay attention to the details of what's going on emotionally, because she's not beating you over the head with big production moments.”

Take the album’s opener, “Room Temperature,” which begins with Webster cooing, “Looks like I’ve been crying again over the same thing/ I wonder if anyone has ever cried for me.” The otherwise forlorn lyric ebbs and flows tranquilly while a slide guitar elicits much warmer beach imagery—fitting, since the video for the song finds Webster synchronized-swimming in a pool and dancing at a faux luau with a gaggle of gals for backup.

Atlanta Millionaires Club was written and recorded in pieces over the course of 2017 and 2018, and it was during that time when Webster figured out who she was—and who she wasn’t.

“I wrote them all when I came back from school and moved out from my parents’ and started living by myself,” she says of the record’s songs. “So, I think they came out of me kind of being tied off for the first time in my life, and I guess feeling alone for the first time.”

Webster had attended Belmont University in Nashville, studying songwriting and, eventually, graphic design, but the former program just didn’t click.

“You can’t teach [songwriting]. You can’t teach it in that very textbook, formal way,” says Webster, who had already begun to develop her own style after releasing a full-length album in 2013. “It was just kind of a step back, almost,” she continues. “Why do I need this old-ass dude to tell me how to write my songs?”

She was also collaborating with Atlanta hip-hop artists—her last album, a self-titled effort in 2017, was released by Awful Records, which also boasts A$AP Mob affiliate Playboi Carti as an alum. One experience, in particular—quietly tracking vocals for Awful emcee Ethereal while her parents slept down the hall—helped shape her effortless vocal delivery. 

“I sent it to him, and I was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll redo it tomorrow. It’s just for you to hear what I’m doing.’ And he was like, ‘No, this is great. This is actually perfect. It’s so raw and honest.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I should just stop putting effort into singing and just sound like Faye,’” she says with a laugh.

Whether that was the definitive turning point or not, Webster’s vocals have since taken on a buoyancy that helps set the course for Atlanta Millionaires Club, which also benefited from having its backing band—including in-demand Athens pedal steel player Matt “Pistol” Stoessel—record together live in the same room.

“I think that really opened things up a lot in terms of the ideas that were floating through the air,” says Vandenberg. “We were able to get closer to the core emotion of the songs faster, because we were all in there together expressing ideas to each other.”

Webster will wrap up a series of domestic tour dates supporting Lord Huron before releasing her album, after which she’ll head to Europe for a week of shows, then return to the States for a headlining East Coast tour through the end of June. Even still, there’s no hint of melancholy in her voice while discussing the long road ahead. In fact, she sounds pretty pumped for what’s yet to come.

“I’d like to keep trying to write, which I can’t on the road. That, and, I guess, just keep making stuff, even if it’s not music,” Webster says emphatically. “Just making my action figures, making cool videos. Just making something physical.”

Summer Singles Compilation Showcases Women in Athens Music →

When summertime in Athens rolls around, there’s much to be thankful for: more bearable traffic, shorter brunch lines and pools aplenty to drop in on. But for small businesses and musicians alike, time can slow to a crawl as the bulk of clientele and audiences head back to the ’burbs. No stranger to this seasonal downturn, recording engineer and studio operator Jesse Mangum—with a little ingenuity—developed a productive way to pass the summer and drum up business for the fall.

“In the spring of 2014, I quit all of my other jobs to focus on running the studio full time, and things were actually going really well until summer hit,” says Mangum. “Athens, being a college town, slows down tremendously during the summer, and suddenly I found myself with a lot of free time.” 

So, to occupy whatever hours weren’t booked at his The Glow Recording Studio, Mangum crafted a recording project that would serve as both an exercise in efficiency—for him and whomever he would record—and as a seasonal compilation to document what was going on in the local music scene at the time.

“The concept and parameters have remained pretty much static throughout the series,” Mangum explains. “Artists are given a four-hour block in which we record, mostly live, with a few things overdubbed afterwards; mix; and master their song at my studio. The single is then released later that week, warts and all, via the Moeke Records Bandcamp.”

Featuring a cross-section of local talent over the past five years, from Monsoon to Scooterbabe and Harlot Party to Dream Culture, Mangum has fielded submissions for his Summer Singles sampler each summer without any real thematic criteria: Submit a demo recording of a song in any number of formats—crude voice memo, unmixed GarageBand track or live-band practice session—and if he likes it, welcome aboard. Without much intention, though, this year’s compilation has taken on new life.

“Well, towards the submission deadline, I realized that seven of the 10 artists I had selected happened to be female-fronted,” Mangum says of this year’s compilation. With the bulk of the singles already representing a swath of Athens and Atlanta’s premier women-centric acts, Mangum decided the collection’s full 10 songs should be comprised of female-led or female-identifying acts. “It just seemed appropriate to put a spotlight on the incredibly talented women that are, in my opinion, dominating the local music scene right now,” he says, touching on the national watershed moment represented by movements like #MeToo, as well.

“The fact that Jesse has decided to take this approach speaks for itself,” says Avery Draut, lead singer and songwriter for Avery Leigh’s Night Palace, a featured act on this year’s comp. “Jesse is demonstrating a commitment to extending his privilege to dismantle it, and I am excited to see other Athens folks follow his lead,” she adds.

Kissing Booth

With the first single by songwriter Erin Lovett’s Kissing Booth project already in the bag, this summer’s series has the potential to be Mangum’s Moeke magnum opus. In addition to Lovett’s tune, singles are in the works for Atlanta shoegazers Twin Studies, recent Moeke signees and Macon natives Atria and Athens punks Shehehe.

It’ll be one to savor, as Mangum believes this may very well be his last edition of the series. “I would love to keep it up, but a number of factors suggest to me that it may no longer be feasible,” he says. For one, he’s now consistently busier during the usually slow summer months than he has been in years past. Couple that with the difficulty social media’s algorithms have posed in regards to effectively promoting the project, and it becomes more and more of an uphill battle.

“Promoting the singles organically via Facebook, for example, just isn't as far-reaching as it used to be,” he says. “The posts just aren't being seen, and the concept of paying for sponsored posts just so my friends can see them doesn't sit right with me.”

Still, Mangum’s proud of the work he’s put in over the past five years, and he recently found a new perspective on the project after a conversation with an acquaintance.

“It hadn't occurred to me that these recordings, a decade or two from now, would serve as [a] unique documentation of the Athens music scene during this time period,” Mangum says. “Some of these tracks are the very first studio recordings of bands who have since become significant figures in Athens music lore, and it's likely that many more will do the same in the coming years,” he adds. “I should probably prepare an archive.”

Neighbor Lady Makes Magic on Maybe Later →

Few small-scale shows possess the same magic as an outdoor AthFest Club Crawl gig; the ripe summer heat and cheap booze provide the perfect conditions for sonic enchantment. With a sorcerous sway, Neighbor Lady commanded one such performance at the festival in 2016, on the back patio of Little Kings Shuffle Club, with a twangy, reverb-soaked set that culminated, fittingly, in a captivating cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams.” 

