King Buzzo, the singer, guitar player, and frontman of the almighty Melvins joins composer and Ahleuchatistas and Mr. Bungle bass player Trevor Dunn for the long-awaited “King Dunn” acoustic summer tour.
Over the years, Buzz and Dunn have worked on several projects including Fantômas, the Melvins Lite 2012 album Freak Puke, and the 2022 LP titled Gift Of Sacrifice. Their most recently released collaborations arrived in 2022 as two four-song EPs titled Invention Of Hysteria(Amphetamine Reptile Records) and I’m Afraid Of Everything(Riverworm Records). In April 2024, they released another EP titled Eat The Spray (AmRep). These songs materialized as pandemic restrictions were lifting, which is to say they haven’t had much time for touring with this material together until now.
For those who are unfamiliar, Buzz and Dunn’s paired-down offerings do not yield the full-bore sonic onslaught of distortion and wild rhythms that one gets from a Melvins or Mr. Bungle record. There are no drums. However, when playing one-on-one they craft a spacious atmosphere that ranges from cinematic to downright haunting, summoning a dark ambiance from the natural resonance of their respective voices and stringed instruments. Each song delivers an ominous traipse of psychological and physical tension by subtle but no less affecting means.
Photo courtesy J.D. Pinkus
J.D. Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers, Daddy Longhead, sometimes the Melvins, and more lands in the middle slot commanding a set of cosmic banjo strumming from the deranged outer limits. It’s all set to a beautifully hallucinatory visual display. Press play below to check out a couple of cuts from Pinkus’ latest offering, Grow A Pear!
Void Manes photo by Buzz Osborne
Atlanta-based abstract electronic project Void Manes sets the night in motion with a dazzling array of modular synths and analogue gear wrapped in a galaxy of multi-colored cables. The one-man outfit explores dreamtime and nightmare soundscapes, striking a balance between atmospheric noise and melody; drones and sub-bass swells that rise and fall in fugue-like moments of rhythms, sonic impressionism, and chaos.
Radfest is back after a three-year Global pandemic hiatus! RadATL’s founder celebrates one more year around the sun, this time at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on Friday, January 19.
This year’s show features performances by seven post-punk, post-hardcore, and pure noise greats spread across two stages.
Photo courtesy x.nte
Athens-based cassette label \\NULL|ZØNE// gets the party started with a showcase of Georgia-bred noise acts including x.nte, Grant Evans (of Quiet Nights), and label boss Michael Potter’s own project The Electric Nature. Each act is cranking our short, powerful sets that challenge the traditional notions of what music is, and what it can be. Potter has been on the frontier of this scene for a long time, and it’s been far too long since his last Atlanta appearance, so it’s great to have him back.
Gebidan photo by Geoff Knott
Gebidan marks its live debut. The recently founded four-piece features Mike Patton of Orange County’s late ‘70s hardcore outfit Middle Class. The group is often hailed as the first North American hardcore act EVER. Patton’s musical resume also includes time spent playing with Jack from TSOL in the band Cathedral of Tears. He was also in Eddie And The Subtitles, and Trotsky Icepick. But really, check out his credentials on Discogs to see that he worked as a producer and backup vocalist on the Adolescents’ self-titled “blue album.” He also produced the Minutemen’s “Joy” single, along with a handful of other Minutemen releases.
Patton lives in Georgia these days and is singing and playing bass with the new outfit. Gebidan’s first recordings find the group embracing a more abstract, psychedelic take on indie and alternative rock songwriting. Great stuff!
tONY cURTIS photo by Ellen McGrail
WREK 91.1 FM’s “Destroy All Music” co-host and bass player Tony Gordon teams up with guitarist Curtis Stephens for tONY cURTIS. Together, they create a scrapping, smoldering grind of earth rattling textures. Gordon (also of FREEBASS, Zandosis, and Charlie Parker fame) is well aware of the power of subtlety, especially when it’s blasted at maximum volume. The 11 numbers that make up their latest release tc2 lull the ears and the brain into a meditative state by commanding a deeper level of ecstatic listening. Beyond rhythm, beyond melody, and beyond the drone lie the pure sonic textures of steel strings, and they are teeming with abstract beauty and limitless possibilities for the imagination.
Photo courtesy Whiphouse
Whiphouse brings a high-energy and death-afflicted punk dirge to the stage. It’s one of my favorite new bands to emerge from these parts in quite some time. Lots of homies in this group! Michael Keenan, Mike Bison-Beavers, Debbie Beat, Stanley Jackson, and one of my favorite former interns Kelly Stroup! It’s just an awesome assemblage of people tearing up on stage the only way they know how.
