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Thursday
May 26 2022 8:00PM doors -- music at 8:30PM ••• ALL AGES $15 Winnetka Bowling League www.wbleague.com/ indie pop Henry Chadwick www.henrychadwick.net/ indie rock Jared Harper www.jaredharpermusic.com/ alt indie rock Winnetka Bowling League -from Los Angeles, CA -The fourth EP from Winnetka Bowling League, pulp presents a radiantly detailed collection of stories from the life of frontman Matthew Koma. With equal parts raw sensitivity and self-effacing humor, the award-winning artist/songwriter/producer explores everything from the sweetly cinematic (a teenage crush on an impossibly cool girl he met on the Martz Trailways bus) to the quietly heartbreaking (an attempt to save a friend from a destructive relationship) to the delightfully tragicomic (the time an ex left him to move to Wisconsin and work at Mars Cheese Castle). When met with Winnetka Bowling League’s prismatic form of indie-pop, the result is a batch of songs that invite both pure nostalgia and profound self-reflection. The follow-up to their acclaimed 2020 EP Congratulations, pulp arrives as the most immersive and introspective body of work yet from Winnetka Bowling League, whose lineup also includes drummer Kris Mazzarisi (Koma’s brother) and keyboardist Sam Beresford. In laying the groundwork for the EP—which features a guest spot from multi-platinum-selling pop superstar Demi Lovato—the L.A.-based Koma headed to New York and spent several months holed up in a studio in the dead of the pandemic winter, a deeply isolated experience that soon inspired him to re-examine certain moments from his past. Along with tapping into the limitless ingenuity he’s shown in his work with an eclectic range of artists—Bruce Springsteen, Britney Spears, Tiësto, to name a few—Koma deliberately returned to a more intimate approach to songwriting. “For years before starting this band almost everything I was doing was electronically driven, and it’s felt good to pick up a guitar again and write in a more direct way,” he points out. A collaboration with singer/songwriter Sasha Sloan, pulp’s lead single “barcelona” opens on a lyric perfectly encapsulating the EP’s ultravivid storytelling: “So you put on your flip flops/Over your white socks/It was Halloween/Your suitcase open on the couch/The air weighed a couple hundred pounds.” With its dreamlike textures and sprawling guitar tones, the song emerged soon after Koma sent along a series of voice memos to Sloan (a former tourmate of Winnetka Bowling League), who helped transform “barcelona” into a spellbinding portrait of love enduring long after a relationship’s end. Co-produced with Oren Yoel (Miley Cyrus, Fitz and the Tantrums), pulp’s title track takes on a more frenetic intensity, matching its mercurial rhythms with Koma’s brilliantly offbeat wordplay (e.g., “Super Cali fragile ego mild psychosis/Can I Amazon Prime you a book on Freud and hypnosis?”). “In high school I had a girlfriend who lived in Pennsylvania, so I’d take the bus down to see her a lot,” says Koma, who grew up on Long Island. “Once when I was 14 or 15 I ended up sitting next to the textbook cool indie girl who was about five years older than me, and she started playing me all this rad music I’d never heard before. It was such a strange, impactful three-and-a-half hours on a bus with someone who’d definitely never remember me now.” As the first song written for pulp, the gorgeously stark and string-laced “fiimy” feat. Demi Lovato set the tone for the EP’s bittersweet reminiscence, an element reflected in the track’s poetic expression of regret (“I know I held your hand like a bunch of balloons/I knew I was meant to hold onto/But I was just a stupid kid/Throwing everything to the wind”). “I love writing heartache-y ballads like that,” says Koma of “fiimy” (i.e., “Fuck It, I Miss You”). “It’s sort of my default mode, to the point where I almost felt like I had to crack some other codes on the EP before I let myself take the leisure walk of working on that song.” In a serendipitous twist, Lovato reached out to Koma and asked to jump on the track after he’d shared a clip on TikTok. (“About 24 hours after I posted it I got a text from Demi saying, ‘What’s up with that song? I need to be a part of it,” he recalls.) Since forming in 2018, Winnetka Bowling League has provided an outlet for Koma’s more left-of-center influences, such