NYS Music 20​16

Category: Rock

  • Hearing Aide: WOLF! ‘1-800-WOLF!’

    If you’re looking for some new music to wind down your day or rev up your evening, dial up 1-800-WOLF! for a good time. WOLF!’s new album was released today by Royal Potato Family.

    1 800 WOLF

    The band consists of guitarist Scott Metzger (JRAD, RANA), bassist Jon Shaw (Cass McCombs, Shakey Graves) and drummer Taylor Floreth. They were booked as the backing band for a singer at a Williamsburg club one night a few years ago. When the singer never showed up, instead of cancelling, the trio decided to play as an instrumental trio. With no material to go on, they winged it, filling the set with straight improvisation. It went exceedingly well and they were asked back for a regular gig. Thus WOLF! was born.

    Most of the music on the record, the follow up to their 2015 self-titled debut, was borne of improvisation, either on stage or in the studio. The only preconceived track is the Metzger-penned Ennio Morricone-esque “You Are No Longer My Friend, My Friend.” Each song soundtracks short scenes the listener can almost visualize. The environment of the music is so clear, and while certainly borrows from music’s past, emerges as an original thought that is entirely of WOLF!’s making. There’s the surf rock late-night blues of “Furry Freedom,” the slinky Cuban groove of “Tomatillo Verde,” the swinging gypsy of “Oaxaca Ox,” the dripping Western romance of “Denim Love Affair” and on and on. “Bohemian Grove,” lilting and lazy, swells like the tide on a secluded island until it crashes in a wave on the sandy shore.

    The only thing that raises questions on this breeze of a listen is the band name WOLF! The music doesn’t have the scream of all-caps nor the exclamatory punctuation. The music moves effortlessly from song to song, scene to scene, location to location. Perhaps, since the band backed into it’s existence, it would make more sense to read the name backwards? Indeed, the name “flow.” would suit this music quite well.

    As good as 1-800-WOLF is, a band born on stage is surely best enjoyed on stage. The tri-state area has multiple chances to catch WOLF! live in the coming weeks, including opening for, and backing, Nicole Atkins on a few dates.
    10/14 – The Acoustic – Bridgeport, CT
    10/15 – Still Partners – Sea Cliff, NY
    10/ 20 – Hometown BBQ – Brooklyn NY
    10 /23 – Ardmore Music Hall – Ardmore, PA
    10/25 – LPR – NYC*
    10/26 – BSP Kingston – Kingston, NY*
    10/28 – House of Independents – Asbury Park, NJ*
    * notes dates w/ Nicole Atkins

    Key tracks: Tomatillo Verde, Bohemian Grove, Slow Stuff

  • Just the Tip is Night 1 of the 3 Day Halloween Indoor Fest at Anthology

    Just the Tip is the start of a three day Halloween event at Anthology in Rochester, NY. Kicking off on Thursday, October 27, this ALL AGES show, featuring regional bands and headliners each night for a sensational music experience.

    On Thursday, Level 7, Joe Driscoll, Funknut and Subsoil perform sets throughout the night, performing from 8:30 PM until 2 AM. Save money by purchasing the three-night ‘megaticket’ and enjoy PBR specials at Just the Tip.

    Friday, October 28 features Thunder Body, Danielle Ponder and the Tomorrow People, with Saturday night performances from The Blind Owl Band, The Honey Smugglers, and Mulberry Soul. Friday tickets are $20 and Saturday tickets are $16.

    Thursday schedule:

    Doors: 8:00 PM
    Level 7: 8:30 PM to 9:00 PM
    Joe Driscoll: 9:00 PM to 9:30 PM
    Funknut: 9:30 PM to 11:00 PM
    Joe Driscoll: 11:00 PM to 11:30 PM
    Subsoil: 11:30 PM to 1:00 AM
    Joe Driscoll: 1:00 AM – 1:30 AM
    Level 7: 1:30 AM to 2:00 AM

    Known for their high-energy live shows, Subsoil is lyric-driven live Hip-Hop music. Subsoil’s performance wields a keen edge of razor-sharp lyricism, with equal emphasis on tight grooves and furious improvisations within a funky dance aesthetic.