Loud Humans
Loud Humans close out the show. More info. coming soon.
This is an ALL AGES SHOW! Doors open at 7 p.m. $10 gets you in. Fri., Jan. 19. 515 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd. Park in the lot across the street if the side street and front lot are full.
Thanks to this year’s sponsors! Eyedrum, Topo Chico, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Record Plug Magazine, The Tight Bros. Network, and to Dain Johnson who created this year’s magnificent flyer.
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In the summer of 1981, Drivin’ N Cryin’s bass player Tim Nielsen and drummer Paul Lenz started playing music together as the rhythm section for Atlanta pub rock/punk outfit the Nightporters. The group, which also included singer and guitar player Andy Browne, carved a path through Georgia’s burgeoning underground punk and new wave scenes, sharing stages with legendary acts such as the Clash, REM, and the Replacements.
The Nightporters infused unabashed angst and joy in equal measures into their three-minute, three-chord songs with titles such as “Mona Lisa,” “Dreamin,’” and “West of Eden,” detailing their teenage worldview—yes, some of them were still in high school at the time. Browne was only 15 years old when the group started.
LYNX DELUXE: Photo by Kelly Thompson
Fast-forward some 42 years later: Browne fronts the baroque alternative rock songwriting machine that is Lynx Deluxe. Backed by a lineup featuring bass player Lucy Theodora, drummer Brad Mattson, keyboard player Billy Fields, and guitar player Jeff Dean, the group’s take on “The Great American Bubble Factory” is a stylish and bucolic affair. Their cover pays homage to Kinney’s original number while reflecting on how industry outsourcing has affected the American economy and changed the landscape and middle class American culture as a whole.
“The Great American Bubble Factory” embraces a sense of nostalgia for a happier time and place in America, when daily life seemed simpler and more prosperous.
Kinney makes a cameo appearance in the song, playing harmonica, and Nielsen plays mandolin, making it the only song on the comp. to feature Drivin’ N Cryin’s two longest standing players.
Lynx Deluxe renders “The Great American Bubble Factory” even more precarious than the original, pushing the narrative forward by expanding upon Kinney’s lyrics in deeply personal ways.
In the second verse, Browne sings, “Did some time for a crime went a little loco / Slaved for two bits a day praying for a furlough.”
As Browne explains, it’s all a true story.
“I was in jail for 80 days, because I went a little loco,” Browne says. “The prescription oxycontin I was on for eight years due to a severe back injury left my dopamine and serotonin levels not so balanced for about a year and half. I was not exactly in the right state of mind, and was going through a very difficult time. While I was in there I was trying to get in the kitchen to work and make like .50¢ to $1 a day,” he adds. “But they wouldn’t let me do it.”
Later, Browne blends yet another homage into the song, this time giving a nod to “Union Sundown” from Bob Dylan’s 1981 LP Infidels. “Her dress reads Mozambique / This flashlights from Taiwan / These boots are from the Far East / Boxed and shipped from Amazon / The car parts come from China / Fenders made in Mexico,” he sings before calling back to the original number’s refrain, “If you can make it here, why you build it there?”
This new vision of “The Great American Bubble Factory” unfolds with an even greater sense of unwavering determination.
“We’re not much of a cover band,” Browne goes on to say. “When we pick a song to cover, we have to rewrite it a bit and make it our own.”
Artwork by Anna Jensen
Songs for this living tribute project are amassing over the next 10 months. Previously released singles can be found here.
The first physical installment is available on vinyl now. Check it all out via TastyGoodyRecords.com.
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All three bands on stage this evening feature longtime friends who cut their teeth in a more civilized era of hardcore, post-hardcore, and indie rock—the ‘90s. Now, they’re elder statesmen of the scene, raising the bar high while fusing furious rock, noise, and angular riffs without pretense. It’s called experience, kids.
Photo courtesy of Blood Circuits
SCRATCH OFFS: Photo by Steve Pomberg
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PYREX! Left to right: Arbon Elrich, Joe Hardwick, and Steven Fisher. Photo by Michelle Kinney.
Brooklyn’s Pyrex joins Die Slaughterhaus Records’ new wave of grimey post-punk adversaries with the “Struck Down” b/w “Staying Alive” 7-inch.
Both numbers plunge the group into menacing depths of real-world dejection while revealing a dark sense of humor. Atlanta expat. guitar player and vocalist Joe Hardwick, bass player Arbon Elrich, and drummer Steven Fisher summon bludgeoning intensity with “Struck Down.”
