10.28.15 PRE-FEST SINGLE DAY (ORPHEUM ONLY): Desaparecidos, The Menzingers, mewithoutYou, Into It. Over It, The Sidekicks, Restorations, Pentimento, D

Desaparecidos is a rock band featuring Conor Oberst (vocals,guitar) Landon Hedges (bass guitar, vocals), Matt Baum (drums), Denver Dalley – (guitar) and Ian McElroy (keyboards). The band formed in 2001, released one album (2002's Read Music/Speak Spanish), and broke up shortly thereafter. In 2010, Desaparecidos reunited to play The Concert for Equality in Omaha.


After releasing an especially lauded EP and touring much of 2009, Philadelphia's The Menzingers have been dubbed a "Band You Need To Know" in 2010 by Alternative Press and they have a brand new full length proving why. Chamberlain Waits may very well be the most important record released so far by Red Scare and on it The Menzingers combine many of the genre's styles (punk, hardcore, folk) to make for an undeniably infectious hybrid of hits. Produced by Matt Allison at Atlas Studios (Alkaline Trio, Less Than Jake, Lawrence Arms), this band and this new album are destined for great, great things.


Those who have followed mewithoutYou's music in recent years will likely see their new,self-releasedTen Storiesas a return to old form. Their previous record,It's All Crazy!, etc. had been a drastic and intentional departure. Aaron Weiss' manic, unorthodox hollering was nowhere to be found, deliberately giving way to a more conventional melodic vocal approach. The explosive, schizophrenic drumming and swarthy,tempestuouslow end (Rickie Mazzotta and Greg Jehanian, respectively) were accordingly subdued, relegated largely to keeping basic time. Chris Kleinberg had jumped ship for med school, leaving Mike Weiss reluctantly alone on electric guitar, feeling like a session player embellishing his little brother's folk songs, no longer part of a coherent unit.In short, due largely to their singer's creative wanderlust, the band had entirely forsaken whatever they'd become; in an effort to spurn the familiar, they had grown unrecognizable, alienating no shortage of fans in the process. Those fans, and whoever has come to miss what was most distinct about mewithoutYou, will welcomeTen Storiesas the rightful follow-up to their 2006 release,Brother/Sister,and 2004'sCatch forUsthe Foxes.To be sure, the band hasn't altogether renounced the psychedelic-rustic-pop elements ofIt's All Crazy!; rather, they have renounced the scrupulous control inherent to its renunciation. Simply put, they seem to have let go of the steering wheel, and are back to writing music, well, 'naturally.'"They're not quite children's songs," vocalist Aaron Weiss explains, "with not quite coherent storylines, but there is an overarching and kind of child-like narrative: a circus train crashes in 19th century Montana. Some animals escape, others stay in their cages. The traveling menagerie re-rails, stays its course, and struggles to fill in the missing attractions. Meanwhile, freed from institutionalized life, the rice-cake rabbit takes to a peripatetic fortune teller, the monastic walrus is tempted by a hedonistic owl, a fish falls for an eggplant. Other songs describe a contemplative Fox's prophetic dream, a starving Bear's vision of a martyred saint, and an indecisive Peacock & gnostic Tiger learning the virtues of megalomania from an ego-annihilated Potter Wasp."This bizarre, character-heavy lyrical approach let the band revisit their perennial leitmotifs of romantic disaster & quasi-mystical speculation, without the self-pity/indulgence of direct autobiography. Reflecting recent, devastating personal losses, practically every song addresses ourinevitable dying, apparently easier to face when projected onto anthropomorphic animals. This zoological ventriloquist act allows them to explore abstract philosophical themes and draw on finespun literary sources with a profound goofiness that deflates whatever danger of pretentiousness. The story-teller elements are obscure enough to avoid the short-lived rock opera aesthetic, leaving most plot details and potential moralizing to the imagination; and this without succumbing to insincerity/irony, overt relativism, or outright nonsense.The ever-odd Daniel Smith's production and veteran Brad Wood's mixing combine to improve upon the best sonic elements of the band's past releases. Musically,Ten Storiesis a mix of the brazen noisiness, hypnotic soundscapes, and derelict shouting of theirold songs, the dead-level melody and extravagant orchestration of recent years, and a newfound reliance on ethereal harmonies, courtesy en masse of female guest vocalists (most notably, Paramore's Hayley Williams). Whimsically morbid as an Edward Gorey alphabet, simultaneously self-abnegating and -aggrandizing, defying simplistic musical or intellectual categorization, mewithoutYou's new collection of songs is the fabulously vivid outgrowth of an ongoing religious and irreverent eclecticism, a 'decade-plusnarcissistic scramble for artistic affirmation' (their words), and the even longer-running and peculiar friendship of four not-so-younggentlemen from nowhere in particular, apparently at the height of their mutual affection.Epilogue:mewithoutYou's 17-ton grease-powered bus --the ornately-chipped, floral-painted, "mental hospital on wheels" --will once again, according to the band, "hem and haw its way across the country this summer, punctuated no doubt by near-daily breakdowns, makeshift repairs, newborn babies, manic depressive episodes, and desperate attempts by all parties involved to separate [them]selves from separation itself."