    Funknut formed in 2006 when Tony Gallicchio and Tristan Greene started playing together as a key and drum duo. Since then, Funknut has expanded and has been blessed to play with a rotating cast of talented musicians with Tristan and Tony as the core. In 2009, Sean McLay became a permanent member of the band holding down the low end and making things even funkier than before. In 2010, good friend Paul McArdle joined in on the guitar. Fans of improvisation, each Funknut show is different from the next.

    Joe Driscoll was born in Syracuse, New York. He performs solo, and uses recorded loops of his own beatboxing and live looping using a sampler to fuse hip-hop, reggae, soul, folk and roots rock. During 2007 and 2008, Driscoll has toured with Dirty Pretty Things, Regina Spektor, Coldcut, and The Sugar Hill Gang at events in the US and Europe.

    Level 7 (Skribe & DJ 2way) are a hip-hop duo who have been blessed to share the stage with bands such as Mosaic Foundation, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, Thunderbody, Subsoil, Sophistafunk, Danielle Ponder and TheTomorrow People, and Cha Cha & the Ndor Band.

  • Bob Dylan Awarded 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature

    The Swedish Academy announced today that it will award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The announcement breaks with convention, as past recipients of the prize have composed primarily in one or more of the traditional genres of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or drama.

    According to the New York Times story by Altar, Chan, and Sisario, “the Nobel comes with a prize of eight million Swedish kronor, or just over $900,000. The literature prize is given for a lifetime of writing rather than for a single work.” Dylan is the first American to receive the honor since Toni Morrison in 1993.

    bob dylan Nobel Prize
    Photo by Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

    Dylan is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, having been inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, while receiving twelve Grammy awards, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a special citation from the Pulitzer prize committee, Kennedy Center honors, a National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom along the way. With this capstone achievement, Dylan has indubitably fulfilled the destiny many of his fellow musicians ascribed to him long ago. As Jerry Garcia had it, “Dylan gave rock n’ roll the thing I’d wished it had when I was a kid—respectability, some authority. He took it out of the realm of ignorant guys banging away on electric instruments and put it somewhere else altogether.” Though Garcia did not live to see it, we now know that ‘somewhere else altogether’ is to be among the planet’s foremost creators and thinkers in the annals of the Swedish Academy.

    Bob Dylan was born as Robert Allen Zimmerman May 24, 1941 in Duluth, MN, and was subsequently raised in nearby Hibbing, MN. At the age of nineteen, he cut out for Greenwich Village with a few songs and a guitar, a wannabe folk singer following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie. It was during this time, while performing at coffeehouses like the Gaslight Café and the Café Wha? that he honed his songwriting talent, cultivated his creative persona, and whetted his deft delivery to a razor-sharp edge. With the help of famed producer John Hammond, he released his eponymous debut in 1962. Its follow-up, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out in 1963, and when the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary recorded the timeless single “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it skyrocketed to number two on the Billboard charts, thus catapulting Bob Dylan into the American consciousness. In August of 1963, at the age of twenty-two, Dylan, accompanied by Joan Baez, performed “When the Ship Comes In” and “Only a Pawn In Their Game” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom just before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

    Over the course of his decades-long career, Dylan has confounded audiences at every turn. In 1965 he took the Newport Folk Festival by storm, toppling the acoustic expectations of the folk enthusiasts in a blaze of electric guitar-driven guerrilla rock heretofore unknown, declaring “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,” and taking the whole of pop music with him. In 1966, during the height of a hugely successful foray into electric rock, which saw the release of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, following a devastating motorcycle crash, he disappeared from the scene altogether, holing up with The Band in Woodstock, NY to work on The Basement Tapes in secrecy, which would not be released until 1975. Of this period, Allen Ginsberg said, “He was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something. Each line had to advance the story, bring the song forward…There was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath.”