On the flipside, a perfectly nasty cover of the Bee Gees’ disco-era classic “Staying Alive” feels like a Killed By Death deep cut that was captured at a construction site—grounded in dense rhythm and noise—as Hardwick’s distorted growl finds new meaning in the lyrics, “Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me.”
NOTE: The digital versions of these songs, mastered by Graham Tavel, sound notably crisp when compared to the spacious and deeply textured vinyl renderings that are courtesy of Ryan Bell.
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A version of this review first appeared in the November issue ofRecord Plug Magazine. Grab a print copy at your nearest record store, coffee shop, pizza place, or music venue.
Scratch Offs hit hard withTidal Wave, an 11-song debut that distills the traditions of post-hardcore’s top-tier and most forward-thinking luminaries—Fugazi, Hot Snakes, Jawbreaker, Quicksand, Helmet, et. al.—into a streamlined and modern-sounding opening salvo.
Variety is key when propelling vocalist Mike Ligocki’s penchant for screaming melodic catharsis. Ligocki’s voice sits high atop guitar players David Lane and Jason Beebe’s winding riffs, melodies, and leads in songs such as “Puma,” B.Y.R.,” and standout cuts “Hand Replacements” and “The Chapel.” Each number draws out a balance of naked and gnarly emotions with driving force.
Bass player Lloyd Benjamin and percussionist Greg Stevens’ pounding rhythms show off depth and confidence. Together, their musical chemistry epitomizes strength, intelligence, and a full-bodied groove while exploring complex structures and tense dynamics, never losing sight of the rhythm and the sprinting momentum of the song they’re playing. The flexed arrangements of “Mountain of Light” and the powerful charge of “Jesus Night” and “Text Fight” are steeped in unrelenting tension and atmosphere—the accumulated experiences of a band made up mostly of Atlanta punk and post-hardcore scene vets. Lane plays in Skin Jobs, and has been playing alongside Stevens since circa 2001 when they made up the rhythm section for noise rock trio Hex Error.
Benjamin was in All Night Drug Prowling Wolves and is in Uneven Lanes with Stevens, who also plays in Total Peace Band. Beebe played in the Liverhearts and recorded a grip of singles for Rob’s House Records in the early-to-mid aughts. Ligocki is a Maryland-born, New York City transplant who cut his teeth playing with East Coast bands Bound & Buried (with Matt Krupanski from Boy Sets Fire on drums), Habits, and Killtakers. Look them all up! As such, Tidal Wave is an accomplished and formidable collection of fast-urgent punk and post-hardcore anthems that draw from the past to promise a bright future.
Photo by Ron Sherman. Courtesy of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
Photographer Ron Sherman will be at Different Trains Gallery in Decatur, discussing his photographs of The Sex Pistols first show on North American soil on Thursday, November 9 at 7 p.m.
On January 5, 1978, British punk landed in Atlanta when the Sex Pistols played their American debut at The Great Southeast Music Hall in Buckhead’s Lindbergh Plaza. Sherman was in the audience that night shooting pics for Newsweek Magazine.
It was just another night on the job for a working photographer. The media was steeped in a moral panic leading up to the show. Sherman’s photos portray the group as what it was, a young rock’n’roll band.
GOLD SPARKLE BAND: Live at the Silver Ceiling circa 1997. Photo by Steve Pomberg
Gold Sparkle Band, one of the most influential and far-reaching ensembles to emerge from Atlanta’s underground music scene of the early ’90s, is returning to headline an evening at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on Saturday, October 14. The group’s deft compositions, improvisations, and live performances defined a sophisticated era for Atlanta’s underground music scene, alongside contemporaries such as Smoke, Cat Power, and the Rock*A*Teens. Decades later, the energy the group has wielded since 1994 still resonates within the more adventurous realms of the city’s outsider music and arts scenes.
This show marks the first in a series of events geared toward raising awareness for Eyedrum’s two-night 25th anniversary party happening the weekend of Nov. 11 and 12.
Since August of 1998, two of Gold Sparkle Band’s co-founding members, alto saxophone and reeds player Charles Waters and percussionist Andrew Barker have resided in New York City, where they remain musically active under different iterations of the group’s moniker—mostly as the Gold Sparkle Trio.
For the evening of their Eyedrum performance, Waters and Barker are returning to play two full sets with fellow GSB co-founder and trumpet player Roger Ruzow and longtime bass player Chris Riggenbach.
Other co-founding members, bass players Andrew Burnes and Joe Jamerson are no longer performing with the group. Saxophonist and flautist Rob Mallard, who was also a founding member of GSB, died in 2018.