It was apparent even then—barely a year into the group’s tenure—that singer and guitarist Emily Braden’s modest personal songwriting outlet was unfolding into a full-band force to be reckoned with. “I never thought Neighbor Lady would be a serious thing,” says Braden. “I just thought I would play some songs with my friends and call it a day.” 

The Rome native began writing her first batch of Neighbor Lady tunes sometime in 2015, before asking a few friends to join her live at what was originally planned to be a solo set. “After playing a few shows and seeing how people responded, it inspired me to be more serious and write more songs.”

The four-piece—comprised of a veritable who’s who of Athens indie-rock talent, including bassist Meredith Hanscom and former Dana Swimmers Jack and Maggie Blauvelt—began gaining traction around Athens and Atlanta on the strength of a profound chemistry and authenticity. (It also helped that Braden has the voice of a Southern seraph.) Former Reptar drummer Andrew McFarland soon took over the kit as the group began landing higher-profile gigs. 

After much build-up, the crew began recording its debut album, Maybe Later, in 2017. “It was a very relaxed and stress-free environment to record in, and I hope we can do it [that] way every time,” says Braden of the process. The band then signed to the small Sacramento, CA label Friendship Fever, home to fellow Athenians Deep State.

With a sound incorporating elements of rock, pop and country, Neighbor Lady might be one of the few bands capable of claiming to have opened for The Growlers and also toured with Futurebirds. Though the group’s stylistic diversity is evident on the seven-song record, where each player’s personality is uncannily distinct, Braden’s voice shines through the din like a lighthouse through fog.

“I went back and recorded the vocals when no one was in the house, and it made it so much easier for me,” says Braden. “I was able to experiment with harmonies and power through the songs in my own way.”

The opening track, “Let It Bleed,” wastes no time in pushing Braden to the edge of her comfort zone, as she belts with full emotion, “You have no idea what’s gotten into me!” The cathartic release is made even more powerful knowing the songwriter’s initial hesitance to take the project public. “All of these songs loosely touch on procrastination,” says guitarist Jack Blauvelt, who now lives with Braden in Atlanta. “Not the ‘I’m too lazy’ kind, but rather the feeling of being too scared to express your deepest thoughts and just pushing it off until later.”

With the recent release of Maybe Later, Neighbor Lady will play back-to-back release shows in Atlanta and Athens this week before heading out on an East Coast tour in July, as Braden and group inch ever closer to finding comfort in sharing those deep, dark thoughts with the public. “These songs just come out of Emily,” says Blauvelt. “They’re genuine, and I think that’s the best way to go about songwriting.”

---

Fact Sheet: Neighbor Lady’s Maybe Later

Best Track: “Fine,” which focuses on loneliness and desperation and possesses all the tension of a Wild West quickdraw.

One Shining Moment: Braden's pipes are supreme, but check out “Consider Me Mean” for an opportunity to slow things down and hear them on full display.

Where to Buy: neighborlady.bandcamp.com (digital and vinyl available via Friendship Fever).

Shade Releases a Freewheeling Album in Memory of a Friend →

For all intents and purposes, the local genre-benders in Shade have had their sophomore album in the can for three years now. Any other band probably would have grown anxious, apathetic or a mix of the two holding on to their creative treasure for so long, eager to release it into the world for all to hear—and rightfully so. Yet the Athens trio, led by singer and guitarist Phelan LaVelle, seems to have remained pretty chill about it.

“We got into other life happenings, wrote other songs, met other people [and] developed other skills,” LaVelle says. “We loved it, it was cool, and we just sat on it.”

Recorded with David Barbe in the spring of 2015 at Chase Park Transduction, the cheekily titled Why Spread Panic retains much of the primal energy of Pipe Dream, the band’s 2014 debut. In fact, in many places it supersedes it. Where Pipe Dream exhibited traces of taut post-punk inflection and relative grounding, Why Spread Panic plays like a freewheeling surrender to the cosmos, its larger-than-life psychedelic jams ushering Shade into a new aural phase that’s only grown more dynamic as time has passed.

“I like to think of this album as a geode underground, garnering power, cultivating its most radical crystals for an inevitable unearthing,” LaVelle says. “Little did we know it would be almost three years in incubation.”

As LaVelle explains, it wasn’t like the band was just sitting around during the interim. LaVelle remained active in Crunchy, her duo with drummer Kathleen Duffield, and former bassist Will Cash moved to Atlanta after recording for the album wrapped up. “Al [Daglis, Shade’s drummer] and I kept jamming, honing our natural chemistry and democratic songwriting methods,” LaVelle says. “Greg O’Connell started jamming with us, and it all feels good, fluid [and] organic. So this is the current Shade lineup: me, Al and Greg.”

So, why 2018, one might ask, after that long in hibernation? “I feel like playing music is so important right now for a million reasons, the dearest of which being that it gives you the ability to slightly transcend a reality that you don’t want to accept,” LaVelle explains. Specifically for the band, she says, that means “a reality without Ash.”

The sudden and unexpected death of fellow musician and visual artist Ash Rickli in late 2017 sent shockwaves through Athens’ creative community. Rickli, 30, suffered a cardiac emergency one evening last November at Hi-Lo Lounge, leaving behind a partner pregnant with twins.

While his death was tragic, by most accounts Rickli’s spirit was lively, the sort that would urge his peers to continue pursuing the same dreams and joys he did during his life. LaVelle echoes that sentiment. “I am not saying that, like, my guitar is a weapon of denial, but that I can feel closer to Ash when I am playing music,” she explains. “Because art and music were such huge touchstones for Ash, it seems natural to manifest him in relation to these things.”

Shade’s release show Saturday at the 40 Watt will serve primarily as a tribute to Rickli. In addition to performances from musicians in the late artist’s circle, like The Hernies, Cult of Riggonia and Hannie and the Slobs, Rickli’s art will be featured and on sale, with all proceeds going to directly support his family.

“No one really knows how to navigate experiences like this, and everyone is doing their best,” LaVelle says. “Everyone wants to hold up Desi [Sharpe, Rickli’s partner] and the twins in a nest of love and light. Everyone wants to hold up Ash and really understand what a truly amazing and beautiful person he was. Everyone wants to manifest his ways and his values, keeping him here with us.”

After years of building intensity, awakened by a shift in cosmic energy, Why Spread Panic is ready to be loosed upon the world. The catalytic circumstances for its release, while difficult for the band to bear, support the notion that the time is right to finally let this record above ground to see the light of day.

“That’s the thing, that Ash is so important to so many people, everyone’s essence of him being as important as everyone else’s, all informing the ways that we behold him,” LaVelle says. “It is important to have an outlet for people to come together in support of all this—to celebrate art as a contribution to Ash’s family and memory. That is what this show is. That is what this little geode of an album was for.”

