Tag: The Southern Cafe and Music Hall

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79.5 bandmates are romantic psychedelic soulmates

Brooklyn’s 79.5 is making a name for itself through ear candy soul and unique musical residencies. The group supports Chicano Batman at the Southern on Friday. Publicity photo

When 79.5 founder and frontwoman Kate Mattison started her band in 2012 she didn’t envision playing gigs in a setting that looked like something straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. But, three years later after adding five new members to the band, including vocalists Piya Malik and Nya Parker Brown, guitarist Matty McDermott, bassist Adrienne Hailey and saxophonist/flutist Izaak Mills, the magic happened. 79.5 was asked to play a series of shows on the Clipper City Tall Ship in New York.

“Those shows really brought the band to a whole ’nother level,” says Mattison. “It’s really hard to play on a boat but it’s so much fun. You can’t hear anything while you’re playing because the sound goes straight out to the water—and you may or may not get seasick.”

The band sold out the shows quickly. It was a big move for the Brooklyn-based group, which had played its first gig at Sunny’s, a small, historic dive bar in the neighborhood.

In September 2015, the band raised $8,654 through an Indiegogo page to help fund its debut album, Predictions, which Mattison credits to coming mostly from supporters in Brooklyn. “People on the street stop us and say, ‘Go get ’em. Go make a name for us out there,’” says Mattison. “The outpouring of love from that community has really helped lift us up.”

The album is slated for release this summer. “Overall, I’d say the record has a romantic theme to it, but it’s also kind of psychedelic and lofty. A lot of the songs are about relationships and what could go wrong or even just imagining a relationship.” The single “Terrorize My Heart,” which Mattison calls her “song revenge,” is about being cheated on. Meanwhile the band’s latest single, “Boys Don’t Be Afraid,” is about manning up and telling someone you love them despite past relationship drama.

Chicano Batman with 79.5 and Sad Girl
The Southern Café and Music Hall
March 24

While the band’s sound falls into a mix of genres—nu-soul, psychedelic pop, disco and R&B all weave through the dancey tunes—Mattison dubs it as “romantic psychedelic soul,” citing the influence of old soul records. “One of my biggest influences is Todd Rundgren, if you can believe that. It’s because I really like the chords that he uses on the piano. There’s a lot of major and minor seven chords,” says Mattison. “I would say—especially with the big sound of the band with all the singers—we have a Pointer Sisters and Rotary Connection kind of vibe.”

Since the addition of Malik and Brown, Mattison has developed an even stronger appreciation for unison singing and three-part harmonies.

The band’s alluring vocals attracted the attention of Los Angeles-based soul psych act Chicano Batman, who asked 79.5 to join them onstage last year for a set at The Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan.

“Without even hearing us they asked the three of us to do backup vocals at that show and we just killed it…it came naturally,” says Mattison.

That gig set the ball rolling for the band’s current tour with Chicano Batman, on which 79.5 will also provide backing vocals and keys during part of the headliner’s set.

“For me that’s the most exciting part, playing keys for somebody else’s music,” says Mattison.

As for the singing, Mattison enjoys the way her bandmates’ voices complement and contrast. “All three of us sing so differently. …I have a softer, more whispery voice. I would say Piya has a more cutting, stronger voice. She sings in Hindi and stuff like that so she can do a lot of trills, and then Nya is the R&B ringer,” says Mattison. “We’ve all sung our whole lives, so working together just came really easy for us.”

Going for gold

Why 79.5? Mattison says, “The band kind of sounds like AM gold, so [a friend] came up with the band name. It was like the name of a radio station that was below the dial, you know. I liked it. It wasn’t anything specific but it encompassed the sound of the band.”

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ARTS Pick: Chamomile and Whiskey

Chamomile and Whiskey rocks the Southern on Friday. Photo by Rich Tarbell

Nelson County’s Chamomile and Whiskey drove its inaugural release, 2007’s Wandering Boots, around the U.S. festival circuit to build a fanbase and define itself in the massive genre of Americana, leading to its current pace of more than 150 live shows per year. The band throws some extra Irish passion on its musical fire with a St. Paddy’s Day bash and the online release of the new single, “Solomon’s Reel,” from its album out this summer.