as the hyper-melodic yet unvarnished jangle-pop of classic indie-rock artists like the Lemonheads and Blake Babies (“I think there’s a weird alternate-universe version of me that’s a boy from the ’90s who’s got a huge crush on Juliana Hatfield,” he notes). Over the course of their catalog (including their 2018 self-titled EP and 2019’s Cloudy with a Chance of Sun), the band has simultaneously allowed each member to pursue their most idiosyncratic impulses. “Winnetka Bowling League really started off as a way to do what we love without second-guessing it,” says Koma. “There was so much discovery and exploration on the first few EPs, and all those little journeys led us to create what feels like the best representation of who we are as a band.” With the release of pulp, Winnetka Bowling League hope that their songs might lead listeners on a transformative journey of their own. “I’m a big fan of the TikTok generation and that thing of being able to share songs in real-time, but it’s so different from the way I experienced music growing up,” says Koma. “I’d love for people to absorb this EP in full and let it be the soundtrack to a specific moment in their life. And not necessarily even in a heavy way—just something you can put on when you’re out on a long drive, and get lost in all the songs.” Henry Chadwick -from Santa Cruz, CA -Henry Chadwick is a Santa Cruz, CA-based singer-songwriter, musician & producer. Chadwick’s music dances between genres - landing somewhere between indie, garage rock, psychedelia, and shimmery, sunshine-tinged power-pop. Chadwick's self-produced, performed & released 2016 debut EP Guest At Home garnered attention from prominent blogs and outlets such as Rolling Stone, Time, Huffington Post, Indie Shuffle and others. Rolling Stone and Time Magazine listed it as one of the best albums to come out in the first half of 2016. It’s loved by all who hear it. In late 2017 Henry Chadwick entered the studio with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck, Kurt Vile) & engineer, Brian Rosemeyer (Kurt Vile, Cass McCombs, Cat Power), & emerged with a full-length monster of an album. Chadwick acted as a multi-instrumentalist again, playing drums, guitar, bass & keys on the record. The 11-song LP is named Marlin Fisher, after Henry’s middle names. Marlin Fisher received praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, No Depression and more. It’s loved by all who hear it. In 2019, Chadwick released a 5 song EP titled The President Of Make Believe with Brooklyn-based Indie label, Swoon City Music. It was recorded partially in Santa Cruz, as well as Brooklyn with engineer Mike Beck, who mixed the EP. It’s loved by all who hear it. Henry’s 2nd full length album, We All Start Again (10/29/21) is his finest work yet and is universally loved & worshipped by all. Jared Harper -from San Francisco, CA -Californian alt-indie singer-songwriter and guitarist Jared Harper released his first solo single, Running After You, in 2018. After a successful debut, he released his single, Addicted to You, which preceded the release of his 2018 EP, If I’m Being Honest. His latest singles, If I Can’t Have You (2020), About You (2021), All For Me (2021), continue to consistently garner international acclaim and his most recent hit Lonely (2021) is a dynamic power driven belter and a change of pace from his other songs. He has garnered over of 1,000,000 streams across Youtube and Spotify alone. Through his signature sound that transpires from the influence of The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Oasis, The Beatles, and John Mayer, Jared Harper has been a contestant on The Voice US (season 18), performed in London, San Francisco and LA, and kept music fans entertained during lockdown with live stream original performances and energetic covers of “Dynamite” by BTS and “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye. Jared Harper’s music has featured on Soho Radio, Boogaloo Radio, Lonely Oak Radio, Somer Valley Radio, Ko Radio, Islington Radio and Musomuso. It has been written up by A&R Factory, LA Wire, Music Industry Weekly, Chalkpit Records, AAA Backstage, UNXIGNED, Unrecorded, The Other Side Reviews, Indie Top 39, The Bops Collective, Edgar Allan Poets, Talk About Pop Music, Indie Music Center, It's All Indie, YMX, We Write About Music and FV Music Blog. |
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