Through Music and Politics, Linqua Franqa Calls on Athens to Act →

It was hard to miss Linqua Franqa in 2017. The linguistics doctoral student turned Athens It Girl—known to friends and family as Mariah Parker—released her self-titled debut last February and quickly took the Classic City by storm, bridging cultural divides and injecting a hefty dose of sociopolitical awareness into local music in the process. Her skillful turns of phrase, magnetic live show and nonstop activity paved the way for a best hip-hop artist win at last summer’s Flagpole Athens Music Awards, and she wowed at ensuing slots opening for of Montreal at AthFest and ESG at Athens Popfest.

With Model Minority, HHBTM Records’ impending vinyl re-release of her debut, Linqua Franqa is prepping for the limelight once again. The reissue includes a new track, plus a slew of remixes from her beatmaker-in-chief, Wesley Johnson, aka WesdaRuler, as well as Savannah emcee Dope Knife. But as attention continues to mount for the gold-bike-riding rapper, Parker is staying grounded, keeping her performing alter ego and musical ambitions in check with another personal passion: local politics.

“By some metrics, my life is in shambles,” Parker jokes over a beer at Walker’s Coffee and Pub. It’s a little after 8 p.m., and she’s just now finding time to decompress, revealing her secret to how she manages to wear so many hats without completely losing her mind. “At some point, when you’re so passionate about so many different things, and you feel called to do them… you learn to operate at a lower threshold,” she explains. “You have to either go insane or accept that 50 percent is good enough.”

It’s likely that Parker is her own harshest critic, though. After all, she’s partially responsible for putting Athens hip hop back on the map.

Parker adopted the Linqua Franqa name (then Lingua Franca; the spelling was recently changed) in 2015 after moving to Athens from Asheville, NC, new to the city and eager to create a fresh identity. As a regular at The World Famous, it wasn’t long before she approached a friend working there about organizing a hip-hop show. It drew an unexpectedly sizable audience, convincing Parker that there was more work to be done. “When I saw the amount of people that coalesced around it, from that first show, I knew that we had to keep doing this,” she says. “I knew we had to keep cultivating that.”

From there, Parker became instrumental in reinvigorating the local hip-hop scene, booking Hot Corner Hip Hop events, connecting like-minded artists and bringing outsiders into the fold. “She’s provided a platform for local hip hop to thrive,” says her friend and producer Johnson. “It’s even brought life to movements that were already in place, but struggled to continue [growing].”

With the scene thriving, Parker felt it was time to decentralize. She didn’t want to be viewed as the gatekeeper or spokesperson for local hip hop. She had also been taking a much harder look at the rooted issues permeating Athens’ political and socio-economic framework. 

“It’s so much deeper than just getting people to come to shows,” Parker says. “Why do you think it was that there weren’t a lot of black people in the music scene? Those questions are not just a matter of, ‘Well, this bar is too kitschy and white,’ and that’s just it. It’s way, way deeper than that. If you want to have a really thriving and diverse and fruitful culture, one that’s constantly generating cool shit, you’ve got to fix the underside of it that’s creating [those] conditions.”

One particular message started to resonate more and develop a life of its own. As Parker raps in her song “The Con and the Can”: “Cuz everyone wantin' to complain about the state of the system, congratulate themselves on Facebook for paying attention/ And homie, I know you're right, but if nobody mobilizes and noble fights, shit/ We staying slaves for centuries.” It’s a comment on the trappings of being social-media woke without making motions towards progress in real life, but it’s also a personal call to action. “The only way I have to fix it is cashing my chips in,” she concludes.

“When it comes to Mariah's music, the lyrics are what sets her apart, in my opinion,” says Pity Party house show organizer and Perfect Attendance Records head Taylor Chicoine. Chicoine and Parker have encouraged each other’s projects, and he recently produced the video for Linqua Franqa’s “Gold Bike.” “It’s real, raw truth,” he continues. “I've seen people become uncomfortable upon understanding some of her lyrical content, but that's the point, I think. There are lots of issues in our society that don't get properly dealt with because they make people uncomfortable.”

Parker’s rhymes often make those raw truths more palatable, so it wasn’t much of a jump when she dove headfirst into introducing those ideas to an even wider audience by joining Tommy Valentine’s campaign for Athens-Clarke County commissioner. Valentine saw a Linqua Franqa set and continued to run into Parker at activist circles before having a long conversation about music, language and politics and extending an invitation to join the campaign. Now, Parker serves as Valentine’s campaign manager. On their docket: improving community relations with police, fighting for a living wage, securing better public transportation and creating more opportunities for continuing education for adults.

“From the moment we started this campaign, we said that we hoped it would be about more than a moment. We wanted it to be a movement,” says Valentine, himself a former Athens emcee. “Thanks to Mariah, we feel like we've succeeded well before Election Day.”

As the campaign narrows in on the May 22 election, Parker continues to advocate on Valentine’s behalf by canvassing, organizing town halls and more. And while politics has taken the front seat most recently, Parker still has plenty of musical plans, and a few beats ready to go for a new album. She’s still mulling over subject matter, though it shouldn’t take long for her to piece things together once she gets into the studio. “Until I sit down with a beat and let it tell me what the story ought to be, I don’t really know what the story will be,” Parker says.

One issue she is interested in tackling is combating inaction. “It’s something I’ve wanted to write about and foresee being a very prominent theme in my next work,” she says, “especially as I deal more and more with trying to empower people politically, and [find] that a lot of a certain kind of person feel[s] very paralyzed with guilt into not acting. Like, ‘Oh, well everything’s so terrible, and I’m so terrible; I can’t do anything,’ and having to work around that with folks.”

Whatever the calling—politics, music or language—Parker is eager to continue bettering herself and her community. One thing is certain: She’s going to stay busy as hell.

“I haven’t worked around that with myself, of like, ‘I’m a garbage human; I’ll never amount to anything,’” Parker admits, before her tone turns from critical to hopeful. “People need more than that from me. People of the world need more of that from everyone.”

UPDATE: After this story was published, Parker announced her candidacy for Athens-Clarke County Commission in District 2. Read more here.

The Whigs' Parker Gispert Reflects on 10 Years of Mission Control →

No Athens band captured the back-to-basics rock swagger of the early-to-mid 2000s better than The Whigs, a scrappy trio of college-aged buds brought together by mutual friends and shared music tastes. Capitalizing on the post-Strokes boom, the band created a significant groundswell in town by bringing together both sides of the Khaki Divide. That swell eventually surged across the country, and it wasn’t long before the buzz around The Whigs’ live shows caught the attention of both RCA Records and Rolling Stone, which named the band one of the best unsigned acts in the country.

The Whigs were riding high following the release and tour in support of their 2005 debut album, Give ’Em All a Big Fat Lip. But despite the early accolades and attention, the band found itself at a crossroads after bassist Hank Sullivant decided to leave the group to tour with New York City up-and-comers MGMT and focus on his psych-tinged solo project, Kuroma.

