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.
Artwork for Edwin McCain’s cover of Drivin N Cryin’s ‘Rush Hour.’ By Anna Jensen.
On Friday, April 10, The Sun ATL premieres “Let’s Go Dancing: Artwork celebrating the songs of Kevn Kinney and Drivin N Cryin.” The show features a colorful and deeply personal collection of works by Anna Jensen, who transforms music and songwriting into a visual language.
Cover art for Puddles Pity Party’s single by Anna Jensen.
Running through May 23, the show draws from a sprawling series of six LPs and dozens of online singles featuring artists playing Kinney’s songs from his solo releases and his work as the lyricist and frontman with Drivin N Cryin.
Jensen conceived, curated, and produced “Let’s Go Dancing” via Tasty Good Records. She is also married to Kinney. The show features roughly 75 of her acrylic paintings, each one created as a direct response to the cover songs that appear throughout the series, performed by artists such as Abe Partridge, Amy Ray Band feat. Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls), Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish, Fang of Gore (a Gang of Four), Gordon Gano (of the Violent Femmes), Peter Buck and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), and dozens more.
The cover art for Abe Partridge’s single by Anna Jensen.
Varying in size and mood, the paintings function as emotional translations—snapshots of how a photograph, a story, a lyrical phrase, a chord change, or a simple melody lands in Jensen’s imagination.
The show is a traditional gallery presentation and a map of devotion. Each canvas is tethered to a song, and each song becomes a jumping-off point for color, gesture, and abstraction steeped in Southern punk rock imagery. The cumulative effect mirrors Kinney’s catalog: wide-ranging, deeply felt, and guided by instinct rather than rigid structure.
The six week span of the exhibition will feature live performances by some of the artists who contributed to “Let’s Go Dancing,” giving immediate life to the songs that inspired the paintings. It’s a full-circle moment—music inspiring art, art reframing music, and community binding it all together.
Check back soon for details.
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On Thursday, February 19, Plazadrome digs deep into the ’90s art-house underground with a screening of Michael Almereyda’s sleek and chilly 1994 vampire film Nadja.
The film takes shape as a soft, postmodern reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter (1936), transplanting familiar nocturnal lore—alienation, desire, and immortality—into 1990s Brooklyn.
This screening features a newly released 4K restoration (Arbelos and Grasshopper), the highest quality presentation Nadja has received yet—an ideal excuse to revisit a film that has long existed in the margins.
Before the lights go down, Videodrome’s Jordan Kady will offer a short video introduction that digs into the film’s famously fraught production history. Chief among the hurdles: the sudden departure of actor Eric Stoltz just days before shooting was set to begin, which resulted in the film’s financiers bailing on the project. Executive producer David Lynch stepped in and personally financed the film, a rare act of filmmaker solidarity.
Stylistically, Nadja is as striking as it is unconventional. Almereyda’s use of the Fisher-Price PXL2000 aka Pixelvision toy camera in select scenes gives the film a ghostly, degraded texture, nodding to the expressionist techniques of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, while firmly rooting it in the DIY aesthetics of the ’90s.
Composer Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting score adds to the film’s hypnotic pull, while the film’s soundtrack—featuring music by My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Verve, and Spacehog—anchors Nadja firmly in its era. As Kady puts it, “Almereyda once described the film as ‘sucking the blood out of all other vampire movies,’” reconstituting centuries of lore into something singularly stylish and deeply strange. Three decades later, these sensibilities still feel radical and irresistibly seductive. Nadja is a must-see on the Plaza Theater’s big screen.
Multi instrumentalist Che Arthur is a Chicago-based artist touring in support of his fourth and most recently released solo album, Describe This Present Moment (Past/Future Records). Having recently wrapped up a month-long European tour doing live sound and opening for Bob Mould, Arthur brings a modern take on raw hardcore velocity, and intense punk songwriting to Waller’s Coffee on Wednesday, January 28.
For this show, Arthur is joined by Athens indie rock stalwarts Five Eight and Atlanta post-punk statesmen Victory Hands.
Five Eight. Photo by Marc Pilvinsky.
Five Eight is still riding high after touring the Southeastern U.S. from Austin to Asheville to Tampa with their critically-acclaimed feature length documentary film, Weirdo: The Story Of Five Eight. The group’s ninth studio album, Help A Sinner, is due out in March via Static Era Records.
Victory Hands. Photo by Ryan Williams.
Victory Hands is prepping to record their upcoming release, a “watergatefold” double LP titled Cavett. The album builds upon VH’s theme of crafting lyrics using transcripts taken from disgraced former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon’s nefarious recordings of conversations about his enemies in the media—journalists! The release date for Cavett (as in Dick) remains TBD, as the album is currently being recorded. Come get a sneak peek at the songs.
If you can’t make it out for the the show at Waller’s, you can catch Che Arthur in Athens on Jan. 30 at Normal Bar with David Barbe of Sugar and Mercyland.
Check out Sugar’s latest single, “Long Live Love” below.
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Meghan Dowlen of Club Silencio. Photo by Jeff Shipman.