Growing up is weird. Very few of us ever end up doing that thing for a living that we imagined we might when we were kids. Even fewer end up doing the same thing for the rest of our lives that we were doing as teenagers, even if that thing happens to be making music with our friends. In the case of The Sidekicks, a teenage affinity for playing propulsive punk rock somehow, against all odds, managed to turn into a full-time life pursuit. After nearly a decade of making noisy rock music, The Sidekicks have the audacity to finally grow up and their newfound maturity is at the very core of their excellent new album, Runners in the Nerved World.

"This band essentially started when we were kids, when we were fifteen," recalls front man Steve Ciolek. "Every time we make a new record I always stop and ask myself if we're even the same band now. We were in high school, you know? We loved bands like Against Me! and that's where we were coming from. Over the years we've all grown and changed—like anyone does—and you want the art you make to reflect that. It's just funny sometimes to think about it. The Sidekicks feels like an arbitrary moniker sometimes, you know? We're certainly not the same people we were back then."

Formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 2006, The Sidekicks paid their dues according to the old-fashion punk rock model—by playing lots and lots of shows, sleeping on floors, and generally devoting themselves to recording and touring at the expense of any other kind of life. The bands earliest recorded efforts—2007's So Long, Soggy Dog and 2009's Weight of Air—reflected this. By the time they released 2012's Awkward Breeds, the romance of punk rock was beginning to wane and the influence of pop music began to creep in. "To me the appeal of punk rock was that there weren't any rules," says Ciolek. "Now the word "punk" has changed so much. I still like the whole spirit of punk rock, but it's crazy to spend so many years on the road playing with so many bands that all sound exactly the same, like they are all working within this very rigid formula. A lot of our music now feels like a reaction to that, to having been around that for so many years. This record was really about trying to get away from that punk format, even though I have a lot of respect for that music."

For the recording of Runners in the Nerved World the band— Steve Ciolek (Vocals & Guitar), Matt Climer (Drums), and Ryan Starinsky (Bass)—decamped to Seattle to work with famed indie-rock producer Phil Ek, a pairing that proved to be something of a dream come true for Ciolek. "The dream from the very beginning was to work with Phil Ek," says Ciolek, "When that became a reality it was almost too good to be true. It was working with Phil that really shaped the sound of the record. Up until this point we'd just go into a studio for a week and record everything live and that would be it. This time around I just really wanted to make a great pop record. I was ready to abandon that idea that we're a punk band and everything has to sound like we're a punk band playing in a basement somewhere. I wanted to let the songs just go wherever they needed to go, which was liberating. This time we got to spend six weeks on the songs instead of just one."