“We found ourselves in a situation where we now had a record deal, we had some good momentum going for the band, but we didn’t have a third member,” says guitarist and vocalist Parker Gispert. “It was kind of a weird time where there was sort of this question mark as to what to do, but at the same time I felt like I was writing really good songs.” 

In the face of uncertainty, Gispert and drummer Julian Dorio decided they’d come too far to hang it up, and continued making strides towards creating their breakout sophomore album. The band brought in a friend, Adam Saunders—from local group The Pendletons—to learn Sullivant’s parts and contribute new material for demo recordings. “It was a pretty tough thing to be dealt. He kind of had to learn these other parts, kind of master them as if they were his own, and then also perform the ones that he did,” says Gispert. “But he nailed it." 

The addition was natural, but temporary; Saunders signed on just to help with recording, and didn’t plan to tour on the record once it was released. In need of a permanent new member, The Whigs’ label at the time, ATO, held auditions in Los Angeles to find a replacement. 

“There are multiple people there who, that’s what they do: They source people for bands,” says Gispert. “So, we have a group of maybe 40 people who are relatively our age,” he continues with a laugh, before listing a sample of inquiries included on the questionnaire, like “What are your favorite bands?” and “Do you party?”

The search was a bust, and the pair were running out of options as they progressed towards the new album’s imminent release date. “We had booked a tour with Jason Isbell that start of that fall [in 2007], and, no joke, it was two weeks before the tour and we had nothing,” Gispert says. Finally, when he and Dorio had seemingly exhausted all their options, they thought to ask a pal they knew by proxy, Tim Deaux. “He had 10 days to learn the songs, and then we were on tour,” says Gispert.

With the existential crisis handled, The Whigs released their much-anticipated second album, Mission Control, in January 2008. “There was definitely a pretty dramatic change,” says Gispert of the record, which quickly gained traction thanks in part to radio support for the album’s lead single, “Right Hand on My Heart.”

In addition, The Whigs got their first opportunities to play late-night TV, making appearances on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Around the same time, the band was receiving offers to open for bigger acts, including Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Kooks and Kings of Leon.

Now, as the band prepares to celebrate Mission Control’s 10th anniversary with a one-off show at the 40 Watt, Gispert is able to look past the anxieties of a then-changing lineup and appreciate the record that came to be. “The whole recording process and figuring out who was going to play and all that stuff was pretty stressful,” he says. But “I’m definitely super proud of it, and when I listen to it, it feels good hearing it now.”

Love Tractor Finds That Elusive Athens Feeling, Again →

While Athens has many easily identifiable qualities that attract and retain individuals from all walks of life—a great university, low cost of living, a vibrant arts scene—there’s something about the Classic City that remains inexplicably appealing and difficult to pin down. Those drawn to our town because of the latter of those three conditions often feel this indelible, indescribable quality most strongly—or at least it’s made the most evident through their expressions and media, their photographs, poems and songs.

Armistead Wellford feels it as much now, in his Richmond, VA home of nearly 15 years, as he did living off Barber Street during the early ’80s. “There’s something about Athens—it’s so life-giving and spiritual to make music with musicians down there,” Wellford says by phone one afternoon. He bristles with excitement while reminiscing about jamming with his friends, Athens’ musical legacy and even the distinct smell of Georgia pines. 

Wellford’s band Love Tractor, one of Athens’ seminal rock groups of the early college-radio boom, has slowly been picking up steam again over the past few years, reuniting in various incarnations and using various names, seemingly under the presumption that something new and exciting is on the horizon. Then again, maybe it’s just good to experience that hard-to-describe Athens feeling every once in a while.

Talk of re-releasing at least the band’s first two albums has been intermittent, as it was before We Love Tractor’s 2015 AthFest performance. The group, driven by Wellford and original Love Tractor guitarist Mark Cline, also included a who’s who of Athens rockers: former Glands drummer Joe Rowe, Drive-By Trucker Jay Gonzalez and Elephant 6-er Bryan Poole. By Wellford’s account, “That helped get the core three together, because we had such a fabulous kind of real Love Tractor show.”

The process of corralling the band’s three original members—Wellford, Cline and Mike Richmond—has proved difficult, with each living in a different state up and down the East Coast. As the core trio makes strides towards playing together again, reissuing its back catalog and even working towards new material, distance and dynamics have proven to be a hurdle. “Stuff just keeps getting in the way,” Wellford says. 

Yet they keep inching closer. Last August, the trio reunited for the first time in years, alongside members of We Love Tractor, to play Athens Popfest. “[W]e were playing basically the order of the first album,” Wellford says, referring to 1982’s Love Tractor. “We changed it up a little bit,” he continues, “but it sounds just like it, except for even better.

“Those guys have instinct that you can’t really get with musicians in other places,” Wellford says, grappling with how to best describe Athens’ elusive quality and draw. “We’re from the vintage Athens scene, but it seems like all the bands that have come out of there, especially the Elephant 6 collective, [have] all been interesting and original, and everybody’s trying to sound different and unique,” he continues. “It’s such an Athens thing.”

The core threesome will reunite again this week for two shows—one at Atlanta’s Vista Room with Southern new wave stalwarts the Swimming Pool Q’s and an Athens show at the 40 Watt Club with alt-rockers Magnapop—making yet another move towards some big 2018 happenings.

In addition to the continued talk of reissues, Wellford and Cline both indicate that a fresh album is in the works for release next year. “We have a few songs we never released, so we want to go in and rework those a little bit,” says Wellford. “We all have some music that we can bring in and put it in the cooking pot, put it through the Love Tractor mill,” he adds.

But again, getting them all together in the same room will be crucial to the development of the material. Wellford stresses the importance of being in the same room together when playing and recording, as opposed to emailing tracks back and forth. “I know we can do this over the computer, but I’d just like to get us into a room the old-fashioned style and jam it out,” he says. “When we get together, exciting stuff happens. That’s why I want us to get into a room if we’re going to do new stuff, because all these surprises happen.”

As Love Tractor finds renewed purpose and spirit, one thing becomes clearer about that peculiar Athens feeling: Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to go away. “We are focusing on the early years of Love Tractor because it’s so present now,” Wellford says. “There’s something about the energy of that, playing. I just warp back to being 22 years old again. It just evoked this feeling.”

Mdou Moctar Modernizes Tuareg Sounds, and Other Tuareg Music to Know →

While much of the West's exposure to Tuareg culture is tied to the ethno-political conflicts that have played out across North Africa over the past few decades—and the rebellious desert blues that's taken shape as a result—a relatively fresh face is steering his people's music into even more modern territory. 

Anar, the first album from songwriter and guitarist Mdou Moctar of Niger, was released in 2008, featuring heavily autotuned vocals and electronic instrumentation largely avoided by most popular Tuareg musicians. The spaced-out tunes spread like wildfire throughout the Sahara as files were shared via cellphone SIM cards. Sahel Sounds label founder Christopher Kirkley included the title track on one of his Music From Saharan Cellphonescompilations, sparking a working relationship that would lead to Moctar's first film role. 

