Presented by Bowery Boston Doors: 6:00 pm / Show: 7:00 pm Tickets on
sale Fri 2/14 at 10am! Tickets available at AXS.COM, or by phone at
855-482-2090. No service charge on tickets purchased in person at The
Sinclair Box Office Wednesdays-Saturdays 12-7PM. Please note: this
show is 18+ with valid ID. Patrons under 18 admitted if accompanied by
a parent . Opening acts and set times are subject to change without
notice. All sales are final unless a show is postponed or canceled.
All bags larger than 12 inches x 12 inches, backpacks, professional
cameras, video equipment, large bags, luggage and like articles are
strictly prohibited from the venue. Please make sure necessary
arrangements are made ahead of time. All patrons subject to search
upon venue entry. *** *** Bombay Bicycle Club Website Facebook Twitter
It might seem odd to describe Bombay Bicycle Club as veterans given
that nobody in the band is older than 24, but this is the London
quartet’s fourth album, each one more successful than the last,
which is a notable achievement in today’s climate of rapid ascents
and sudden declines. Their steady rise is something that rarely
happens anymore — a band given space by their label, Island, to
evolve unpredictably with each release and take their audience with
them. So Long, See You Tomorrow is their richest, boldest and most
euphoric album yet, and their first UK number one. This autumn,
following a string of international festival appearances including
Glastonbury, Reading/Leeds, Latitude, Fuji Rocks and Lollapalooza, the
band will play their first ever UK arena date at London’s Earls
Court. They have a healthy, ever-growing following in continental
Europe and the US, too, with all of their dates having sold out. The
more risks Bombay Bicycle Club take, the bigger they get. “I feel
like we’ve found the balance, making it interesting and intelligent
but not highbrow or elitist,” says frontman Jack Steadman. “You
want to satisfy the people who like the technical side of music but
someone listening on the radio should be able to sing along.” Bombay
Bicycle Club are Jack Steadman (vocals, keyboards and guitar), Jamie
MacColl (guitar), Suren de Saram (drums) and Ed Nash (bass). They grew
up in north London and signed to Island after leaving secondary school
at 18, releasing their guitar-driven debut, I Had the Blues But I
Shook Them Loose, in 2009. Their second album, Flaws, in 2010, saw an
unexpected change of direction: folky and intimate, it was nominated
for the Ivor Novello for Best Album. Their third album in as many
years, A Different Kind of Fix, arrived in 2011. Living up to the
title’s promise, it was a dramatic departure, with agile rhythms,
sampled loops and vertiginous swirls of guitar. So Long, See You
Tomorrow is yet another leap forward, a beautiful collection of songs
that owe more to experimental electronica than to indie-rock. In fact,
the whole album is one giant loop, because it is bookended with the
same melody — the beatific title track effectively segues back into
the surging, string-laden opener, Overdone. Compounding the sensation
is the last lyric the listener hears: “Keep going round and round
and round…” Jack, who writes all the band’s songs, can trace his
absorption in loops to the first music he made as a teenager, using a
simple pre-GarageBand software program called eJay. “Everyone talks
about how our albums have been different, but from my point of view,
this was there the whole time,” says Jack. “I started recording
music at 15 on my computer and it was far more experimental than any
of the Bombay stuff.” (This he attributes to “getting into stuff
like Boards of Canada and discovering psychoactive drugs — a lethal
combination!”) Rhythm is the key to So Long, See You Tomorrow. The
show-stopping first single, “Carry Me,” is a tough, restless dance
anthem, its vocal refrain looped like a sample. Echoing the album’s
theme of circularity, the interactive video, which allows viewers to
animate the band, was inspired by the great 19th century stop-motion
photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. Second single “Luna” has a
slippery, sun-kissed ambience, opening with the busy patter of tablas.
