King Buzzo (left) and Coady Willis of the Melvins at Buckhead Theatre June 24. Photo by Chris Campbell
On Friday, June 24, Void Manes, the Melvins, and Tomahawk played to a sold-out Buckhead Theatre. The night, it seems, was ordained by the gods of volume. Buckhead Theatre has a way of underscoring booming loud bands; its cavernous room naturally amplifies low end, allowing every kick drum, bass note, and down-tuned guitar chord to reach full bloom without dissolving into mud. Within seconds of the Melvins taking the stage, it was clear that this was an ideal setting for an evening built on bombastic riffs and fearless experimentation.
Void Manes. Photo by King Buzzo
Void Manes took the stage shortly after the doors opened at 6:30 p.m., obscured behind a maze of modular synths that glowed like a distant galaxy suspended in a balance of total darkness on the stage, and a dizzying show of lights from above. The one-man electronic project conjured a world of jagged rhythms, sub-bass swells, and truncated melodies that came into view just long enough to reveal themselves before getting swallowed up by waves of dissonance and a mechanical pulse. A complex blend of electronic noise filled the room with an intensity that pulled the growing crowd toward the stage. With every passing moment, Void Mane’s bold motions and abstract nuances established a deep emotional sonic baseline and a palate cleanser for the onslaught of heavy guitar riffage that was soon to come.
The Melvins: Trevor Dunn (left) and Steven McDonald. Photo by Chris Campbell
More than four decades into their career, the Melvins persist as a stylishly heavy and uncompromising institution. On stage, guitarist and vocalist Buzz Osborne (King Buzzo), drummers Dale Crover and Coady Willis, and bass player and vocalist Steven McDonald (Redd Kross) locked in with wicked chemistry. Their set bounced between more recent numbers such as the pummeling “Working the Ditch” and “Never Say You’re Sorry,” while longtime staples “Civilized Worm,” “A History of Bad Men,” “Honey Bucket,” and “Night Goat” reminded everyone why the Melvins remain a towering influence on generations of post-punk, metal, and noise rock.
Dale Crover of the Melvins. Photo by Mike White of Deadly Designs
Their positively warped take on the Rolling Stones’ “Sway” proved no song is safe once it passes through the Melvins’ peculiar gravitational pull.
Trevor Dunn of Tomahawk. Photo by Mike White of Deadly Designs
Trevor Dunn joined in on a second bass for “Night Goat.” The Melvins Lite, Mr. Bungle, and Tomahawk MVP made their finale hit even harder—his cowboy hat serving as an unspoken homage to the late great Birthday Party bassist Tracy Pew.
Mike Patton of Tomahawk. Photo by Mike White of Deadly Designs
Back on the road after a 13-year touring break, Tomahawk sounded refreshingly sharp. Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas) remains one of the most magnetic vocalists of the 21st century, alternating between deadpan restraint, demonic absurdity, and explosive vocal acrobatics in a single musical phrase. Standing behind a laptop, a Kaoss Pad, and an array of electronic gear, Patton demonstrated that his voice can go anywhere, effortlessly navigating an extraordinary range of sounds that no machine could replicate.
Guitarist Duane Denison’s (the Jesus Lizard) razor-wire riffs cut through Dunn’s muscular bass lines while drummer John Stanier (Battles, ex-Helmet) anchored everything with his unmistakable combination of precision and brute force.
Duane Denison (left) and Mike Patton of Tomahawk. Photo by Mike White of Deadly Designs
Tomahawk threaded songs like “Business Casual” and “Doomsday Fatigue” from 2021’s Tonic Immobility alongside crowd-pleasers such as “Flashback,” “Capt. Midnight,” and “Point and Click.” Their closing stretch was especially rewarding, with a run through George Jones’ “Just One More” giving way to an encore featuring “God Hates a Coward,” a twangy rendition of Duane Eddy’s “Stalkin,'” and the crushing one-two punch of “Sidewinder” and “Totem.”
By night’s end, the crowd had witnessed three acts approaching heavy music from distinctly different—complimentary—angles, each arriving at a wildly different destination. Void Manes mapped the outer reaches of the imagination through currents of noise and electricity. The Melvins bent gravity around riffs that have only grown heavier with time, while Tomahawk landed with twisted, surgical precision.
