All digital 7-inches posted on The Ampeater Review include an A-side and a B-side, just like a classic vinyl 7-inch. Most of the bands that we work with chose an accessible A-side to hook new listeners and a more experimental B-side for the adventurous listener. But Austin-based band The Laughing has taken their selection a bit more seriously and, upping the ante, they’ve presented us with something unprecedented—a concept 7-inch. Get ready for “pop music as envisioned by The Laughing.”

You’re probably scratching your forehead right now and wondering just who the hell The Laughing is and what their vision of pop music could possibly entail. I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical too at first. But this isn’t the vague and far flung pile of bullshit you tried to pass off as your comp lit thesis, it’s a bold vision that The Laughing paints with remarkable clarity and confidence.

The Laughing is a four-piece rock band but don’t be fooled by the conventional lineup. Featuring Logan Middleton on guitars and vocals, Sean Neesely on bass, Grant van Amburgh on drums, and Adam Glasseye on organ, the band likes to keep it fresh by tossing bells, dulcimers, ukuleles, synthesizers, clarinets, flutes, an array of percussion, and any other noises they can dream up into the mix. They draw inspiration from music, both popular and experimental, that spans eras. The band explains that their varied instrumentation and ornamental arrangements “adorn core song structures and melodies that take cues from the likes of Harry Nilsson, Os Mutantes, Jorge Bem, Silver Apples, Love, Roxy Music, Sonic Youth, 13th Floor Elevators and more.” Yet the recipe is so complicated that the ingredients become obscured. What do they do? The Laughing manage to drum up the same excitement that pop music once inspired but now lacks. How do they do it? By milking a century’s worth of music for everything its worth and fucking it up beyond recognition. The product captures the spirit of pop without seeming derivative. There are very few bands out there that can do what The Laughing is doing right now.

Let’s listen to A-side “Runner.” Middleton explains, “we present a core melodic and chordal structure of a classic early 60’s R & B influenced American pop song, that got unknowingly dosed with some sort potent combination of psychotropic substance and amphetamines.” Awesome. “If someone had informed Sam Cooke ahead of time how his brilliant career was going to come to such a violent and bizarre end,” Middleton continues, “he might have have leaned his later compositions in this direction. Incorporating a little 80’s new wave synth on top of Hammond organ the song is considerably faster, and more unhinged than the traditional pop form on which its based. Lyrically swapping out the innocence of the 50’s with a tinge of cynicism, all the while singing the same old song: I love you… I messed up…. now I want you back!”

“I messed up,” might be the dominant theme, but Middleton delivers it with such a cocky drunken American punch that one couldn’t exactly call it apologetic. In his deep vibrato and swooping melodies I hear traces of Presley to Pavarotti, Dr. Martin Luther King to Oscar de Leon to a laughing hyena. The Laughing’s style is bold and resonant but a little wild, accompanied well by a whiskey on the rocks. And what about Sam Cooke? My hunch is that even if he’d had the foresight to imagine what happened at the Hacienda Motel on that fateful night, he wouldn’t have created something quite so perverse as “Runner.” Yes, perverse. Why? Because it’s out of control. It’s an uncensored portrait of the inner workings of the diseased mind. And you can’t look away no matter how hard you try.

Sometimes when I’m listening to music I’ll zone out and without any conscious effort I’ll orchestrate an elaborate scene for which the music is the soundtrack. These scenes play out in my mind shot by shot, as if I were reading the storyboard of a film. “Runner” is the soundtrack to a chase scene. Frantic synths and guitars push the narrative along at breakneck pace. As the momentum builds, the cuts get more rapid. The screaming guitar becomes the screaming of breaks. Alternating drum and noise breaks on the bridge mark cut to after cut to! The drums break into a steady roll and the song explodes. Don’t expect to listen passively. This spirit is contagious.

B-side “Help Me” is a little less frantic. Middleton explains that “it slows things up and strips things down.” But please don’t get the wrong idea. “Help Me” is no ballad. It’s a dancing-on-the-kitchen-table-in-your-underwear-and shouting-into-a-broomstick kind of song. To put it more directly, “Help Me” is not a song for normal people. Though outwardly upbeat it’s deranged at the core and has a deceptively calm energy that builds steadily throughout. “Bringing in the ukulele and substituting the the persistent drums with hand claps and shakers,” says Middleton, “we depict a more personal account of some one in a sticky situation that stubbornly wants to be left alone to sort things out for himself. The title along with the overly re-assuring lyrical content betray this idea though, instead revealing that this person, really does need help! Complete with synth arpegiators and a ghetto-blastered-out finale we wanted to give the listener something to shout along to, while their ’subs’ rattle their neighbors coffee-table collectibles.”

“Help Me” lacks the force of “Runner” but more than compensates for that with catchy hooks and unconventional instrumentation. The chorus is beautiful for its simplicity. At only three words and four chords it’s easy (and nearly impossible)to forget. “Don’t help me…” As Middleton emphasizes, in context the lyrics appear ironic, the music suspiciously peppy. The plea is altogether unconvincing, it lacks composure.

Both “Runner” and “Help Me” come from The Laughing’s debut album, FEVER, which they released in 2009. Borrowing from the production tactics of genres as diverse as classic dub and noise rock, the album was collaboratively engineered by Erik Wofford (Black Angels, Voxtrot), Danny Reisch (The Lemurs), and Middleton himself. FEVER juxtaposes the “warmth of analogue tape and vintage effects” with the “infinite other-worldliness of digital.” Every track is memorable, interesting, and theatric… even the ones deceptively titled “(((pause)))” and “(((silence)))” Middleton explains that FEVER is named after a book he discovered as a child that discusses his grandfather Dr. John Frame’s discovery and treatment of Lassa Fever in Africa many years ago. “I liked it as it thematically ties in with the topic of the diseased (mostly mentally diseased) people throughout the album, but can also equally refer to a sense of fanaticism for something,” he adds.