The Indian influence is even more prominent on third single
“Feel,” expanding on a snake-charming melody from the 1954
Bollywood movie “Nagin” with thick electronic bass and an
explosively optimistic chorus. The video was shot in India and has a
Bollywood theme. “Eyes Off You” is a piano-driven festival torch
song fluctuating between turbulent peaks and glittering pools of
melancholy. “Home By Now” bathes in harmonies as folk meets hip
hop, while “It’s Alright Now”‘s tender sentiments are offset
by bracing marching-band percussion. The sighing melody of new single
“Come To” slowly blossoms into starry-eyed shoegazing textures and
consoling harmonies. So Long, See You Tomorrow was heavily influenced
by the cultures that Jack experienced during a series of songwriting
tours. He travelled, often by himself, to India, Japan, Turkey, the
Netherlands and around the UK. “It made me happy,” he says. “And
when you’re feeling good you’re going to start creating things. I
need to be feeling energetic to write new music.” Sometimes he would
remain in a country after the band played a show and immerse himself
in the local culture, as he did in India. At other times he selected
places randomly on holiday-lettings websites and took himself off to
see what happened. This led to a spell living with a family in the
middle of the Turkish countryside. “I turned up with all my
equipment and stayed for three weeks, and ended up feeling like this
weird adopted kid.” [At one point he was taken to a travelers’
camp because they were the only people for miles around to have a drum
kit he could borrow, and they turned out to be dazzlingly accomplished
folk musicians who performed especially for him, although the drum kit
turned out to be “the worst I have ever seen in my life”.] So
Long, See You Tomorrow was written and recorded between May 2012 and
October 2013 and produced by Jack in the band’s own London studio, a
decision he took because he was fed up with being “incapable of
describing what I wanted with words. You just end up sounding like a
terrible A&R man.” The album was also partly recorded in north
London’s famous Konk studios and engineered and mixed by Mark Rankin
(Adele, Plan B, Queens of the Stone Age, Florence & the Machine), with
vocal contributions from regular collaborator Lucy Rose and impressive
newcomer Rae Morris. “I think there’s a romantic side to the
album, although I always try to leave the meaning of a song open,”
says Jack. “When I write it’s very much a stream-of-consciousness
thing. I think maybe the audience can be the psychologist that
analyses it for you…'” “We want people to interpret the lyrics
in their own way,” says Jamie. “I do think it ties into our lack
of cynicism though. More than on any of our other albums there is a
feeling of hopefulness.” *** Liza Anne Website Facebook Twitter
“Growing up, people would always say I was too happy to be
depressed, or too social to have anxiety,” says Liza Anne
Odachowski, the critically acclaimed songwriter better known these
days by her stage name Liza Anne. “In their eyes, because I was one
thing, I couldn’t also be something else. I think we all exist in
duality, though. I can be everything and nothing all at once.”
Duality is at the core of Liza Anne’s arresting new album, ‘Fine
But Dying,’ her debut release for indie powerhouse label Arts &
Crafts. Synthesizing the elegant sincerity of Angel Olsen with the wry
lyricism of Courtney Barnett and the unapologetic candor of Feist, the
music is both tough and vulnerable, bold and withdrawn, a helping hand
and a middle finger. Firing on all cylinders with distorted alt-rock
guitars and explosive drums one minute, hushed and delicate the next,
it’s an eclectic collection that reflects the messy complications of
growing up in the modern age, as the 23-year-old grapples with the
fallout of falling in love, reckons with the patriarchy, and stares
down the panic disorder she refuses to let define her. ‘Fine But
Dying’ is the sound of an artist taking total control of her life
and her art, a proud misfit crafting an aggressively infectious
kiss-off to an industry (and a society) that’s tried to box her in
from day one. “Being a young woman playing music in Nashville,
everybody had their opinions of who I should be and what I should do
next,” says Liza Anne, whose music is as decidedly un-Nashville as
it gets. “They wanted me to be happier and softer and easier because
people are conditioned to only experience women in entertainment as a
force of goodness and kindness and light. But just because I’m a