Friday, March 17. 8:30pm, $10-12. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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River Whyless patches world music influences into new album

River Whyless bassist Daniel Shearin (right) says that when the songs weren’t clicking for the new album, producer Justin Ringle of Horse Feathers pointed them in a new musical direction. Publicity photo

‘‘We all deserve the light” members of River Whyless croon on “Baby Brother,” the captivating opener on their second full-length album. The lyric resurfaces in the record’s final stretch: It’s both the name and crux of the closing track, before it fades into reverie. The Asheville-based quartet even used the line to inform the album title, We All The Light.

“We decided to take the word ‘deserve’ out just because it made it a little more curious, a little more ear-catching,” says bassist Daniel Shearin. “And it also made it a little more inclusive and it kind of says, instead of like, ‘We all deserve this thing that is the light that we’re reflecting on,’ it’s almost saying ‘We all are the light,’ in fact, instead of separate from it in some way.”

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This message of equality and hope is present throughout the album, which infuses string-laden folk with decidedly pop elements and flourishes of global music using violin, drums, harmonium, banjo, cello, guitars, piano and African instruments. In order to achieve such a diverse sound, the band came at the project with a different approach than it had in the past.

“I think the way that we’ve embraced most recently and with this record is to take verses from one song, a chorus from another or just riff from this random idea or words from this song put to the melody of this song. It’s very hodgepodge,” Shearin says. “When you’re writing a song, you kind of fall into the same patterns. And then when you take that pattern and remove part of it and put it on another pattern, then it kind of turns into this thing that we’ve never done before and a lot of that went on with this record.”

Shearin and the other band members Ryan O’Keefe (guitar, vocals), Halli Anderson (violin, vocals) and Alex McWalters (drums) met as students at Appalachian State University. They moved to Asheville, North Carolina, one-by-one after graduation. O’Keefe, Anderson and McWalters were already playing in a group together, and Shearin officially joined in 2012. He says Asheville has a way of seeping into the music.

“Musically, it’s filled with so many different things; you can kind of pick whatever you want. But there’s also the ubiquitous nature of the mountains…that kind of pulls the folk nature out of us, highlights it in a way that might not happen if we lived somewhere else,” he says. “The soul of the mountains is impossible to escape.”

River Whyless
The Southern Café and Music Hall
March 7

To glean different perspectives while songwriting, the band likes to decamp to areas outside of Asheville. The We All The Light sessions took them to a woodshed in Maine and a living room studio in Oregon belonging to Justin Ringle of the band Horse Feathers. After the group went on tour with Horse Feathers, Ringle offered to help produce its forthcoming record.

“We had this one batch of songs we’d been working on for quite some time and they weren’t clicking in a way that we were excited about,” Shearin says. “And we had two or three other songs that didn’t fit with this other group of songs.”

So they played Ringle the recordings and asked what he thought. He was way more interested in the extra songs that didn’t fit with the rest of the group.

“He was like, ‘You kind of have to pick one road or the other at this point,’” Shearin says. “And he was like, ‘You know, I suggest this road,’ and we all got on board with that pretty easily and that’s the sound that you hear on the record.”

That sound incorporates aspects of the world music that Shearin and the rest of the band are drawn to.

“I have listened to African music for a very long time, since high school and college. And the rest of the folks, I think they have, too,” Shearin says. “And together, we started exploring especially this one record by a band called Tinariwen—a North African band—that and some music from Asia.”

With arrangements and voices that dance around each other, the result is a ruminative collection of layers and textures that reveals something new with each listen. Songs like “Kalangala” were born by combining two different songs.

“All these little parts and bits and pieces of songs had been played around before that but then they were all like in this big melting pot and we pieced them all together,” Shearin says.

River Whyless’ global approach hasn’t gone unnoticed, and, in fact, the album’s title and content has received a renewed appreciation in the wake of the election.

“I think it’s something that’s changed its meaning with this past year’s political climate and it’s turning into something bigger than we initially intended and we’re accepting that and are very pleased with it, actually,” Shearin says. “We’re happy that that title especially and the songs that go with it seem to display a kind of inclusivity that seems to be on the chopping block in some ways these days.”

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ARTS Pick: Will Overman

Following up on the album Will Overman Band that was released in June, the Charlottesville-based group is currently on a run of triple-billing shows with The Vegabonds and Cris Jacobs. Publicity photo

Not only does Will Overman charm the crowd with his arsenal of lyrically enticing folk rockers, the lead singer can’t resist stepping off the stage and into the audience to groove among his fans. Following up on the album Will Overman Band, “a love letter to the Commonwealth of Virginia” that was released in June, the Charlottesville-based group is currently on a run of triple-billing shows with The Vegabonds and Cris Jacobs.