    Photo by Billy Name, 1963
    Photo by Billy Name, 1963

    More surprises followed in the coming decades, as Dylan went on to record a country album, 1969’s Nashville Skyline, score and star in the 1970 film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and embrace a Christian rock phase, during which he released Slow Train Coming in 1979 and Saved in 1980. And in the years leading up to and following the turn of the millennium, Dylan experienced a profound reemergence as a supremely influential songwriter, albeit in a decidedly more jaded, wise, and curatorial register than that of his younger self’s high-strung psychedelic prophecies. His influence spread for the first time to a younger generation in search of stability in insoluble times, and for the second time for an older generation having grown decidedly jaded, wise, and curatorial themselves. Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006), Together Through Life (2009), and The Tempest (2012) form the canon for the latter half of Dylan’s recording career, which he has dutifully supported on his “Never Ending Tour,” which has been going strong since 1988. In keeping with tradition, Dylan has continued to defy expectations over the last few years by releasing a trio of classic cover albums, taking on tunes mostly from the traditional Christmas and Sinatra catalogues.

    In addition to a prolific songwriting career, Dylan is a recognized painter, poet, scriptwriter, and memoirist. His drawings and paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world and featured in his Drawn Blank series, his experimental prose-poetry piece, Tarantula, appeared in 1971, a compilation titled “Writings and Drawings” was released in 1973, and his memoirs, Chronicles, came out in 2004.

    In what has been a strange and unsurprising autumn already, the announcement of Bob Dylan, a simple song and dance man, as the newest Nobel laureate in literature comes as yet another strange unsurpise. Strange in that, like most aging institutions, we are here to stand witness to the dissolution of the borders and guidelines that have so far constituted the Nobel prize for literature; yet unsurprising because Bob Dylan’s mystic oral erudition is so worthy and deserving of this honor, despite having immigrated from a genre far, far away. Perhaps Kris Kristofferson, the songwriter, actor, Rhodes scholar, and William Blake expert, offered the best summary of Dylan’s body of work, proclaiming, “His songs take us to another level. He is absolutely a poet. He made songwriting into an art form, and made it worthy of committing your soul to.”

    For more information, including tour dates and tickets, check out bobdylan.com, and for a full list of this year’s Nobel laureates visit nobelprize.org.

    And if you need “something to open a new door / to show you something you seen before / but overlooked a hundred times or more,” then enjoy Bob Dylan’s spoken word performance, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” from 1963.

    bob Dylan Nobel Prize

  • Set Up Like a Bowling Pin: JRAD Knocks Down the Brooklyn Bowl Run

    If the Brooklyn Bowl ever decides to create a Hall of Fame, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) can be sure to add “Fall Ball 2” to their list of accomplishments. As Saturday night wrapped up the sold out three-show run for this incredible quintet, I will non-apologetically say that they are the most important “cover band” in the world and are potentially better than anything Grateful Dead related today. The Bowl was where they capitalized on their first run as a newly developed powerhouse and years later, this all-star side project has become nationally recognized and a force to be reckoned with.

    “Blues for Allah” welcomed the crowd to the show. The Dead rarely performed the spacey and complex composition live, which JRAD seems to greet as a challenge and ambitiously took the “Blues” to another level before stepping into a starry “Eyes of the World.”   A delicate transition into “Minglewood Blues” was highlighted by Scott Metzger’s fiery guitar solo turning into the first fist-pumping barn-burner of the night. The band slowly eased into “The Wheel” with an extended jam taken over by Tom Hamilton in between the first and second verses. I couldn’t help getting chills as the five pieces screamed out the lyrics “bound to cover just a little more ground.” Observing the usual peaks and valleys of “The Wheel” from a viewpoint that only JRAD could capture was truly a magical experience and one of the highlights of the first set.  The breathtaking transition into “Ramble On Rose” got the predictable crowd explosion as “just like New York City” was sung to their hometown audience. There was a Tom Hamilton lyrical mishap but with the room in a trance, nobody seemed to give a flying flub.

    Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” was technically the night’s first cover that this cover band covered (make sense?). The cowboy song gave the thirsty crowd a few short minutes to grab a beer before returning for the otherworldly “Morning Dew.” The unusually energetic intro to the tune made some Heads scratch their beards but the euphoric meltdown in the middle orchestrated by Joe Russo’s team-captain drumming leadership was as mellow as it gets on a Saturday night. The always-powerful refrain was given some extra juice by Dave Dreiwitz’s bass bombs shaking the rafters as the first set came to an impressive close.

    The second set got asses shaking right off the bat with “Crazy Fingers” and I am pretty sure you could actually smell the reggae influenced magic in the air. Another incredibly silky transition led to the monster “Truckin’” and once again the crowd showed some extra excitement in the lyrical reference to New York. The band also got a kick out the lyrics “set up like a bowling pin” which was evident by their ear-to-ear smiles as they exchanged glances. Joe Russo instigated a quick “The Other One” tease to keep the set list note takers on their feet, but the scribes weren’t disappointed with the next rarity, Donny Hathaway’s “Magnificent Sanctuary Band” popularly performed by the Jerry Garcia Band.

    “Help On The Way> Slipknot” was the jazzy cherry on top of the second set sundae and gave Marco Benevento a chance to have his wings spread bright on the organ. Where Hamilton vocally shined during the first section, Benevento added a haunting solo during the thick of the jam. While many came to expect a glowing and upbeat “Franklin’s Tower” to be the other piece of bread to this incomplete sandwich, Benevento and Russo teamed up to create an eerie transition into “Estimated Prophet” which was reminiscent of an early Pink Floyd sample. Benevento used an effect that sounded like a spaceship in Atari’s Galaga being abducted by a larger spacecraft and the retro noise was very suitable at this point in the night. The first guest appearance came during the set closer as Chris Harford (Band of Changes) joined the boys for Neil Young’s “Hippie Dream” off the 1986 album, Landing on Water.  The gritty and bluesy piece gave each member the instrumental spotlight for a moment before they stepped off stage.

    The encore was an unannounced nod to a long time friend and JRAD enthusiast that recently passed away. “He Was a Friend Of Mine”, a traditional folk song popularized by Bob Dylan was performed acoustically as the members displayed their first sorrowful tone on stage since “Morning Dew.” This version is not to be confused with the “He Was a Friend of Mine” cited in Grateful Dead set lists throughout the mid to late 1960’s and felt more like something you may hear off a Garcia/ Grisman compilation. While the somber acoustic tune mourned the loss of a loved one, “Not Fade Away” celebrated their friend’s life and memory. The boys were back on their electric instruments as half the crowd “air keyed” along with Marco. Seasoned Deadheads began the “Not Fade Away” ending clap-chant combo along with the band, which echoed for a solid five minutes even after they left the stage. Security opened the exits encouraging fans to leave, but the community energy was keeping everyone warm inside and sure enough, the group came back for a surprise second encore, “Bertha” to cap off an incredible evening.

    As the house music played and the audience finally began to exit the venue, I couldn’t help but stare at the vintage poster that has hung above the side doors since the early days of the Brooklyn Bowl. While the band’s title bares the description “Almost Dead” the words next to this mystical werewolf poster read “Real, Alive” and after a throw down like Saturday night, I think we can all side with the wolf.

    Joe Russo’s Almost Dead is covering a little more ground at the Brooklyn Bowl on December 29th before taking a short trip north for their two night New Year’s run at the Capitol Theatre on December 30th and 31st. Tickets are going fast and after this past weekend they are sure to sell out soon!

  • Photo Gallery: Adirondack Independence Music Festival 2016

    Lake George hosted the Adirondack Independence Music Festival on September 30th, and October 1st. With the lineup this year, you would never guess that this is only the 2nd year for this event. This years festival featured sets from headlining acts; Robert Randolph and the Family band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and the Spin Doctors, as well as some local favorites Rich Ortiz, and Formula 5. Were excited to see this festival grow in the upcoming years! Check out the full 2016 lineup below, and re-live some photos from Saturday!