Tomahawk. Photo by Chad Radford
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Anne Richmond Boston, the Swimming Pool Q’s singer, possesses a voice that threads sweetness with steel. That balance is preserved with crystalline brilliance on her long-shelved second solo album, I Should Be Happy.
The album’s 15 songs were originally recorded in the early ’90s with producer Rob Gal at Atlanta’s Snack ’n’ Shack Studio, but remained unreleased for decades. In November 2025, the album arrived via DB Recs—the labels first release since 1992—proving that numbers such as I Should Be Happy’s title track, “Torn Apart,” and “Who Cares” are timeless. I Should Be Happy is a quiet and powerful reclamation for Boston, that finds grace in the wreckage of these once-abandoned tunes and turns them into something luminous.
The songs have been reshaped and enhanced by David Barbe and Jason Nesmith of Athens’ Chase Park Transduction, both of whom recast the album with a delicate touch and a clean spotlight on Boston’s supple and searching voice. Here, Boston leans into a warm palette with flashes of jangling pop that nod toward R.E.M., particularly in the crisp sway of “Give In.”
The alchemy that arises between “Carry Me” and “Bottle Of Sleep” is fraught with worry while remaining smart, sophisticated, and smooth, shifting from a troubled ambiance to a confident stride.
Other songs, such as “Torn Apart” and “Gone” carry a lived-in gravity, as their arrangements brush against folk and Americana while maintaining the melodic clarity that defines Boston’s songwriting. Elsewhere, “Dark Room” and “You Planned It” tap into a more electric current, recalling the Swimming Pool Q’s at their most fluid while allowing space for sharper emotional edges. Even the cover songs—“The Wind Cries Mary” and “The Music Weaver” among them—feel like conversations filtered through Boston’s distinct tonal patience.
Tenderness runs underneath it all, perhaps most evident in the spare moments, where piano or acoustic textures give her voice room to hover. It’s here that time becomes the album’s greatest collaborator. What once might have been a promising follow-up to 1990’s The Big House of Time now plays like an album that stands apart—a document of endurance and resolve.
Anne Richmond Boston plays Wax N Facts Records’ 50th anniversary party on Sunday, July 19, with Pylon Reenactment Society, All the Saints, the Swimming Pool Q’s, Uncle Green, Helionaut (w/ Paul Melançon), and Kevin Dunn’s Unresponsive in Malibu.$34.04. 5:30 p.m. (doors). 6:30 p.m. (show). Variety Playhouse.
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For more than four decades, bass player, songwriter, poet, and raconteur David J Haskins has occupied a singularly mystical place in underground music. Whether anchoring the shadowy architecture of Bauhaus, shaping the widescreen dream-pop of Love and Rockets, or pursuing a rich and eclectic solo career, David J has always treated performance as something closer to ritual than mere entertainment. On June 18, he returns to Electron Gardens Studio in Avondale Estates for an intimate Summer Solstice celebration. It’s a seasonal companion to the Winter Solstice-themed performance he brought to Electron Gardens last December.
Poet Lisa King opens the show reading works that are steeped in alchemical symbolism, dreamlike themes of transformation, and imagery drawn from woodland creatures, coastal landscapes, and the unseen currents connecting them all. Her words will be accompanied by atmospheric soundscapes created by Penelope Courtney, creating an immersive prelude to the music.
The Hot Place set the music in motion with a stripped down lineup featuring King performing alongside guitar players Jeff Calder and Mike Lynn, playing a few songs from The Language of Birds and the 2022 self-titled LP.
James Hall of Mary My Hope and Pleasure Club joins the bill performing a solo set.
David J will draw from every corner of his catalog, playing older material alongside selections from his latest release,Tracks from the Attic Revisited—10 songs taken from his sprawling 2024 demo anthology, reworked, rewritten, and reinterpreted.
The Revisited album transforms decades-old home recordings into a fully realized collection shaped by four decades of artistic growth. He’ll reel through a few fan favorites that have followed him across decades and continents.
As the evening reaches its conclusion, guests will join David J on stage for a communal finale: James Hall will join in to collaborate on a handful of songs, as will King and Calder from the Hot Place, culminating in what promises to be one of the summer’s most memorable musical gatherings.