Friday, February 24. $12-15, 8:30pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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The Last Bison forges a new sound

Newly local, The Last Bison brings a fresh lineup and recently recorded tunes to the Southern on February 19. Photo by Jakob Wandel

Ben Hardesty is roaming Charlottesville. The frontman of indie folk- pop act The Last Bison moved to C’ville last August. Since then, the musicians that once comprised the band in its former home base of Chesapeake have scattered. Only six months on the new terrain, Hardesty is still trying to discover where he can get the juiciest bison burger in town, but he’s more focused on new music for The Last Bison, performing at the Southern on Sunday.

The band, formerly known as Bison, gets its name from Hardesty’s fascination with 19th-century American history.

“I thought the American buffalo/bison represented a lot of things about the way our country is because it has a pretty complicated past as an American icon,” he says. “It represents power but it also represents greed. It represents the creation of civilization but also the destruction of another one. I felt it was the most honest representation of what America really is.”

The Last Bison
The Southern Café and Music Hall
February 19

The Last Bison released Quill independently in 2011, then signed with Universal Republic and went on to release two albums—Inheritance and Sleigh Ride—in 2013. After being dropped, the band followed with two more independent albums, 2014’s VA and 2015’s Dorado.

Hardesty, 25, reflects on Dorado’s songs, which are based on his life experiences. The tracks even fall chronologically on the album, making it a play-by-play of Hardesty’s most memorable moments. “Souls in the Sand” is about his childhood journey across Bolivia. His missionary parents (his father is a pastor) went to remote jungles to build churches and train locals to be pastors. While they were working, Hardesty explored. That sometimes meant getting into trouble during his encounters with the wilderness—like losing his shoes in quicksand when he was 8 years old.

Since Dorado, there have been other coming-of-age moments, the biggest being Hardesty’s father’s departure from the band (to commit to his work as a pastor). Last summer, he performed his final show with his dad, who had been with The Last Bison from the start.

“My dad gave me a guitar [at the age of 12] and said, ‘It doesn’t matter how you play, just make it sound good,’” he says.

With the member shuffling (the band is currently made up of longtime members Andrew Benfante on keys and Amos Housworth on bass) have come changes to the band’s overall instrumentation. You won’t hear violin, banjo and mandolin, as before.

“We’ve definitely reduced the instrumentation a little bit,” says Hardesty. “It was a difficult transition with the music because you never want to force anything because people can see through fakeness.”

Last summer the band started recording songs for a new album that Hardesty says have an underlining theme of nostalgia. One of the newbies, “Gold,” also recalls Hardesty’s experience in the Bolivian Amazon.  “That song is a retelling of that transition for me as a very young child and a kid trying to process all that,” says Hardesty.

Skipping forward to another impressionable time is “The Glow,” inspired by Hardesty’s anxieties about the transition into adult life. “I was scared and anxious about how everything was going to work out, but there was a moment where I just knew everything was going to be okay, no matter what,” he says.

Now if he can only find that burger on the comfort food landscape.

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ARTS Pick: That 1 Guy

Feeling restricted by his instrument, classically trained bassist Mark Silverman traded his bass for a homemade rig he calls The Magic Pipe, and started slapping out and looping bizarre, futuristic, psychedelic funk songs. Publicity photo

Feeling bored with, and restricted by, his instrument, classically trained bassist Mark Silverman traded his bass for a homemade rig he calls The Magic Pipe, and started slapping out and looping bizarre, futuristic, psychedelic funk songs with titles like “The Moon is Disgusting,” “Buttmachine,” “Suckatash” and “Laser Beans.” Silverman, who performs as That 1 Guy, promises a pre-show magic act for VIP ticket holders and “no more Mr. Nice-That 1 Guy” on his Rainbows On Demand tour. “I’m bringing all my toys, lights, cameras, rock ’n’ roll, awoooooo!” he says.

Monday, February 20. $10-12, 8:30pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall. 103 S. First St., 977-5590.