    Adirondack Independence

  • Frank Palangi Ready To ‘Break These Chains’ With New Video

    Upcoming rocker and Queensbury native Frank Palangi, has recently released a video for his new single “Break These Chains.” With this track, Palangi just keeps getting better and better, and “Break These Chains” is one of Palangi’s hottest recordings to date. The multi-talented Palangi hooks you with his husky gritty vocals on the track while showing off some of his guitar skills in the video.

    Palangi caught the eye of Daughtry guitarist Brian Craddock, and was invited record the “Break These Chains” single at Craddock’s the Cat Room Recording Studio in Charlottesville, Virginia. When talking about Palangi, Craddock stated that Frank is an amazing young artist, with a very clear and focused direction, he knows who he is. He went on to say that Palangi is a killer singer and guitar player and is an artist to look out for.

    The frontman has been making a name for himself opening many shows across the northeast for some pretty recognizable names in rock over the years including Buckcherry, 3 Doors Down, Trapt, Aaron Lewis, Lacey Sturm, Powerman 5000 and Starset to name a few. The singer/songwriter has also appeared on some major music festivals in the capital region including the Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival that featured Alice in Chains and Janes Addiction, and the first ever Rock ‘N Derby, which saw the likes of Shinedown, Ghost, Megadeth, Sevendust and Sixx: A.M.

    The vocalist has also appeared on numerous local media outlets on television and print including News Channel 13, Fox 23 News, Albany Times Union, The Chronicle and The Saratoga Spotlight.

    Besides himself, Frank Palangi’s band consists of guitarist Jared Curtis and Josh Opitz behind the kit.

  • Blackberry Smoke rolls into Upstate Concert Hall

    Blackberry Smoke tells everyone that they are too country for rock and to rock for country, and that was on full display Saturday night as they tore up the Upstate Concert Hall. Lead vocalist and guitarist Charlie Starr, Bassist Richard Turner, drummer Brit Turner, guitarist Paul Jackson and Brandon Still on keyboards ripped through a set that contained songs from their long 16-year career.

    blackberry smoke upstate concert hallCapping off a weekend of headlining shows after opening up for the legendary Gov’t Mule all summer Blackberry Smoke proved to everyone in attendance that they deserve to be in a headlining spot. They are one of the tightest live bands this writer has seen with everyone on the band playing off of and complimenting each other to the fullest. Blackberry Smoke seamlessly blends Southern Rock, Country, Hard Rock and Jam music into their own style and they did it to near perfection. Starr’s vocals live are just as smooth as they are on a recording.

    Mid-way through the show there was a distinct sticky smell in the air near the front of the stage which led to Charlie Starr to make a new impromptu song which he called “Front Row Reefer”, which was basically an ode to the best reefer being in the front of the house and the skunk was in the back. After riffing on the new song he asked the crowd if anyone got that on video. Maybe the cut will make the next album.

    blackberry smoke upstate concert hallBlackberry Smoke play their music their way and have not changed that thinking over their long career, and it now seems people are finally starting to take notice. They have gone from a bar band to a band that is capable of headlining arenas, and this writer for one hopes that more people take the time to listen to them and appreciate one of the truly great modern bands that is keeping the rock and roll spirit alive.

    Opening the show was Philadelphia’s Stolen Rhodes whose brand of Southern rock got the packed crowd heated up.

    Blackberry Smoke are on tour supporting their upcoming new release “Like an Arrow” which is slated to be released on October 14, 2016.

    blackberry smoke upstate concert hall

  • Project/Object Kicks-Off Northeastern Tour

    New Jersey-based Frank Zappa tribute band Project/Object will be touring the Northeast United States through October 23rd with stops at Mavericks  in Ontario, Canada on Friday, October 7; The Garrison in Ontario, Canada on Saturday, October 8; at The Tralf in Buffalo, New York on Sunday, October 9 and at Lovin’ Cup in Rochester, New York on Monday, October 10.

    Founded in 1989 by guitarist/vocalist André Cholmondeley, Project/Object has gone through numerous lineup changes since its inception, hosting more Zappa alumni than anyone other than Zappa himself. Project/Object welcomes back alumni vocalist/guitarist Ike Willis and synthesizer legend Don Preston for a tour  “Celebrating 50 years of The Music Of Frank Zappa” featuring material both men recorded with The Mothers Of Invention, The Frank Zappa band, and much more!