The North Carolina Piedmont-based outfit Setting finds three deeply intuitive musicians—Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund—summoning rhythms and textures from deep within the Appalachian soil.
The group’s collective resume boasts contributions to projects such as Mind Over Mirrors, Califone, Pelt, Sylvan Esso, Black Twig Pickers, Acid Birds, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. In Setting, these disparate histories are distilled into a transportive sound that unfolds like an extrasensory conversation among musicians who know when to push and when to leave space in their music.
The album’s meticulous textures underscore the warmth and flow of a group that moves as a single organic unit, blending synths, banjo, zithers, cassette loops, keyboards, and hand percussion into hypnotic patterns that drift between exploration, minimalism, and ecstatic improvisation. The song “Heard a Bubble” shimmers and expands with a patient glow. “Derring-do” builds on a locomotive pulse that gathers force until it rattles the walls and lifts the roof clean off.
“Gum Bump” swirls like a weather system gathering at the horizon. Its slowly blooming pulse of harmonium, guitar, and percussion draws listeners into a meditative state. Each number builds, illustrating a singular gift for making expansive, transcendent music that blurs the lines between ritual and revelation, culminating in an immersive journey where every rhythmic turn opens onto a new horizon.
Director Morgan Maassen’s video for “What Kind of Fish is a Turtle,” offers a visual accompaniment to the song’s slowly-moving synth waves with striking detail.
For Thursday night’s show, Atlanta guitarist Mason Brown of Maserati makes a rare appearance performing under the name Brainworlds.
With Brainworlds, Brown makes music that feels like a transmission from the outer reaches of the cosmos—propelled by a motorik Krautrock drift. Each song unfolds in hypnotic layers of pulsing rhythms and spiraling synthesizers.
Brown’s immersive soundscapes provide an ideal entry point into the night’s meditative terrain.
On Monday, May 11, Athens-based guitarist, composer, and improviser Shane Parish plays two sets as part of Eyedrum’s Monday Night Creative Music Series.
The first set features Parish performing solo selections from his latest album, Autechre Guitar, a striking collection that recasts the intricate electronic structures of British duo Autechre for acoustic guitar. What seems an unlikely translation becomes, in Parish’s hands, an act of revelation—stripping away circuitry to expose the skeletal beauty of Autechre’s looping, asymmetrical phrasing and shifting repetition, rendering each number with breathtaking precision and warmth.
This kind of imaginative transformation has long defined Parish’s work. Whether fronting Ahleuchatistas or reinterpreting sea shanties on Liverpool, Shane Parish has long balanced Appalachian roots, experimental composition, and a quietly dazzling command of the guitar.
On Repertoire, he turns his attention to a wide-ranging set of compositions—from Alice Coltrane to Kraftwerk—recasting them as intricate solo guitar studies that highlight both his technical virtuosity and instinct for reinvention.
For the second set, Parish reunites with longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Libro (Michael Libramento). Libro joins Parish on drums for an improvisational duo performance, offering another glimpse into the pair’s deeply expressive approach to sound.
The Messthetics (from left: Anthony Pirog, Joe Lally, and Brendan Canty) with James Brandon Lewis. Photo by Pat Graham
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis’ latest album, Deface the Currency (Impulse!), captures an increasingly bold and rebellious sound for the ensemble. Drop a needle on the opening number and the barreling rhythms explode with force. Drummer Brendan Canty and bass player Joe Lally have spent a lifetime honing their shared musical instincts in Fugazi. With the Messthetics, guitarist Anthony Pirog and saxophone player James Brandon Lewis elevate their collective efforts to a higher plane of consciousness, communication, and chemistry, distilling punk, hardcore, free jazz, and the avant-garde into a singularly defiant spirit.
Born from long stretches on the road and captured in a blur of first and second takes, Deface The Currency trades polish for immediacy without sacrificing precision.
Songs such as “30 Years of Knowing,” “Rules of the Game,” and “Serpent Tongue (Slight Return)” lock into grooves that are both grounded and volatile. Each song stretches, collapses, and builds again, veering from tightly coiled funk to an ecstatic squall. Pirog’s guitar fractures and refracts around Lewis’ saxophone, as both move with urgency toward chaos, but always maintain structure.