On January 23, The Garden Club at Wild Heaven transformed into a darkened threshold between worlds as Club Silencio paid loving tribute to the music of David Lynch’s films and television series. Billed as a celebration of what would have been Lynch’s 80th birthday, the atmosphere ebbed and flowed with a deep knowledge of just how much this music breathes, trembles, and rumbles.
The night began with a Morphine cover dubbed Cure For Pain, which found saxophone player Ben Davis joined by bass player and vocalist David Railey, and drummer Robbie Nelson paying homage to Cambridge, Mass’ once great low rock trio. The group’s set was a well-balanced counterpart to Club Silencio, crafting an atmosphere that was both fun and foreboding while channeling Morphine’s slow-burning fusion of jazz, blues, and alternative rock in songs such as “You Look Like Rain” (featuring Matt Coleman), “Cure For Pain,” and “Honey White.”
Club Silencio photo by Jeff Shipman.
Club Silencio drew from the haunted lullabies and skronking unease of soundtracks from films such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, and, of course, Twin Peaks. Vocalist Meghan Dowlen brought a commanding presence to the stage, her voice equal parts torch song and apparition, while the band—Jeffrey Bützer on guitar, TT Mahony playing keys, saxophone player Ben Davis, bass player Matt Steadman, guitarist Henry Jack, and drummer Sean Zearfoss—proved deeply fluent in Lynch’s cinematic language of mood, menace, and overdrive. “The Pink Room” and Julie Cruise’s “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” from Twin Peaks laid the ground for the band to show off some of it’s own flare while taking on the Lynchian hits: “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” from Blue Velvet, and Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” from “Wild At Heart.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The evening peaked for me when I was unexpectedly invited to sit down on the stage with Bützer, Davis, and Dowlen while they serenaded me with the painfully sincere “Just You” a.k.a. James’ sappy acoustic love song from Twin Peaks. It was just a few days after my birthday, and for as much trash as I talk about James’ character, the situation was hilarious. Davis nailed those exaggerated high notes with a devotion to the bit—trusting the audience to follow his lead, never spelling anything out—pushing past sincerity and into something beautifully, mischievously funny. After all, humor has always been an integral part of Lynch’s films as well.
Lynch once said that “music is a ‘magical’ tool that can convey emotions and moods faster and more directly than film.” Club Silencio understands this instinctively, and honored the notion by trusting atmosphere, feeling, and form above all else.
“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air.” — The Arm
On Friday, January 23, at The Garden Club at Wild Heaven, Club Silencio pulls back the red curtain to revel in the music of David Lynch’s cinematic universe.
For this celebration of what would be Lynch’s 80th birthday, Club Silencio features some of Atlanta’s finest players delving into the moody tones and skronking beauty of sountracks from Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, and of course, Twin Peaks. Finding balance in that precarious space between the tangible world and wandering deep inside the dreamlike qualities of Lynch’s works, each number lingers in the air where silence and space are as important as rhythm, melody, and dissonance—much like the films they accompany.
Lynch was unafraid to examine the outer limits of Americana from every angle, especially when that vision exposed somehting dark lying just beneath the surface. Club Silencio honors the beauty, dread, and strange familiarity that’s baked into Lynch’s vision.
The ensemble includes vocalist Meghan Dowlen, guitar player Jeffrey Bützer, pianist TT Mahony, alto saxophone player Ben Davis, bass player Matt Steadman, and guitar player Henry Jack, and drummer Sean Zearfoss—all of whom are well-versed in conjuring Lynch’s cinematic language of emotion and atmosphere.
WEST END MOTEL: Brent Hinds (left) and Tom Cheshire. Photo by Chad Radford
West End Fest is the kind of gathering that Atlanta does best: a celebration of community, history, and one of the city’s most enduring creative forces, Brent Hinds. For decades, the guitar player, songwriter, and restless spirit whose work with Mastodon, Fiend Without A Face, Four Hour Fogger, and West End Motel shaped the heavy-fisted country, punk, hardcore, surf, and metal outer limits of Atlanta’s musical identity.
Hinds died in a motorcycle accident in August 2025. West End Fest celebrates his birthday kicking off at 3 p.m. with a full roster of music, toasts, and eulogies—equal parts heartfelt and hilarious—setting the tone for a day that’s as much about storytelling as it is about volume.
By 6 p.m., the amps are on and the music rolls through the evening, wrapping up by 11 p.m. with plenty of time for reconnecting, reminiscing, and raising as many glasses as one can muster with friends old and new.
The Night the Sky brings their expansive heft to the stage. Michael Rudolph Cummings (of Backwoods Payback) taps into raw, road-worn intensity. Ironbound, Lefty & His Right Hand Men, and the almighty W8ing4ufos add their own distinct flavors to the mix, before Black Daniels teams up with Kevn Kinney (of Dryvn N Cryin) for what’s sure to be a memorable collaboration. West End Motel closes out the night, grounding the celebration exactly where it belongs.
At its core, West End Fest is about honoring a creative lifer and the scene that grew up around him—a reminder that Atlanta’s music culture thrives in shared spaces, long drunken conversations, and nights like this one.
Rad/ATL 