Released in 2015, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, which roughly translates to "Rain the Color of Red With a Little Blue in It”—an homage to Prince's Purple Rain—is not only Moctar's premiere screen appearance, it's also the first-ever Tuareg-language film. The movie will be screened in its entirety at Trio Contemporary Art Gallery on Tuesday, Oct. 10 before Moctar performs a live set on the Georgia Theatre Rooftop.

More Tuareg Music to Check Out

Tinariwen

The Mali collective Tinariwen has gained increased exposure over the last two decades with a string of critically acclaimed albums, positioning it as arguably the most well-known and influential Tuareg ensemble in existence. Formed in the late ’70s by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and fomented in a Libyan military training camp, the group has consisted of a rotating cast of players throughout its three-decade lifespan. (It even played the baptism of its youngest member, Eyadou Ag Leche.) Tinariwen’s 2011 album Tassili, featuring contributions from Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and TV on the Radio members Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, won the Grammy for Best World Music Album, and is a great place to get acquainted with The Desert Boys’ sub-Saharan blues repertoire.

Bombino

Niger native Bombino is probably the closest thing to a Western rock star you’ll find in the Sahara. After fleeing the country in the early ’90s amid Tuareg rebellion, Bombino taught himself guitar, studying the styles of Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler before eventually forming his own band, Group Bombino. After some prodding by filmmaker Ron Wyman, Bombino recorded and released his standout, Agadez—named after Niger’s largest city and the guitarist’s home base—in 2011. Since then, Bombino has worked and toured with a range of notable names, including Robert Plant, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors.

Terakaft

Founded by former Tinariwen member Diara Ag Ahmed and aided by his two nephews, Sanou and Pino, Terakaft dabbles in a brand of desert rock similar to Tinariwen, if not even more movement-inducing. The group draws its name from the Tamasheq word for “caravan,” and its melodies are equally roving, meandering and bobbing along with rhythmic sway as call-and-response lyrics trade off with evocative guitar leads.

Tartit

Timbuktu group Tartit, taking its name from the Tamasheq word for “union,” is comprised of five women and four men. Formed in a Burkina Faso refugee camp in the early ’90s, Tartit began gaining traction a few years later after a handful of high-profile festival appearances and performances alongside Tinariwen, Plant and renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré. The group’s music and humanitarian work focuses on community and culture, with the women all playing tinde drums and the men playing traditional string instruments as all chant. Tartit's members have also been recognized by the United Nations for their work developing schools and opportunities for women in their native Mali.

Sublime Frequencies

Sublime Frequencies, a Seattle label focused on “acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers,” has a vast catalog of ethnographically inclined recordings, housing everything from the pop stylings of Syria’s Omar Souleyman to traditional folk songs from a variety of artists in South Asia. Dip into the Guitars From Agadez series on SF’s Bandcamp page for seven volumes of hypnotic Tuareg rhythms from Koudede and Group Inerane.

Chicago Buzz Band Whitney Isn't Burned Out Just Yet →

"For the sake of my sanity, I’m not even going to call it a tour," Whitney guitarist Max Kakacek says with a laugh. “That’s like a week-long ACL run in my brain,” the Chicagoan adds for clarification and self-preservation alike. 

Kakacek is referencing the sextet’s short run of upcoming shows—the second of which takes place at the Georgia Theatre on Saturday—leading up to an appearance at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Texas on Oct. 8. He’s potentially losing his mind because, ever since releasing last year’s critically acclaimed Light Upon the Lake, the band’s debut, he’s been swept up in a seemingly nonstop cycle of touring the world to promote it.

Though it’s been a whirlwind of press and shows since the album came out on Secretly Canadian at the beginning of 2016, Whitney’s formation took a fair amount of time. After the dissolution of Smith Westerns, Kakacek’s previous band with fellow songwriter, drummer and lead singer Julien Ehrlich, the duo began writing material for a new and completely different project, allowing it to blossom organically. Where Smith Westerns dealt in slick, glossy indie-pop, Whitney took a markedly different stab at freewheeling folk and soulful rock, resulting in a warm and timeless album despite its being mired in heartbreak.

“In Smith Westerns, there was never really a way to make that kind of music,” says Kakacek. “I feel like the way that we started Whitney was a reaction to trying not to do that again—recording on tape, having everything have a little more soul, leaving a lot of mistakes in, not going to a big fancy studio.”

The approach has paid off for the band, as the record was included in a bevy of music publications’ year-end lists and has landed it a number of festival gigs, including Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Atlanta’s Shaky Knees. The album struck such a chord that it demanded the type of endless touring Kakacek jokingly laments, most recently a nearly 90-day trek from April to July. “By the end of it, we were just so tired that we became that band that went back to the hotel and slept,” says Kakacek.

With so much touring and so much buzz, one’s bound to wonder when there might be time for a follow-up to materialize. As it turns out, when Kakacek is reached by phone, he and Ehrlich are holed up in Rhododendron, OR, fleshing out song concepts in a cabin around Mt. Hood National Forest. “We’ve got a tape machine out here, and we’re just kind of starting the writing process and goofing off and watching Ryan Gosling movies,” says Kakacek. 

“It’s usually me and Julien passing ideas around and then trying to make a vocal melody,” Kakacek adds, elaborating on their writing process. From there, they’ll create a “rough skeleton” for the rest of the song, for instance, where horns and other players should come in for emphasis. 

“We don’t write something like, ‘You have to play this even if you don’t like playing it,’” Kakacek says. “We all kind of have, I think, a very similar musical brain throughout the six of us, where we don’t really argue about ideas very often. Usually, once an idea is there, everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I would have done anyways.’” 

As strides are made towards writing a sophomore album, Kakacek says that, moving forward, finding a healthier balance in regard to touring is a priority. 

“Part of the reason that it’s fun is getting to hang out with the people that come watch you play and be a part of the city for a night,” Kakacek says, before harkening back to the band’s free-willed roots. “We definitely want to get back to a point where we’re touring just the right amount—where we still have the energy to hang out with new friends.”

Fact Sheet: Whitney’s Light Upon the Lake

Best Track: “Golden Days,” a bittersweet look back on the golden days of a relationship that culminates in a sweeping outro of horns and “na-na-na-na-na-na’s”

Standout Lyric: “I left drinking on the city train/ To spend some time on the road/ Then one morning I woke up in L.A./ Caught my breath on the coast,” the opening lines of “No Woman” that set the tone for an album about picking up the pieces

Song We Hope They Play Live: “No Matter Where We Go,” an upbeat tune evoking open-road cruising with one’s partner by one’s side

Arcade Fire wants ‘Everything Now’ →

Remember way back in the mid-aughts when circumstances were ripe for indie bands to reach levels of mainstream success typically reserved for more conventional pop artists on major labels? Think New York City with its surging scene of rock revival, or countless other artists plucked from obscurity and given a prime scene to soundtrack on "The O.C." Though it’s only been a decade, that landscape seems generations removed, with Napster a distant memory and rock radio itself nearly as foreign in an era when streaming services now play a large role in chart success. 