woman doesn’t mean I have to be soft and happy and nurturing all the
time. It’s pretty inhumane to expect a human being to represent only
one side of themselves. We embody too many contradictions.” ‘Fine
But Dying’ follows Liza Anne’s self-released 2015 breakout album,
‘Two,’ which garnered more than 20 million streams worldwide. NPR
praised the record’s “deeply introspective” songwriting and
“searing reflections,” while Nylon called it “a stunningly
somber album” and dubbed Liza an artist with the “keen ability to
turn even the smallest of feelings into a sweeping song.” The record
earned her dates with Joseph, Margaret Glaspy, The Oh Hellos, and
Bears Den, among others, as well as festival slots from ACL to
Daytrotter Downs. Though Liza Anne commands a stage like she was born
to do it, a career in music was far from her mind as she grew up in
the quaint, sheltered community of Saint Simons Island, Georgia. She
discovered songwriting one summer at sleepaway camp, when a guitar
class helped her realize that the notebooks she’d been filling with
poetry and prose could be set to melodies. Raised in a deeply
religious household, Liza’s first taste of public performance came
on Sundays when she served as a local worship leader, and though
she’s since moved on from the church, the experience proved to be
formative for her. “I learned at a very young age how to manipulate
an entire room full of people to feel what I’m feeling,” she says
with a laugh. When it came time to cut ‘Fine But Dying,’ Liza Anne
brought both her band and her producer, Zach Dyke, to France’s
legendary La Frette studio, a 19th century mansion on the banks of the
Seine. Dyke and Liza’s recording chemistry had been undeniable since
they first met during college in Nashville, and though Liza dropped
out of school to tour full time, the pair’s creative relationship
continued to grow deeper and break new ground. “Zach is my best
friend and my magic charm,” reflects Liza Anne. “Working with him
just feels like working with your other arm or another part of your
brain.” In a six-day whirlwind, they recorded eleven new songs that
embodied the raw energy and tense emotion that Liza Anne had long
carried in her head but never yet captured on tape. “This is my
‘woman at her wildest self’ album,” she says. “It’s a place
for me to express all of the things about womanhood and the human
condition that I was experiencing without fear of feeling like I’m
‘too much’ or ‘not enough.’ People used to talk about my music
in such sweet terms, but they weren’t sweet things that I was going
through. With this record, I’m not sugarcoating anything any
more.” On album opener “Paranoia,” Liza Anne weaves together
lilting pop sensibilities with moments of frenetic release as she
confronts insecurity and doubt. The result is an addictive,
Cranberries-meets-St. Vincent gem, and it proves to be a perfect entry
point to an album unafraid to bare the multitudes it contains.
Liza’s crystalline voice is alternately beguiling and jarring as she
sets her distress to music on “Panic Attack,” sends up the hollow
phoniness of southern hospitality on “Small Talks,” and sneers and
snarls her way through the third-wave feminist anthem of “Kid
Gloves.” On the gentle but bruising “I’m Tired, You’re
Lonely” she channels the eerie beauty of Jeff Buckley, while
“Closest To Me” is a reverb-soaked look in the mirror, and
“Control” faces off against some of the darker voices in her head.
“There are moments in the song ‘Control’ that question what it
feels like to be in love,” says Liza Anne. “The whole album is
really a catalog of my first few years of falling in love with someone
but doubting I had the capacity to actually do it.” ‘Fine But
Dying’ proves that Liza Anne is a woman with the capacity to do far
more than she’d ever given herself credit for. By casting off the
restrictions of who and what she “should” be, by writing with
unrepentant emotion and without concern for the constructs and
confines of “femininity,” she was able to discover her truest self
and create an album of incredible power and vision, one that fully
reflects the rich duality of its author. “This album gave me space
to find my voice,” says Liza Anne. “In the end, I always want to
make art that’s provocative and that challenges the stereotypes of
what women are supposed to be or how they are usually experienced.
Songwriting isn’t just fun for me, it’s necessity. It’s my way
of escaping my body and inhabiting it at the same time.”
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13/06/2020 Last update