    NYSMusic’s Amy Cavalier recently caught up with Cholmondeley about the upcoming tour and what it’s like being in the longest-running Zappa alumni tribute band in the world!

    NYS Music: Tell me the story behind Project Object’s inception? What was the vision for the project?

    André Cholmondeley: My vision for the project was simply to turn people onto music that was very influential and important to me.

    Around 1989 I started having a Frank Zappa birthday party at my apartment. We would listen to only Zappa music for 24 hours and read interviews read album covers etc. I realized that many people were showing up and did not know a lot about Zappa and left with names of records and songs scribbled on paper. This is way before the blow up of the Internet so people would come back the next year having searched record stores and maybe built a little Zappa collection.

    About the third and fourth year, my band played at one of these parties, performing about a half-dozen Zappa songs. It went over great so we learned another half dozen and soon we played our first gig in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It just blew up from there. Next was Lion’s Den in New York City where we connected with our first managers Howie Schnee and Mike Maietta.

    NYS Music: A pretty high bar has been set by Frank Zappa, his son Dweezil other Zappa tribute bands…what makes Project Object so unique?

    AC: Indeed Dweezil’s band is incredible.I think what makes us unique in our way is that we went out and did it before other bands, over twenty years ago. We were the first band to tour with so many diverse Zappa alumni across the USA and into Canada since Zappa himself took them on the road. We also were the first to do a wide variety of his music

    The Grandmothers (ex Zappa/Mothers members) were out there but they tended to do the very excellent early stuff ONLY. We went out there with Ike Willis then Napoleon Murphy Brock etc. and did material from every period in Zappa’s history.

    NYS Music: Is there a lot of pressure to get it right and recreate the songs as accurately as possible? Or is there still room for improvisation?

    AC: The fans know every note! We strike the balance between doing some tunes as close to the record as we can, with the correct sounds and timbre and instrumentation. And then other things we do – perhaps one of Zappa’s many live versions – we look for moments in the songs where he would leave room for improvisation.

    Improvisation is very important part of the Zappa aesthetic but at the core is doing the music accurately and getting chords and little parts correct. I have been fortunate to have so many of the actual ex-Zappa players in the band so along the way they correct parts and help us get little details right.

    NYS Music: There have been a lot of stories about Zappa’s family and disagreements over copyright issues, as well as stories floating around about bad blood between you and Dweezil, in the news. How do you get away with playing songs without infringement issues? And has the air cleared between you and Dweezil?

    AC: Early on we got so many threats from Gail Zappa that we sought the advice of a lawyer and I learned a lot about copyright law. It’s very basic and simple. As long as the venue you are performing is paying their American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) or Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) membership dues for publishing rights, you are fine. That’s why there is an enormous business in cover bands of every genre imaginable. It was always completely legal to do what we do. In the Project/Object entire career of over two decades we have had to cancel two, maybe three gigs because the venue was not part of ASCAP membership.

    I think the NPR interview I did “NPR Zappa Lumpy Legacy” is the final word on it. NPR spoke to me as well as Gail Zappa and independent legal

    counsel and they said on national radio that as long as the club is certified it’s no problem playing published music of any artist.

    As far as the recent history about the copyright issues and the Zappa family, a lot of what happened was due to the wishes and direction of Gail Zappa. Now that she is gone there is a real splintering of stuff and the siblings are sadly in dispute over many issues.

    Even before she passed away I made peace with Dweezil and have seen his band several times. He was very gracious about accepting my apologies for the previous bad vibes. He was aware it flowed in both directions. This thawing of the ice has continued after Gail Zappa’s passing and Dweezil has been very public talking about how the Zappa family trust unfairly charged him for various things and made it difficult for him to just go out and play the music.

    I’m happy to say that through his agent, Dweezil and I worked together recently to plan out these historic appearances that Ike Willis is doing with his band. I want to support anything and everything that celebrates Frank’s music.

