tag:flavorpill.com,2005:/newyork/venues/bowery-ballroom 2012-05-27T00:00:00-07:00 tag:flavorpill.com,2005:EventListing/67696 2012-05-30T00:00:00Z 2012-05-30T00:00:00Z Tuesday 5/29  The individual roots established by Keith Morris (Black Flag/Circle Jerks), Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), Steven McDonald (Redd Kross), and Mario Rubalcaba (Earthless/Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt) are uniquely woven throughout the rock music canon. Each has challenged society’s cyclical and complacent ideals in their own respective bands, and three decades on they’ve never strayed from their intentions. Now they come together as a four-piece called OFF! and they’re as confrontational as ever, lunging inside the aesthetic of West Coast hardcore to push life’s most provocative issues to the forefront. The pinch-hitting First Four EPs box set marks their explosive approach for a total of 16 songs in just under 18 minutes (released in Nov. 2010). New album to be released May 8, 2012.   tag:flavorpill.com,2005:EventListing/67697 2012-05-31T00:00:00Z 2012-05-31T00:00:00Z Indie Wednesday 5/30  New Wild Everywhere is the follow-up to Great Lake Swimmers' critically acclaimed, Polaris Music Prize shortlisted and Juno nominated 2009 album Lost Channels. Their fifth album in just under a decade, this new collection of 12 tracks reveals a depth and maturity previously only hinted at by lead singer and songwriter Tony Dekker. Featuring the touring band from Lost Channels (with long-time collaborator Erik Arnesen on banjo and guitar, along with new addition Miranda Mulholland contributing backing vocals and violin, Bret Higgins on upright bass, and Lost Channels drummer Greg Millson), New Wild Everywhere thematically picks up where the previous album left off, exploring transcendence in the natural world to describe the universal themes of love, mortality and escape.  "There is something very elemental about this album as a whole," says Dekker.  tag:flavorpill.com,2005:EventListing/67698 2012-06-01T00:00:00Z 2012-06-01T00:00:00Z Thursday 5/31  For the moment, Joe Pug has it figured out, career if not life: Just write the songs that have to be written, play them for anybody who will listen, tour as if you had no home. Oh, and give your music away. Which isn't to say he won't be selling his debut full-length offering, Messenger ( Released 2/16/2010 on Lightning Rod). But free is how he came to make it, more or less. It worked like this, for Joe Pug anyhow: The day before his senior year as a playwright student at the University of North Carolina, he sat down for a cup of coffee and had the clearest thought of his life: I am profoundly unhappy here. Then came the second clearest. Pug packed up his belongings and pointed his car towards Chicago. Working as a carpenter by day, the 23 year-old Pug spent nights playing the guitar he hadn't picked up since his teenage years. Using ideas originally slated for a play he was writing called "Austin Fish," Pug began creating the sublime lyrical arrangements that would become the Nation of Heat EP. tag:flavorpill.com,2005:EventListing/70743 2012-06-02T00:00:00Z 2012-06-02T00:00:00Z Friday 6/ 1  To call them multi-instrumentalists might be a little overdone. The kids in Freelance Whales are really just collectors, at heart. They don't really fancy buffalo nickels or Victorian furniture, but over the past two years, they've been collecting instruments, ghost stories, and dream-logs. Somehow, from this strange compost heap of little sounds and quiet thoughts, songs started to rise up like steam from the ground. The first performance of these songs took place in January of 2009, in Staten Island's abandoned farm colony, a dilapidated geriatric ward, in one of New York's lesser visited boroughs. A seemingly never-ending jigsaw of small rooms, the farm colony ate them whole and threatened to never regurgitate them. And even though the onlookers were only spiritual presences, the group was still palpably nervous and visibly cold. After a bit of singing, strumming and stomping asbestos, they realized that they'd found a good crowd. They heard a bit of clapping from an adjacent room, also some laughing, but not a single soul asked about their record. Weathervanes, the groups debut LP, finished tracking just a few nights earlier. Swirling with organic and synthetic textures, interlocking rhythmic patterns, and light harmonic vocals, the record works to tell a simple, pre-adolescent love story: a young male falls in love with the spectral young femme who haunts his childhood home. He chases her in his dreams but finds her to be mostly elusive. He imagines her alive, and wonders if someday he'll take on her responsibilities of ghosting, or if maybe he'll join her, elsewhere.