Gold Sparkle Band. Photo by Thomas Tulis
“Charles and I still communicate pretty much every day,” Ruzow says. “He sends me new music that he’s working on all of the time—any genre that you can imagine. I send him new material pretty much every day as well. We have been talking about getting together to play another show down here for quite some time. When Randy Castello and Will Lawless from Eyedrym contacted us about playing their anniversary, it felt as though the time was right.”
For this show, Waters, Barker, Ruzow, and Riggenbach will perform the first set as a quartet. After that, they’ll lead a second set performing as the Gold Sparkle Big Band, an expanded version of the group that will include tenor sax player Ben Davis (Purkinje Shift, Edgewood Sax Trio, Teardrinker Salts), oboe player Robbie Hunsinger, Jason Casanova (4th Ward Afro Klezmer Orchestra) playing euphonium, flautist Anne Richardson, and pianist Chris Case—nine players total.
“Stylistically speaking, what sets these two performances apart is the extremely high caliber of musicians that are joining in for the large ensemble performance,” Ruzow says. “They will make it an absolute blow out no matter what the hell we decide on playing.”
Throughout the years, improvisation based around deconstructing traditional musical forms while straddling the avant-garde and solid grooves to create an evocative atmosphere has remained at the heart of GSB’s sound. Gold Sparkle Band has long wielded the talents of a world-class jazz unit. Each number is built upon a structured composition—mostly written by Waters—that’s used as a vehicle to drive the melody and the musical ideas that are brought to the fore, while also creating a form and context for the music. Improvisation launches from there, and the music can glide along in a linear, blues-based progression, or it can go full-on primal scream. It all depends on the moment in which the music is created.
The group has collaborated with likeminded musicians ranging from free jazz double bassist and Cecil Taylor cohort William Parker to Chattanooga’s the Shaking Ray Levis. The group’s New York-based members have even collaborated with lauded Chicago free jazz veteran Ken Vandermark for the 2004 CD, Brooklyn Cantos.
The music often sidles up to a simmering middle ground, easing in at first, then skittering to life with muscular, horn-punctuated grooves that barrel through numbers such as “Zodiac Attack” from the Fugue & Flowers album, and “People’s Republic” from Brooklyn Cantos.
Songs from releases such as 1995’s Earth Mover, 1997’s Downsizing, and 1999’s Nu-Soul Zodiac build on an ethos that resembles something of a punk rock aesthetic, although far beit from anything that can be easily categorized.
“Punk is a good touchstone, but what we’re creating is more like a contemplated combustion,” Ruzow says. “In previous years, when we were experimenting with punk aesthetics, it was all about us learning to command a particular energy and direction. Now, we have a slightly better understanding of that energy and how to turn it into something that we drive, rather than it driving us,” he adds. “It incorporates aspects from each of our lives, which are all very different, but connected by a compulsion to play music.”
Gold Sparkle Band playing the Jump Fest at Eyedrum in 2002. Photo by Thomas Tulis
Waters adds: “All of us come from sone kinda analog punk background. Our first bassist Andrew Burnes—he was a superstar and super vital in my process of becoming a ‘composer’—has his hands in the middle of all you describe. Our frequent guitatist Jer Wilms, now back in Atlanta, who worked in a million ensembles and then brought his genius to the Nuzion Big Band, is amazing. We are a band of collaborators and saboteurs, poets, ghosts, and some special sauce that jazz mostly doesn’t have. That is because we are a BAND! We’re a fucking band, and we play each others mistakes, we love each other—sometimes each others others and many in between. Gold Sparkle is a band and thats why we rock and have a future.”
During GSB’s mid-to-late ’90s Atlanta heyday the group could be seen on most nights tearing up stages everywhere from Homage Cafe and Dottie’s to the Moreland Ave. Tavern, the Point, Cotton Club, and Frijoleros. Gold Sparkle Band even shared the stage at the Highlander with John Zorn’s Masada—an ensemble playing compositions inspired by radical Jewish culture. “It was a life-changing experience,” says Ruzow, who now leads the 4th Ward Afro Klezmer Orchestra.
All of the aforementioned venues are long gone—relics of an everychanging cityscape that no longer exists.
The Star Bar, MJQ, and Eyedrum were also regular haunts for the group. But as Waters says, the group still has a future.
For this show, the group will delve into material from their early aughts albums including 2002’s Thunder Reminded Me and Fugues & Flowers.
“During our whole trajectory in New York City, which is semi taking for granted, me and Barker have worked a million gigs and we still love doing it,” Waters says. “Barker leads his trips, and I play my wacky garden chamber music. We just keep on with it.”