“Serpent Tongue” is the album’s grand finale, recalling moments from the Messthetics and Lewis’ previous, self-titled album. Here, everything is pushed forward by a brighter fire.
Of course, live and in the moment is when the music truly ignites.
Twenty Six years after directors Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen released the documentary film Benjamin Smoke, the story endures, capturing a ghost in the grain of Atlanta’s underground music and mythology.
Shot throughout the 1990s in Cabbagetown, the film traces the ragged, incandescent life of Benjamin (born Robert Dickerson), a poet, drag performer, and frontman for the bands Smoke and the Opal Foxx Quartet.
What unfolds is a collage of moments—equal parts beauty and abrasion. Cohen (Fugazi Instrument) and Sillen’s lens drifts through cluttered streets, dimly lit stages, and unhinged conversations, capturing a figure who existed in defiance of permanence. Benjamin’s world is one of contradictions: confrontational yet vulnerable, self-destructive yet searching, rooted in the decaying edges of a city then teetering between neglect and reinvention.
The screening also serves as a reunion of sorts for those who orbited that era. An introduction by Film Love’s Andy Ditzler and Bill Taft (Smoke, Opal Foxx Quartet, Hubcap City, W8ing4UFOS) sets the stage, followed by a post-show discussion featuring Taft along with friends and cohorts Clare Butler, Rosser Shymanski, Laurie Stevens, and Tom Zarrilli.
For anyone who remembers—or longs to understand—Atlanta in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, this event offers a chance to sit with a life lived in fleeting moments, without apology. It’s also a chance to explore the beauty and unease of a scene that refuses to stay buried.
The 21st Atlanta Documentary Film Festival returns to Synchronicity Theatre March 19–21, bringing a weekend of nonfiction storytelling that draws from the full spectrum of human experience. It’s a festival that’s hand-curated for Atlanta audiences—intimate, unvarnished, and driven by voices that linger long after the credits roll.
This year’s slate casts a wide net, pulling together films that examine identity, memory, and the fragile architecture of human connection. The centerpiece takes place on closing night with Werewolf in the Waves, the latest from director Soleil Moon Frye.
Frye is best known as the former child actress who played the title role in Punky Brewster on NBC from 1984 to 1986. More recently, Frye’s diaristic approach in Kid 90 resonated with critics and audiences alike, its unguarded intimacy doubling as a time-capsule portrait of youth, memory, and the cost of growing up in public.
With Werewolf in the Waves, Frye once again turns the camera inward, tracing her reconnection with childhood friend Seth Binzer—better known as Shifty Shellshock of the band Crazy Town—during the band’s attempted comeback tour. Shot largely on an iPhone, the film reveals a more painful narrative, as Binzer struggles with relapse. The result is an unflinching look at addiction’s pull and the emotional wreckage it leaves behind.
Frye will introduce the film’s premiere Sunday night. Afterward, she will take part in a 45-minute Q&A session.
Marc Ribot is a shape-shifting guitar player whose style dissolves the boundaries between genres as quickly as it defines them. When Ribot takes the stage at the Garden Club on Friday, March 20, expect nothing less than a musical séance performed on six strings.
Ribot’s solo work stretches across a body of stark, deeply personal recordings, ranging from interpretations like Plays the Works of Frantz Casseus to the haunted drift of Silent Movies, and his latest release, 2025’s Map of A Blue City.
Ribot’s live sets rarely settle into anything so fixed. Rather, they unfold in real time: fragments of melody, bursts of free improvisation, and ghostly echoes of everything from Haitian classical music to downtown New York noise. It’s a language that Ribot has spent decades refining alongside collaborators like Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, and John Zorn, helping shape records that are as strange as they are timeless.
That restless spirit traces back to Ribot’s early days studying under Frantz Casseus and cutting his teeth in New York’s late-’70s underground before surfacing as a defining voice in projects like John Lurie’s the Lounge Lizards. Since then, he’s become a connective thread between worlds, jumping from avant-garde jazz to roots music, film scores, and beyond.
On Friday night, Ribot will perform solo on acoustic and electric guitar, stripping everything down to instinct and possibility. It’s an all-seated, first-come affair—fitting for a night that rewards close listening. With Ribot, the only certainty is that nothing will unfold quite the way you expect, and that’s exactly the point.
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