“The whole concept of playlists is something I had to educate myself [on] a bit,” admits Arcade Fire bassist, guitarist and occasional keyboard player Tim Kingsbury.

So let's rewind a little bit to a time before exclusive streams and photo filters. Amid this time of upheaval emerged a Canadian band whose heartfelt anthems were more suited for opening slots on U2 tours than the Montreal house shows from which they rose. With soaring choruses and a critical yet endearing attitude toward growing up and facing the truly dispiriting aspects of human existence, Arcade Fire came to bridge the divide between rebellious art school kids and a larger populace looking for an excuse to toss back some beers at the Corporate Sponsored Arena of Suspended Disbelief. The group’s 2010 album The Suburbs, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2011, cemented this crossover and came at the cusp of a turning point, one in which pleas to show children “some beauty before all this damage is done,” were being unwittingly replaced by #vibes and #feels. That’s not to say Arcade Fire itself wasn’t the only one changing. As audiences have grown increasingly absorbed with documenting a live show on their phone instead of watching it with their own eyes, and notifying friends of their fun by checking in at the function, there’s also grown a serious disengagement with the type of critical messages our rock stars — Arcade Fire in particular — are capable of belting.

Arcade Fire’s latest album, Everything Now, complete with the disco rhythms of the album's title track, and observations on the digital age’s overload of infinite content in "Creature Comforts" and "Electric Blue" arrives as 2017’s natural answer to the equally danceable but more concerned Reflektor.

With a publicity campaign that satirized consumer culture and branding — at one point, their social media was taken over by a rep from Everything Now, a faux global media agency, and fake products tied to song titles were created and marketed out of thin air — it seemed that the band was taking yet another step away from the earnestness and self-seriousness for which it had come to be known. Or, the group was just trying to have some fun with it. “The campaign we did before the record came out, it was kind of greeted a lot more heavily than I expected,” says Kingsbury. “I think we’re always a little bit shocked at how seriously people take us. We’re just a rock band.”

Though incredibly understated, Kingsbury’s remark emphasizes the fact that much of what still remains of rock stardom rests on the shoulders of a particular few. The band took a full dip into major label territory with the release of Everything Now, as have a number of their peers of late, including Grizzly Bear, LCD Soundsystem and the War On Drugs. For the bulk of the group’s career, Arcade Fire has been distributed overseas by a major label and stateside by indie powerhouse Merge. Everything Now arrived July 28 via Columbia / Sony Music. “The idea was that if there was one company dealing with it all, that it would be a much more cohesive effort,” says Kingsbury “That was kind of our main idea, to experiment with this,” he continues, “and literally every time you put out a record it’s an experiment.”

Arcade Fire continues to navigate the current industrial climate as best it can while new trends and shifts are still taking place. As YouTube and streaming services like Spotify and Tidal have become the dominant outlets for music discovery and consumption, Billboard’s charts have begun factoring those plays into their standings. “It’s changed so much even between when we put out Reflektor and this record,” Kingsbury says. 

Making music in 2017 is a tumultuous and uncertain business. While it’s much harder for a band that grew up on Funeral or Neon Bible to reach the same level of success that permeated just 10 or 15 years ago, it remains enduringly true that success isn’t as easily quantifiable as clicks and streams. However one might judge the tone of Everything Now, that earnest sentiment rings just as true for Arcade Fire now as it did in the group’s earliest days. “As an artist, the only thing you really have control over is the quality of your work,” Kingsbury says. “Just make something that you’re really, really proud of. If you’re planning your career based around the business side of it, then you’re already making a mistake. It’s best to just focus on creating something that you feel the world needs.”

Material Girls Want to Stay Off the Online Grid →

When nearly every waking moment is captured by a smartphone camera, documented in a tweet or archived via Facebook status, the truly unique experiences in life start to lose their flair. You’ve lived vicariously through your co-worker’s dog for weeks now in every possible filter, and you’ve read every hot take on Donald Trump’s presidency from both sides of the aisle. Sure, social media has made life more convenient, and the likes feel kind of nice, but at what price?

Atlanta six-piece Material Girls has had enough of the barrage of content—so much so that, save for a scant Soundcloud page and the relatively recent advent of a website that’s fairly buried in Google’s search results, they’ve gone without it over the year or so that they’ve been a band. “We don't feel the need to force-feed content to the masses, and honestly, the only con is people have to think 1 percent harder to find us on the internet,” the band writes collectively via email.

For the drag-punk ensemble—consisting of former members of Atlanta and Athens bands Chief Scout, Concord America and Slang—doing without what many deem a bare necessity in 2017 has only made it more enigmatic, giving the group an elusive edge over a saturated city scene. News of Material Girls began to spread by old-fashioned word of mouth in late 2016 before the release of a limited edition, lathe-cut 7-inch, “Drained” b/w “Tightrope,” which put to record the band’s enthralling live show. The two singles combined elements of shadowy post-punk and glamorous cabaret to dramatic and thrilling effect, proving that the band was more than just the sum of its make-up and high-heeled parts.

With punchy brass, ominous yet raucous guitar licks and a lead vocal that alternates between members while maintaining a distinct guttural growl, the band has carved out a niche that avoids most contemporary rock and punk trends. “Material Girls embodies all that is missing from current music and art,” the band writes. “Haven't you noticed your life before Material Girls and after Material Girls?”

Chunklet Industries aficionado Henry Owings sure did. The man behind music and humor rag Chunklet and a slew of Athens releases, including the recently issued Pylon live album, teamed up with Atlanta promoter and musician Kyle Swick (whose band DiCaprio will share Thursday night’s bill) to release MG VS IQ, Material Girls’ debut EP, in July. The EP landed following a long buildup of interest and speculation and, with just four songs—the two previously released tracks and newer numbers “I Just Wanna Fall in Love With Myself” and “Under the Sun”—left audiences even more intrigued.

The gears are turning behind the scenes and screens for Material Girls. Prolific Atlanta-via-Macon songwriter Meghan Dowlen, who plays and releases her own material as Jade Poppyfield, has taken up the role of bassist after Chief Scout frontman Trey Rosenkampff’s departure. Additionally, a string of East Coast dates is imminent, though talk of writing and recording plans is vague. 

“All that needs to be known is that things are different now, and we will keep tweaking the knobs and tweezing hairs from between the eyebrows of our monster as we let it run free to roam the earth,” writes Material Girls cryptically.

As the band continues to beguile, make sure to keep a keen ear to the ground for updates on goings on, as “the social media whirlpool, the Cook Out drive-through window of inane quizzes and pictures of food” won’t be tipping anyone off anytime soon.

Or, as the band puts it, “Material Girls is far too exciting and engaging to be just another thing to scroll past in your endless quest to the bottom of the bottomless pit of mindless boredom.”