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Margaret Glaspy gets to the point on new album

Margaret Glaspy plays the Southern on Wednesday, February 8. Publicity photo

Margaret Glaspy doesn’t mince words or deal in excess. Clocking in at a brisk 34 minutes, the singer-songwriter’s debut, Emotions and Math, made several best-of lists in 2016 with its blend of bluesy riffs and pared down rock ’n’ roll.

“I do like things boiled down to their kind of most distilled nature. That was a big priority for me in making [Emotions and Math],” Glaspy says. “I don’t like wandering around. I like getting to the point, for sure.”

There’s no beating around the bush on the record’s single, “You & I,” which opens with the grab-you-by-the-throat declaration, “Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us / And tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck / About you and I” with the qualifier tacked on almost as an afterthought. It’s the pinnacle of a record wrought with tension: The push-pull between her analytical side and her emotional side on the title track; between desire and independence on “Somebody to Anybody”; and between who she is and who others want her to be on “Pins and Needles.” While Glaspy’s lyrics are written from the first-person perspective, the “she” in question could be Glaspy herself or a fictional character whose point of view she’s taken on for the song.

“The process is mine, for sure, in making the record—that’s not something that’s shared with the audience. …And then once I release it, it’s totally theirs and I can’t really claim it anymore,” she says. “Those songs mean something completely different to me than they do probably to everyone else. I like it to be kind of without baggage for a listener to just enjoy it and have it be theirs whether they love it or they hate it.”

Glaspy got her start in the third grade playing the fiddle, and transitioned to the guitar as a way to further accompany other fiddle players. When she was in high school, she began playing shows steadily, which led to a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music for one semester. Afterward, she spent time working and performing in Boston before making the leap to New York, where she’s been for the past six years. It was in her bedroom in New York that she first recorded Emotions and Math with an acoustic guitar and upright bass. She was planning to release it on Bandcamp when ATO Records reached out.

“I [recorded] on an iPad first. The second version was on my computer with proper microphones and pre-amp and recording equipment. And then the third time, by the time I was just about to finish the second version, ATO called and asked me if I wanted to make a record,” she says. “So then I went into an actual studio and it kind of felt like I was covering my own songs.”

Glaspy self-produced the ATO release, and she says her methodical approach to production led to the record’s title, as she vacillated between both emotions and math.

“Essentially when I was making it, I made a lot of rules for myself and that was the more analytical side that really helped me get the record done and also not mull over it too much and have it released in a raw state where I wasn’t quite sure if it was done or not, but I said, ‘These are rules, I’ve gotta just keep going,’” she says. “So that part of it was the analytical. And the emotional was obviously just going through the process and the thoughts and heart that were put into the songs. That kind of made those two come together.”

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ARTS Pick: Spafford

Spafford performs Sunday, February 12, at The Southern.

Spafford takes everything it learned from jam legends such as Widespread Panic, Umphrey’s McGee, Particle and EOTO and channels it into a self-proclaimed form of “electro-funk therapy.” The Arizona foursome lays down epic meldings of dance rock, most of which clock in between 10 and 25 minutes, relying as much on its hard-driving sound as a full-throttle light and screen show to create a total sensory experience.

Sunday, February 12. $10, 9pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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ARTS Pick: Country Sweethearts

Tara Mills assembles a supergroup of Country Sweethearts to spread the love on Tuesday. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Ah, Valentine’s Day. A time to celebrate new flames and lasting flames and, for some, a time to weep into a heart-shaped box of half-eaten chocolates. Whether you’re looking to swoon or seethe over love this year, local all-star ensemble the Country Sweethearts, featuring Tara Mills, Terri Allard, Sarah White, Holly Allen and Carleigh Nesbit, have a song for you.

Tuesday, February 14. $12-15, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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ARTS Pick: Ryley Walker

Ryley Walker plays January 24 at The Southern. Publicity photo

Playing more than 200 shows in 10 months would earn most musicians a holiday, but Ryley Walker considered it a wind up to churning out Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, his most acclaimed album to date. Walker’s mounting fan base includes Robert Plant and UK bass legend Danny Thompson. A Pitchfork article raved, “Of all the songwriters trying their hand at this revivalist approach during the last decade, including Steve Gunn, Hiss Golden Messenger and Sharon Van Etten, Walker is the most natural and enviable.” Gold Connections opens.

Tuesday, January 24 . $10-12, 8:30pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St.
977-5590. thesoutherncville.com