Tutlie, TJ Kong and the Atomic Bomb, Lost in Company and More @ The Caravan Music Festival Belgrade, Maine.
Text and images by Jason Melcher.
After a long journey, I finally stepped out of my car to stretch. It was almost 4 o’clock in the morning and the caffeine was beginning to wear off. Exhausted, I leaned back, taking in a deep breathe of fresh air, and my attention was immediately drawn to the sky. The Milky Way burned brilliantly above. The familiar and pleasant scent of a campfire wafted toward me and I could just make out the sound of laughter and the strumming of an acoustic guitar.
After driving nearly 500 miles, I had finally arrived at the Caravan Music Festival.
The festival was born six years ago in a quarry surrounded by lush forest, on the edge of the Great Pond, a massive lake in Belgrade, Maine. What started as a camping trip with some close friends eventually turned into a gathering of around two dozen bands and a few hundred people, almost all locals from Philadelphia.
This year featured live performances by S.T.O.P., Community Service, Static Mountain, Dead Tenors, Tall and Flightless, Hollander Crouse Duo, The Great Vibration, Tutlie, TJ Kong and the Atomic Bomb, Driftwood Soldier, Lightninging, Lost in Company, The Radicans, Manterial Girl, Doubting Thomas Cruise Control, Out of the Beardspace, Penrose, Jesus Christ Goddamnit (JCGD), The Pat Friend Five, Souldiers of Soul, and Sinking Ocean Gods.
WIN FREE TICKETS: Smallpools @ The TLA in October!
The TLA announced this morning that LA based, indie poppers Smallpools will play the South Street venue on October 29 and we’re giving away tickets now.
To enter to win a pair, email us at FreeJumpStuff@gmail.com (give us your name and put “Smallpools” in the subject line).
You can get tickets here if you don’t want to take the chance.
Here they are last November when they played The TLA.
Kindred The Family Reunion @ Chew Playground with Jazmine Sullivan, Suzann Christine, Jaguar Wright and More.
Kindred The Family Soul held a family picnic at 19th and Washington and invited everyone, thanks to State Representative Jordan Harris.
And it seemed like everyone in South Philly showed up at Chew Playground, including some of Philly’s finest R&B, neo-soul and hip-hop performers.
Huey West and the White Cheddar Boys @ Kung Fu Necktie with The Outhouse and Illian Village.
Text and images by Jumah Chaguan.
Huey West and the White Cheddar Boys played at Kung Fu Necktie Friday in what was a three-band lineup that included The Outhouse and Illian Village. As part of the opening act, Huey West, once accustomed to busking, took a moment to reflect on the band’s recent success.
“It kinda dawned on me,” said West. “We are playing at Kung Fu and on a Friday night!”
And it was a success. West and the White Cheddar Boys played to a large crowd. This time, Rob Seitz, frontman for The Outhouse, joined the White Cheddar Boys on stage to play harmonica solos.
With Seitz as guest wingman, it was a reunion of sorts for West and Seitz. They’ve known each other since high school. West gives credit to Seitz for introducing him to the world of banjo music.
After the White Cheddar Boys set, The Outhouse took the stage.
Seitz, armed with several harmonicas and intense vocals, sounded like the perfect cross between The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Bob Dylan.
“There is a drum pulsating in everyone/There is a noise so powerful, it destroys the powerful,” sang Seitz in “Thunder.”
With lyrics about everyday truths delivered in rock ‘n’ roll and punk sounds, The Outhouse’s latest full-length will please anyone with a penchant for the gritty.
The rock beat was held together by drummer Ryan Overly, who played so well that one has to suspect whether he’s really a robot or just born with drum sticks for arms. Evan Gentry, the bass player, was equally as good.
The band – which was rounded out by drummer Ryan Overly and bass player Evan Gentry – formed while they were all students at Millersville University about eight years ago.
This gig in Philly was their last before embarking on a six-city tour through the Midwest, with stops in Chicago and Tennessee. The band is scheduled to play Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar upon their return in September.
Diplo @ Union Transfer with Gent & Jawns.
Text and images by Grace Dickinson. Video by Laura Fanciullacci.
There was a sold out show. There was a packed floor of dancing and constant hands thrown in the air. There was pool paraphernalia floating around, like Styrofoam noodles and beach balls, and water skyrocketing through the air. There was dancing. There was grinding. There were condom balloons and a nearly 90 percent show of full-on sex on the middle of the floor.
Text by Chad Sims. Images by Paul Imburgia.
It has been a few years since Cynic last performed in Philadelphia but last Thursday night, they rocked the TLA. All those in attendance were stoked to see the band that almost wasn’t (see my interview here) but this night they were and it was incredible.
None of the four bands that played this show are easily classifiable, so it is great to hear and see them sharing a stage and hopefully exposing the audience to some new bands.
Josh Miller: Still Alive and Filled With Music.
Text by Christopher Malo. Image by Marie Alyse Rodriguez.
There are stories that are meant to be told. And there are people that are meant to tell those stories. Josh Miller possesses the rare ability to embody both of these sentiments.
“I’m not the songwriter who will just sit down and tell the story of something,” Miller explains about his process. “It’s always something in my life that I’m trying to work out and work through.”