George Christian Pettis comes home

It’s been over a year since Decatur native George Pettis ventured west with folk group 100 Watt Horse, leaving behind Atlanta’s city trappings for the rolling arts epicenter of Olympia, Washington. And while the relocation pits Pettis some 2,500 miles away from his old home, the quirky college town and state capital seem like a natural fit for the animated songwriter. 

“Olympia has been wild,” Pettis says. “It’s a different planet out here for sure,” he goes on to say, noting how wet and excruciatingly cold winters can be before “the flowers and trees suddenly explode with color and absolutely everything is blooming around you and Mount. Rainer becomes visible again and life is good.”

Prior to saying goodbye to Atlanta, Pettis and bandmate Anna Jeter released It May Very Well Do, a 15-minute recording containing various movements, sounds and themes that falls somewhere between a single song and an EP. It's an exciting addition to the band’s catalog, capitalizing on its playful persona while advancing into more experimental songwriting territories.

The group has certainly been busy since then, revising its lineup with local Washingtonians, touring, and writing and recording the Live at Heavy Meadows album, which arrived in July. Given all that excitement, though, and the peculiar way vast distances catalyze forgetfulness, Pettis’ own debut album of solo recordings managed to fly somewhat under the radar.

Recorded with Atlanta engineer Graham Tavel and released quietly this past December under his full name, George Christian Pettis, Tallasassy finds the songwriter taking the folk leanings of 100 Watt Horse and Wowser Bowser’s warbled synths a little further while also exploring more traditional country fare. The new influences, Pettis says, are attributable to his older brother, Rayvon, whom Pettis lived with in the midst of a “crisis of faith.”

“Two autumns ago I hopped into my friend's car in Olympia, Washington, and spontaneously moved back across the country, ending up in Nashville, Tennessee,” Pettis says. “Over the next seven months [Rayvon] took me in and I paid my rent doing all the homework he assigned — listening to classic country.”

Country music had been a point of contention between the brothers, and as Pettis puts it, “I guess it took being down and out in Nashville myself to finally put my mind in the right place to really receive what Willie and Waylon were on about with all those sad love songs.”

Sure, there’s melancholy, loneliness and ruminations on death a’plenty across Tallasassy. But a like “Millionth Snow,” church organ instrumental “D.T.F.C.,” and the banjo and violin led “Atlanimals” — with a chorus that name checks Pettis’ Georgia roots — maintain a light wistfulness that's better suited for front porch rockin’ than closing time at the nearest watering hole.

As Pettis returns to Atlanta, touring with fellow country crooner and Atlantan Moses Nesh for “The Old Crow Meta Shit Show," he brings with him these traces of places that have formed both Tallasassy and the musician he is today: Atlanta’s up and comer, the Olympian transplant, and the “changed man” of Nashville. It’s difficult to contextualize the personal transformations in an individual from a few thousand miles away, but up close and personal it’s easier to see how everything is blooming and life is good.

Small Reactions roll with the punches

By now, nearly 10 years into a career playing music together, Small Reactions have learned how to roll with the punches. They’ve faced lineup changes, a nearly thousand-mile trek in a frigid van, fruitless label pitches, and even the all-consuming affair of raising kids — singer and guitarist Scotty Hoffman has two to be exact. A less determined band would surely have hung it up already and moved on to other, simpler life ventures. But Small Reactions is no lesser band.

Core members Hoffman, drummer and CL contributor Sean Zearfoss, and bassist Clinton Callahan have persisted, refining the group's Krautrock and post-punk sound over a handful of EPs, singles, mixtapes and a debut full-length, titled Similar Phantoms. With their latest effort, a sophomore album titled RXN_002, released Aug. 4 via Bear Kids Recordings, the self-described “nerve pop” purveyors deftly balance noisy discord with a tempered, melodic edge. Take the opening title track, which, after a few steady strums of a chiming electric guitar, finds Hoffman uttering a series of incantation-like lines over an arpeggiated acoustic guitar; a blistering, fuzzed-out lead line quickly takes over the mix, accompanied by tinkling bells, launching the record into a sweetly chaotic frenzy.

While Small Reactions’ music has always expressed a sense of immediacy — rhythms that reel at breakneck speeds, propelled by Hoffman’s teetering vocals — their second full-length feels like they have a newfound comfort and control amid that helter-skelter blueprint. It’s as if the brakes are out and the band is careening toward a cliff face, only to hit the switch at the last second, diverting course with a sly grin.

Finding this harmony, Hoffman says, has been a work in progress and is in large part the result of “being a compulsive, creative person put into the role of real life.” 

Hoffman is a father of two and happily married, but that doesn’t change the fact that he constantly has melodies running through his head. “Sometimes it affects how present you are,” he says. “You miss things. There’s a lot of conflict in that.”

Despite those domestic responsibilities that demand so much time from his life, Small Reactions have stayed busy, putting out two major releases over the course of the past year on Bear Kids: a mixtape of songs, snippets and sound collages called Night Reactions: MIX 001 and, most recently, the Notorious EP, which was much the result of that frigid van ride north.

Back in 2013, the group loaded into a 1987 Dodge Conversion van and headed to New York to play a showcase for a few label reps, putting it all on the line for a chance at breaking through and securing stability in an industry fraught with anything but. “It was already brutally cold and it didn’t help that the van had no heat. We bundled up, hoped for the best, and set sail,” reads the the group’s Bandcamp entry for Notorious. At the end of the night their performance didn’t lead to much more than you can “find [me] on the internet,” but the trip wasn’t made in vain. Studio time had been booked at Brooklyn’s Converse Rubber Tracks, where the band recorded Notorious and RXN_002 track “Controllerhead.”

“The label pitch was exciting and frustrating all in the same,” Hoffman says. “It’s like, you’re in the running, but you didn’t win or something. We didn’t let it affect us — it doesn’t really matter. I’m still going to write songs and play shows with this group and we will get there in some way.”

After that, the band continued writing material in preparation for a new full-length, but conveying the songs live just didn’t make sense as a three-piece.

“We had to reconfigure a bit after [organist] Sam [Jacobsen] left, and so it took a little longer than I would’ve liked,” Hoffman says. “A second record was always planned, it was just a matter of personnel, I think."

Roughly six months after Jacobsen’s departure, though, the band found what they needed. Former Del Venicci guitarist Ross Politi joined Small Reactions, adding what Hoffman describes as a “pretty dissonant” style to the group’s sound. Politi’s out-of-the-box thinking, especially in terms of production and bigger picture aesthetics has benefitted the band just as much as his idiosyncratic guitar playing. “I think we’ve hit a good sound with him,” Hoffman says. “On ‘El Dorado,’ he suggested we fill water bowls and hit them with spoons. It was perfect for the song, and I would’ve never thought of it.” 

So Hoffman and co. keep rolling with it, putting to song those moments where a little bit of pleasure seeps through a hectic routine, or an otherwise joyful experience takes a dark turn. It’s all there in RXN_002 — the frantic, driving groove of lead single “Sessions Street,” the beach-inflected surrealism of “Fatal Flaws,” the homestretch catharsis of “Sliding Glass Nightmare” — not a single element neglected. 