According to Ciolek, the songs that eventually found their way onto the new record represented a period of growth for the band, which is obvious from the beginning of album-opener "Hell is Warm"—a track whose feather light guitar lines give way to charging drums and Ciolek's soaring vocals asking the question "How do we not get lost?" It seems a fitting question to open an album all about piloting new and mysterious paths. Tracks like "The Kid Who Broke His Wrist" and "Deer" bring to mind the kind of jangly pop euphoria of early Band of Horses or old Built to Spill records, while "Everything in Twos" is the kind of pop punk jam seemingly tailor made for singing along in a car at peak volume. According to Ciolek, the album offers a variety of firsts for the band. " 'Satellite Words and Me' is kind of the first ballad we've ever written, like our version of "The Long and Winding Road" or something," he explains. "Also, 'Jesus Christ Supermalls' is kind of our way of taking a step towards making a real pop song. We weren't trying to get all symphonic or Phil Spector on this record, but there wasn't any rule that we couldn't use strings and things like that. For the first time ever we really let ourselves explore the possibilities of a studio. Plus, Phil Ek really knows how to make guitars sound great and I think he really enjoyed the opportunity to make a real rock record." The end result is an album that feels deceptively effortless; a collection of songs about the need to move forward, packed with buoyant melodies and razor-sharp hooks that go on for days and days.

"At its core, Runners in the Nerved World is about getting past the excitement of growing up and finding new ways to simulate that movement," says Ciolek. "How that movement manifest itself varies from song to song--whether it be chemically (basically all the drinking references), physically ("Blissfield, MI"), or even by having new romantic partners. The point the record is supposed to make is that it's often pretty arbitrary how that movement is simulated. Regardless of the situation, inevitably the characters in these songs just get stuck in those cycles. The record tries to deconstruct that inertia--that constant motivation to run."

As for what happens next for The Sidekicks, Ciolek and the rest of the band look forward to getting back on the road and playing shows that reflect the bands increasingly varied back catalog. "Everything we've done in the past is still relevant for us," says Ciolek. "It's just weird to think about how something just becomes your life's work, you know? It just happens without you even realizing it. Maybe that's what some of these new songs are kind of about. You know, sometimes it's scary to think about doing this when I'm 30 and I'll have been doing this for fifteen years at that point. It's wild. The Sidekicks could be a totally different kind of band by then, which is fine as long as we're still having a good time."


At a time when the music world is saturated with more bands than ever, Restorations are a refreshing change of pace: An act who undeniably embody the DIY spirit but also bring along a real breadth of musical knowledge and an unlikely set of influences that somehow manage to work perfectly together. Equal parts punk rock and polemics, Restorations is a unique group of musicians that's difficult to categorize and even harder to get out of your head.


Pentimento is a punk rock quartet from Buffalo, N.Y., that strives to create a sound focused on the raw emotion of the punk scene it grew up on.

While staying true to the roots and influences of its upbringing, what
sets Pentimento apart is the sheer honesty and authenticity present in
its music. Pentimento's goal has always been to share passionate music
with others. Its hope has always been for listeners to develop a
personal relationship with its music, eclipsing the traditional
band-to-fan acquaintance and fusing a deeper bond.

Pentimento released in late 2012 its debut full-length album, a
self-titled record that was released independently for free on the
Internet. Supporters of the band came out in full force, generously
donating to the band to help it pay for its recording budget. The
self-titled LP followed up an EP called Wrecked and a split with Young
English in the band's young career.

Without a doubt, Pentimento is the band's most impressive work to
date. The record plays out like a modern-day Tell All Your Friends
with undertones of early Hot Water Music. The passionate lyricism is
what strikes listeners first, with standout tracks like "Circles" and
"Almost Atlantic" providing memorable one-liners that beg to be belted
out at live shows. The band will release Pentimento on vinyl via Paper
+ Plastick Records and on CD and cassette via Black Numbers on May 7,2013.


Daisyhead, made up of Chiarizzio, Michael Roe (vocals/guitar), Curtis Durard (guitar) and Chad Burroughs (drums), formed in 2012 and has quickly become one of the most promising new bands in the emo/alternative rock revival scene. The band's sound takes listeners back to the heyday of the 90's post-hardcore/alternative rock and early 2000's era of Revelation Records while injecting their own unique edge and style. Following the recent release of their debut EP, I Couldn't Face You, via Spartan Records, word of the band has spread like wildfire and their audience continues to grow with each listen and live show.