    NYS Music: Your partner was in a serious car accident recently which caused you to postpone your tour. How is she doing and why have you decided to resume the tour at this point in time?

    AC: While Robin is still experiencing a fair amount of pain and difficulties she has come a long way in what is almost seven months since the accident. She will be with us on this tour in a very tentative and basic role – we are trying to see how much she can do safely in her regular job as merch and Production Assistant. We hated canceling that tour and she is happy to be out on this one and to be able to personally thank so many of the fans who helped us out.

    NYS Music: What is the feeling going into this tour?

    AC: We just love to play and get out and travel and this is a great time of year to do so. We have a few things we have never done before, some stuff we have not done in a decade or more, balanced with a couple of the Zappa song-along, crowd favorites that you almost have to do, so it’s a mix!

    We are upbeat and excited to get out there playing this incredible music again. Also Zappa lyrics, without even touching them up, have a timeless political accuracy and so getting out right before yet another ridiculous American election season is kind of perfect.

    For more information about Project/Object visit www.projectobject.com or follow Project/Object on Facebook or Twitter.  

  • Glass Animals Brings Dance Party to Sold Out Show

    British indie rock group Glass Animals finished their two-night New York City run on Thursday night at Terminal 5. The evening began with opener Pumarosa. Lead woman Isabel Munoz-Newsome captivated the audience with her sultry voice and funky dance moves. Their unique sound, which combines disco beats with electric guitar solos, tight bass lines and an occasional saxophone playing in the background filled the space nicely. Their closing song, “Priestess” was a 10-minute long dance party that got everyone in the crowd moving and pumped up the adrenaline for the headliner, Glass Animals.

    Glass Animals The venue was packed, and there was barely room to move in the general admission area. During the agonizing 45 minute long set change, the crowd started to get a little rowdy, pushing and shoving to try to make more space. Glass Animals finally came out, opening the set with their hit “Life Itself,” and the mood in the venue lightened. Everyone starting dancing and having a great time.

    The sound was impressively clear, and front man Dave Bayley didn’t miss a note all night. The band seemed to be having just as much fun as the audience, and the feedback between the two created a great atmosphere. The set list was well balanced with older songs, such as “Black Mambo,” “Gooey,” and “Cocoa Hooves.” They also played a lot of songs from their new album, closing the evening with a version of “Pork Soda” that included a long freestyle section at the end that had everyone rocking out.

    The band was well-rehearsed and knew how to create a fun atmosphere for their audience. Everyone was on their feet, dancing around and completely absorbed in the music. The light show was simple but effective. The band was often washed in pink, green, or red which really complimented the rock-band-at-a-discotheque vibe they were going for.

    Dave Bayley came into the crowd for the encore, serenading fans with a cover of Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown.” It was funky and original, and fans loved it. The band put on a great show, captivating an anxious New York City audience that just wanted to dance.

  • March Fourth Struts its Stuff at the Boulder Theater

    Confetti bursts of brass, acrobatics, Balkan music, writhing sweat-covered bodies, salsa, electro-swing, and funk mayhem exploded September 24 at the Boulder Theater with the arrival of the foot stomping March Fourth band from Portland Oregon. With about 20 performers, including stilt walkers, acrobats and a fierce percussive, brass-laden musician blazed its way through a wild set to promote the release of their new album, Magic Number.

    Known as much for its steampunk circus costumes and vaudeville acrobatics, March Fourth has transitioned from its larger community band roots to a streamlined touring band devoted to its music. What started in 2003 as a one-off performance for a Fat Tuesday party in Portland has grown into a successful national touring act, averaging nearly 200 shows a year.

    Colorado music fans have made March Fourth musicians feel like they have a second home. And with raw power and frenetic urgency, the band barreled out of the wood of the Northwest into Boulder like some kind of musical, Mardi Gras Bigfoot with its woolly  hair on fire.  March Fourth blasted its way through mostly original tunes that transformed the Boulder Theater  into a rollicking, steamfunk, booty-shaking, rock-and-roll circus party that even Barnum and Bailey would envy.