“One of the best things I’ve learned is to not waste a day,” Hoffman says, reflecting on an approach that applies to both the group’s work ethic and source material. Though it may seem Small Reactions flirt ever so closely with the edge, it’s these simple lessons that provide reassurance that the band has it all under control.

Tunabunny Releases a Sprawling, Beatles-Inspired Opus

If there’s one thing to be said about Tunabunny, it’s that the adventurous local rock group isn’t afraid to take an idea and run with it, unencumbered and open to where the creative process might lead it. Take the band’s previous two albums, Kingdom Technology and Genius Fatigue, which ostensibly discarded and reworked decades of the rock and pop lexicon. Loud and fast punk numbers made way for hook-laden power-pop before coalescing into off-kilter, synth-tinged drones. In other words, when it comes to Tunabunny, expect the unexpected.

It only came as a small surprise, then, when the band announced in May that its latest undertaking was a double LP mirroring The Beatles’ self-titled White Album titled PCP Presents Alice in Wonderland Jr.

“On the last couple of albums, we had so much material that we always had to cut song lengths to avoid running over time on the vinyl,” writes the band, which insists on being quoted collectively, via email. So, instead of trimming fat from the longer tracks and leaving others off altogether, the band offered to front HHBTM Records head Mike Turner the cash to accommodate its more sprawling songs. 

“But then, Mike being Mike, he said he’d just pay for it, and not to worry about it,” writes the band. “So we were stoked, thinking we could stretch out and do some longer songs like we used to do in the old days.”

Writing for the album commenced, but it didn’t involve sit-down sessions dissecting The Beatles’ masterwork song by song, notebooks haphazardly strewn about the room.

“We rely on accidents, serendipity, luck and inspiration to write our songs,” the band says. “Lyrics get written, but most of the time it’s just stuff that sounds cool or evocative—more like describing a film than straight-out telling a story. It’s only later, looking back, that we find connective tissue. There’s all kinds of clues and connections, but you’d have to put a lot of work in to find them.”

PCP Presents provides a welcome update to its original source material, now almost 50 years old. There’s a fair amount of “Ob-La-Di” pop playfulness on ”Incinerate” and “The Rest of Us,” but Tunabunny hits just as hard, if not harder, with a few “Revolution”s of its own. “Blackwater Homes” and “Boundless Informant” present cases of ominous danger, while the back end of the album follows a song cycle centered around motherhood, from delivery to postpartum isolation and the eventual reclamation of identity.

While the record is intended as a response to the White Album, it carries its own weight. The group admits it wasn’t its intention to write something so targeted at the perils and pleasures of 2017, though—it just kind of happened that way. “We didn’t set out to write a bunch of songs about life in the 21st Century—it’s because we live in the 21st Century that we ended up writing a bunch of songs about [it],” the band says. 

Sonically, the album is as stimulating as the times and its title suggest. “We wanted the album to be as four-dimensional as possible, to sound as gloriously eclectic as our record collections—that is to say, we wanted to sound inspired by everything: hi-fi, lo-fi, mid-fi, Spotify; Bandcamp, summer camp and writer’s cramp. This album was our chance to spread out, to indulge every idea, to push everything to its limit.”

For its PCP Presents release show, the band is adhering to a philosophy of prompt and early shows born from recent music bookings at the arthouse theater, like the Experimentique Night series and other HHBTM-sponsored performances. There will also reportedly be free pizza and music-video screenings involved.

From there, it’s back to preparing for unpredictability. “We’re planning on this album being a huge success, breaking the indie market wide open and propelling us on to playlists like KEXP and Sirius XMU, whereupon we’ll embark on a U.S. tour playing 1,000-seat venues, which will then build into more mainstream success—late-night talk shows in the fall and then a triumphant ‘SNL’ appearance just before Christmas. 

“But of course these are all just plans, and go ask Theresa fucking May what happens when you make plans,” says the band.

Wieuca Evolves With Guilt Complex

“When you first start playing shows, at least for us, we could only get dive bars [who wanted] us to play maybe three hours,” says Will Ingram, the singer and guitarist for local rock band Wieuca. “But we only had, like, five songs.

“Back in those days, we would sometimes play the set twice in the same show, without a break, because we didn’t have enough songs to play,” says Ingram. “We did some Ted Leo, some Truckers,” he continues. “‘This Charming Man,’” adds guitarist Jack O’Reilly, providing a cross-section of the band’s far-reaching influences and interests. 

It’s a familiar origin story: Band books gig, band plays mix of originals and covers, band begins to take on a form of its own. For Wieuca, a group whose live show has always maintained a high level of curiosity, spectacle and excitement, this early stage proved integral in shaping its sophomore full-length, Guilt Complex.

“That’s one thing that’s actually unique about this album relative to our other releases,” says Ingram. “A lot of road testing, and a major evolution between demos and initial concepts, kind of put through the live filter.”

Aside from a few singles, the band’s last release was a self-titled EP in 2014, providing it plenty of time in the interim to hash out songs live before settling on final arrangements.

“We spent about 14 months on the album, kind of picking at it,“ says Ingram. “[We] tried to figure out a way to make the songs the most dynamic so that it impacts a live audience. It’s all about range on this one.”

“Dynamic” is an apt description. A smattering of shoegazey passages, alt-country fare and ’90s-tinged emo come together seamlessly across the album’s 11 songs, recorded and produced by the band in various houses over the years. The mashup sounds odd on paper, but Wieuca makes it work.

“[I]t offers a lot to take a bite out of, but it’s all done through the lens of our haphazard recording process and live performance. So, the consistency comes from that, regardless of whatever genres we’re trying to mash together,” says Ingram. “With this album, we tried to make a lot of different genres fuse together, but to not let them cancel out and create just a bland melting pot of one monotonous drone.”

The record’s scope reveals a band that’s broadened its palette, no doubt due to the ample time it spent throwing ideas against the wall to see what stuck. It makes sense, then, that the ideas and themes expressed in Ingram’s lyrics reflect growth and evolving ways of thinking.

“Basically, in terms of the subject matter and the tone of the album, it spans five years,” he says, “so it covers a lot of ground. There’s a lot of different interpersonal development that took place in the meantime… Almost every song on the album has to do with… longevity and the precious, finite nature of life. So, there’s a lot of talking about life within the context of death, death within the context of life, aging.”

The record’s title came from a similarly weighty place. “In my opinion, a ‘guilt complex’ is an apartment building [or] theme park where all your conflicting convictions co-habitate. It’s a metropolis of discord… your brain,” says Ingram.

“Was that on the spot?” asks O’Reilly.

“Yeah, that was off the dome,” Ingram replies with a smile.

With much still to unpack, a Guilt Complex release show is planned for Friday evening, which Ingram says will be “an intimate evening of sensual music—an experience as physical as it is emotional.”

“And better than The Hernies,” quips drummer Rob Smith.