Throughout the ‘90s, GSB emerged as a Southern counterpart to the post-rock, indie rock, and free jazz sounds created by Midwestern acts such as Slint, Tortoise, and the Vandermark 5. In a single musical moment, the group’s live performances would unfurl with all the flare of a conventional jazz outfit before drifting into psychedelic clusters of skronk and wail. Each number intimating a cerebral sense of immediacy that defined an innovative and iconoclastic era of Atlanta’s underground music scene, and dovetailed with what was happening with the world at large.
That sound and vision remains as potent as potent as ever, and the future remains wide open.
On Oct. 12, two days before playing Eyedrum, Gold Sparkle Band’s members are hosting a workshop from 6-8 p.m., discussing a hands-on approach to live improvisational musical styles.
MELVINS: Dale Crover (left), Steven McDonald, and Buzz Osborne. Photo by Chris Casella.
The monolithic punk-metal speed and molasses dirges of the Melvins establish the group as both forerunners and contemporaries of the Pacific Northwestern musical underground of the early ‘90s. In the modern era, singer and guitarist Buzz Osborne, drummer Dale Crover, and current bass player Steven McDonald have continued pushing the group to creative new heights with 2022’s, Bad Mood Rising, followed by this year’s The Devil You Knew, The Devil You Know, featuring the original versions along with new recordings of the six songs from the Melvins’ debut 7-inch EP.
Now, Melvins have teamed up with Atlanta-based abstract electronic project Void Manes to unleash an homage to British industrial music luminaries Throbbing Gristle, titled Throbbing Jazz Gristle Funk Hits (Amphetamine Reptile Records). It’s an entirely electronic album—a first for the Melvins—featuring TG-inspired improv sessions and covers of songs such as “Sic Sick 60’s,” “Hot On the Heels of Love,” “Hamburger Lady,” and more. The first single is a thickened take on “Discipline 23,” which appears on the CD and on a flexi single that comes tucked inside the LP sleeve.
The video, created by Jesse Nieminen, builds on TG’s subversive late ‘70s mantra on dismantling the mechanisms of social and psychological control amid an era defined by misguided patriotism and technology gone awry. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here, a minimalist blend of fascist imagery, made hollow under a sheen of maximum color saturation and distortion, pushes the Melvins’ vision of industrial overload to the nth degree. Press play above and get disciplined.
Throbbing Jazz Gristle Funk Hits is the latest in a loose but ongoing trend of paying homage to the confrontational and anti-commercial/pro-good-taste force that prompted British tabloids to label Throbbing Gristle “the wreckers of civilization.” “Heathen Earth” appears on the Melvins’ covers CD titled Everybody Loves Sausages. Head down the Discogs rabbit hole and there are more TG renditions by all parties involved to be discovered and devoured.
“Buzz talks a lot about giving people creative freedom and he’s right on about it,” Nieminen says. “There might be some discussion beforehand or none at all. For ‘Discipline,’ I had an idea, it turned into another, and I put it together. I didn’t ask for suggestions for it. I was free to do whatever I wanted and it was pretty close to what I envisioned from the start.”
Nieminen goes on to say: “We made the A Walk with Love and Death short film together. It was a conversation where we sat and riffed on ideas and edited it together. For Melvins TV they shot green screen in LA and sent stuff for me to do what I wanted,” he adds. “That grew from an idea where I was planning to shoot them in a studio with green screen backdrops and do a single music video in the style of those old German Beat Club episodes. Because of the pandemic it turned into Melvins TV and ballooned into 3.5 episodes.”
In a more recently released video for “Zyklon B Zombie,” Nieminen sets the songs fugue-like bouts of faux tropical rhythms and staccato electronic sounds to waves of billowing and blackened clouds, looped in a tussle of natural beauty rendered exquisitely for the simulacrum. It’s just a taste of what the album holds in store.
March of 2023 marked the 40-year anniversary of the Melvins’ first live performance. The group has spent much of the year celebrating by offering a slew of reissues and new releases, and playing shows around the world. The next Atlanta show is on Wednesday, September 27, at Variety Playhouse, where they’re playing 1991’s sprawling Bullhead LP in its entirety, along with more highlights from throughout the Melvins repertoire.
“We’ve been a band since 1983. We’ve never quit, we’ve never taken a break and stopped being a band, and I have seen people come and go from the highest heights to the lowest lows—death, resurrection, and more death,” Osborne says. “In the art world that I am in, there is a war of attrition; whomever is the last man standing is the winner. So far it’s me, with no end in sight.” READ MORE FROM MY OCTOBER 2022 FLAGPOLE MAGAZINE FEATURE STORY.
Void Manes is performing opening sets at several of the Southern Melvins/Boris shows. Keep your fingers crossed that they tear into some of the Throbbing Jazz … material on stage.
Rad/ATL 