The 21-year-old singer/songwriter has more than enough material to fill notebooks with lyrics and sheet music with notes. Most comfortable finding refuge behind a piano or a guitar, the songs he adds – then removes – from his Soundcloud page might give one the impression he is searching. Searching for a genre of music to focus on. That is until you press play and realize that he is deft and adept at several types, from orchestral indie rock to post rock, to hip-hop covers to acoustical mashups over Skrillex tracks.
Calling All Lame-Os!
Text by Beth Ann Downey. Images by Rachel Del Sordo.
Lame-O Records has given itself a simple description: “Punk. Indie. Coffee. Pez Dispensers.” That’s how the label describes itself on Facebook.
Though there’s a lot of that, there’s one more thing that founders Eric Osman and Emily Hakes modestly left out: Lame-O Records is run strictly on passion.
Osman started Lame-O in order to help friends in local pop punk band Modern Baseball put out their first LP. He was managing the band at the time, as he still does today, and decided to use the money he’d been saving working coffee shop jobs to fund pressing 300 copies of Sports.
“We just wanted something bigger than a Bandcamp release,” Osman says from the label’s headquarters, aka his West Philly apartment. “I wasn’t really thinking of it as a label thing. As things progressed, I gave it a name and a logo. But originally, I had no plans to continue the label after that.” Read more…
Cynic’s Paul Masvidal: “We Were Interested in Richer, Deeper Understanding of Music.”
Cynic is probably not one of the most household name as far as heavy metal bands go. In fact, up until not too long ago, they were fairly unknown, with only a single full-length album to their name (Focus, 1993). Perhaps their biggest claim to fame was when founding members Paul Masvidal (guitar) and Sean Reinert (drums) played on fellow Florida band Death’s seminal album Human (1991).
In 1994, Cynic broke up or so it seemed.
Despite their limited output and relatively short existence, Cynic eventually gained a massive following amongst progressive metal bands. Around 2006, Masvidal and Reinert (now living in LA) learned of Cynic’s new found visibility and decided to give the band another shot. In 2008, they released their second full length Traced in Air. Over the next couple of years they released a couple of EPs, and earlier this year they released their third full length Kindly Bent to Free Us.
Though the band’s profile had risen in the metal world they were still fairly obscure outside of this extreme niche. That was until May, when Masvidal and Reinert both came out as gay in a Los Angeles Times front page story.
Unfortunately, being a gay heavy metal musician is still big news and not entirely accepted in the community.
Our Chad Sims talked with Masvidal about the band, the tour (which stops at the TLA on Thursday) and why they felt now was a good time to come out.
Thanks for talking with us. To start off, how is the tour going?
Good. We just got back from a West Coast leg, which ended in LA, which is a hometown gig for us. Everything is good.
I am from South Florida so I was exposed to your music in the late 90s and I have to admit at first I didn’t get it. It was like alien music. There just wasn’t anything else like it. Not until a few years later did I hear it again and it all made sense. What kind of things were you into? What sort of influences led you to create this music?
I think we were just eclectic, nerdy kids. I had a hippy mom so she would play folk and singer song-writer stuff. And I would listen to pop and my older brother was into classic rock, which led me to heavier stuff like Sabbath, Metallic and Slayer.
At that time, the extreme metal community was kind of an underground tape community that we kind of fell into. Suddenly, we had a bunch of pen pals that we were writing letters with. So we kind of got hurled into that extreme scene, which was fun. And then we played with Death.
So, we were just coming from a very diverse, eclectic palette of musical influences and we happen to be guys who have something to say and we excelled at our instruments, versus the punk rock approach where you just have to make a statement. We were interested in richer, deeper understanding of music and that is what Cynic became. It ended up being a hybridized different thing that didn’t fit in any scene. And it kind of was just the result of who we are as people.
So you and Sean have made news recently for coming out, but I understand that you have been out with your friends and family for some time. Why now did you feel that you needed to come out professionally?
Sean and I have been living as gay males since our late teens but we never associated it with our public lives with our recording careers. We were hesitant for numerous reasons. One of which was that we didn’t want it to overshadow the music. Suddenly, you are that gay band and people don’t hear you for the music.
Over time, we realized that it was an obligation of ours to come out and speak publicly. This music we are making and who we are as artists is informed by who we are as homosexuals, and it is not separate. There is such scarcity in terms of gays in the metal scene, and to just say has we are here and we are queer is important.
I thought of Harvey Milk and he said that everybody in every field needs to come out. To this day, we are still a massive minority. There are still countries where being gay is punishable by death. We are everywhere and we need to come out. Read more…
Text and images by Jason Melcher.
The XPoNential Music Festival finished strong with the third and final day providing tons of high energy and soulful performances. During the course of the festival, artists alternated between two outdoor stages. The larger River Stage, complete with a beautiful Philadelphia skyline backdrop, and the intimate Marina Stage both drew massive crowds throughout the weekend.
Sunday capped the 21st XPoNential Music Festival with a fantastic lineup featuring Ginger Coyle, The Lawsuits, Bear’s Den, J. Roddy Walston & The Business, Nicole Atkins, Old 97’s, Diego Garcia, Lake Street Dive, Man Man (above) and Trigger Hippy. Read more…
JUMP: The Philly Music Project 