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Listings are
in the opposite order of appearance: headliner is listed at the top,
next is the support band(s),
and the last band listed is the opener.
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Friday
June 7
2024 7:30PM doors -- music at 8:00PM ••• ALL AGES $18 in advance / $20 at the door Sad Park sadpark.com emo punk Cough Drop Acid instagram.com/urbanscandalrecords rock alternative emo indie Sammy Kless burgerboy.bandcamp.com california demo power pop Sad Park -from Los Angeles, CA -Sad Park is an alternative emo punk band from Los Angeles, California comprised of vocalist/guitarist Graham Steele, bassist/backing vocalist Sam Morton and drummer Grant Bubar. In 2016 they released two EPs with the self-titled Sad Park and Good Start, Bad Endings. In 2018, they released their debut album Sleep and will follow up with their sophomore release in 2021. “No More Sound”, Sad Park’s third full-length, begins with an ending. More specifically, with its own ending. Because the short, just-over-a-minute-long “No More Songs” is kind of a stripped-down reprise of the title track that closes this record. In one way, it means this album—the band’s first for Pure Noise—travels back in time over its 38 or so minutes, but in another it’s also travelling forwards. Because while “No More Sound” is a more fleshed-out version of “No More Songs”, it also contains melodic and lyrical throwbacks to the eleven songs that sit between them. Perhaps more importantly, as everything comes full circle on the record, it offers something that the opener doesn’t. “I wanted you to really hear the song’s darker lyrics in the beginning,” explains vocalist/guitarist Graham Steele, “then once you hear them again at the end, there's maybe some sense of hope—a sense that you’ve kind of gone through something and have learned something from it. So once you get to the end, those lyrics take on a little bit of a different meaning. This was the first album where we really thought through everything and tried to create some sort of story.” It’s not that Sad Park—who formed in Los Angeles in 2015—weren’t capable of that before, but on “No More Sound” the band worked with AJJ’s Sean Bonnette, who oversaw production and collaborated with Steele on the lyric writing process too. He helped Steele, bassist/vocalist Sam Morton, drummer Grant Bubar and guitarist Aidan Memory not only create a record that flows, musically and thematically, from beginning to end, but which also sees the four-piece truly discover and become who they are as a band. “With our previous records,” says Steele, “I was listening to a lot of bands and then trying to write like them, like ‘We really like FIDLAR and Together Pangea, so we're going to write music that really sounds like that.’ This album feels a lot more like us as a band, like really sitting down and writing whatever was in us. It’s the first album where we found what our sound is as individual musicians.” Recorded across ten days at Balboa Studios in Los Angeles, “No More Sound” is, in fact, the sound of a band really coming into their own. It was, says Steele, the most fun he’s ever had recording an album, and you can hear that in these 13 songs. “Always Around”, for example, is a perfect slice of jaunty, off-kilter indie, while the frantic, frenzied, gritty pop-punk of “Art Will Be Gone”—replete with a joyously mournful, ska-punk-inspired horn section—and the jittery, nervous energy of “Money In The Bag” sparkle with the band’s distinctive fizz. But even the songs that are more melancholy in tone sparkle with that underlying enthusiasm: “OMW!” is a slow-motion but energetic chug that wrestles with the struggles of life in a touring band while simultaneously reveling in it, while “Carousel” begins life as a minor chord lament before blooming into an effusive crescendo. It ends with a guitar solo that’s split between Morton, Memory and Together Pangea drummer Erik Jimenez, which sums up the sense of purpose, pleasure and excitement that holds this record together—even if it didn’t always feel that way. “I fucking hated that song for a long time,” chuckles Bubar, “because I just didn't feel connected to it. I find it hard to connect with Graham's words sometimes because he’s my friend and it's hard to make that transition. So I wasn't sure about that song or the drums for it, so I wanted to do a practice take and that was the one we ended up using, which is cool, because it breathes life into the song. And then that solo at the ending just sounds like three dudes having fun late at night. How that song came about was probably like the biggest turn around for me.” “We weren’t actually going to put it on the record,” adds Memory, “but Sean was like, ‘I like that one!’ so we decided to try to figure it out. And I think we did.” They did. And in fact, it captures their chemistry perfectly. But as much fun as the band had on that guitar solo, and making then record in general, “No More Sounds” still manages to convey the band’s distinctively peppy sense of melancholy. Just listen to the desperate urgency of “I Can’t Fight It”, the shimmering emotional strength of “Watch The World Fall Down” or the frazzled, carpe diem rush of “Death”, which serves as a reminder to make the most of the time we have and the people we love while they (and we) are still here. “That’s probably one of my favorite songs ever,” says Steele. “I'm very inspired by AJJ and Sean, and I've always had that thing when listening to them where I'm like, 'Why didn't I think of that?!' “Death” kind of feels like one of those songs where I had this idea and I basically just spoke words into the song and those are the lyrics. And it means a lot to me because that was kind of the thing that I had been feeling through. Cough Drop Acid -from San Francisco, CA -Cough Drop Acid is a three-piece ensemble from the hazy underbelly of San Francisco's DIY scene. Sammy Kless -from Berkeley, CA -My name is Sammy Kless & these are scenes from my memories |
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