Maybe it’s a disease and maybe it’s a fanaticism, where do we draw the line? Whatever the ‘fever’ is, The Laughing has it. Just listen to their wild and meticulously arranged music and I think you’ll understand what I mean. This band is a little bit crazy and a large bit brilliant. Catch them next month SXSW.

Nate Greenberg

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There’s a certain kind of delicate music that quickly divides listeners into distinct camps; we’re either enthralled by its ethereal melodies or utterly bored by the appalling infrequency of extended drum solos and full stacks of Marshall amplifiers. I happen to love acoustic music for its simplicity, candor, and occasional brilliance. But, I can see where the other guys are coming from and usually refrain from forcing the latest Neil Halstead solo project or Sufjan Stevens solo banjo tape on my friends and colleagues that favor music with a bit more oomph. Only occasionally does an artist come along that so perfectly transcends the framework of expectations for acoustic music that I feel moved (compelled, actually) to share his full catalog with everyone I meet on the street, regardless of their musical inclinations. This happened with DIY savant Damien DeRose, known as Peasant.

I get the sense, listening to Peasant’s songs, that he’s experienced life more completely than I have, and that my best hope at redemption is to absorb his music so thoroughly that I vicariously benefit from the flood of emotional wisdom that pours out from every word he sings. Then again, to say that Damien DeRose took “the road less traveled” in this life would be a gross understatement. He began his education at an experimental school that embraced a profoundly unorthodox style of education. He and his classmates spent their days going for walks, taking care of farm animals, and fashioning their own pens from feather quills. Fortunately for us, this unconventional curriculum included enormous amounts of group singing, with a repertoire that consisted primarily of traditional folk songs (I knew I heard traces of that “high lonesome sound”). During his adolescent years DeRose compiled an arsenal of instruments, beginning with piano and violin, then moving to drums, guitar, bass, banjo, and harmonica. He spent his high school years, like many budding musicians of our fine generation, playing Weezer covers in shitty rock bands. Then, in what must have seemed like a crushing blow at the time, he was kicked out of school and cut loose to forge his own path. This unexpected and unsought freedom very likely served as the greatest possible boon to his development as a songwriter. The period that followed was a rough one, wrought with what in retrospect might be construed as adventure. He moved to California and bought a sailboat with a friend, but the boat sunk (was sunk, actually, by sea lions) before it ever saw open ocean. So he traveled around the US and Europe, collecting whatever inspiration the world had to offer. De Rose came out on the other side of this adventure seasoned, but also very much affected by the daily grind of forging one’s own existence at an age when the majority of his peers were most concerned with what to wear at the next college social–so much so that he gave himself the humble stage name Peasant. Having been on the receiving end of too many $7/hr day jobs, broken relationships, and chance encounters, Peasant bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, and his songs are perfect capsules of emotion, contained and conveyed by a musical impulse that’s nothing short of brilliant.

When we spoke on the phone, Peasant said he writes “songs about feelings that produce those feelings.” Songs to inspire love, to incite hatred, to send a confident man to the depths of self-loathing and then draw him back again. This is one of the greatest accomplishments of high art, and while many an artist might make this claim, Peasant undoubtedly succeeds. The songs on this 7-inch are both home-recording ventures, forged over many months in an attic in DeRose’s home town of Doyleston, PA. They’re recorded with the kind of compulsive attention that’s impossible in a formal recording studio. Every sound is meticulously captured, adjusted, re-recorded, mixed, re-mixed, and scrutinized. The soundscape’s layered without being lush; the end result is both decidedly unique and perfectly suitable to the dreamy melancholy of Peasant’s music. I’m tempted to make comparisons to Elliot Smith and Brian Wilson, but Peasant’s music isn’t so easily reduced to the sum of its influences.

A-side “The Distance” evokes the same world of aimlessness and isolation as Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”. It’s the perfect snapshot of your long lost older brother, sitting alone on the back seat of a bus like a still frame from some unmade Wes Anderson remake of Into The Wild. It’s about losing people–not to death or depravity, but to the simple distractions and the natural dispersion of a normal life. He sings,

“I’ve been walking in the city and wandering far away.
I’ve been falling through the fields and hiding every day.
I’ve been holding onto everything, all that I have.
I’m hoping I can come out the other side.
Been sleeping in the moonlight, and running through the days.
Been waiting for the troubles to go away.

Where have you been my lover?
Where have you gone, my friends?
Fading through the distance of each other.
What have we done, my brother?
Have we all gone away?
I’m listening to the distance of the past.”

A simple two chord progression sends the song on a steady trajectory from the onset, each change propelling listeners one step further on some gradually unfolding journey. Like DeRose said, it’s a song about distance that induces the perception of distance in anyone within earshot. What a trick. The arrangement is complex but so delicately balanced that it’s possible to listen through the song without fully hearing the dozens of overdubbed parts that DeRose weaves through the basic framework of guitar and vocals. There are multiple keyboards, layered vocal harmonies, and even some figures that sound a bit like backwards tape loops (around 1:45). It all blends into a sonic stew, with DeRose’s voice in the forefront as the most prominent ingredient. It’s delicate but not fragile, sensitive but not overly expressive. It’s earnest. This isn’t a song written by someone so overly-conscious of songwriting as to do anything to deliberately subvert the tradition. That said, he isn’t merely following in tow either; it’s a refreshing mixture of truly original composition and deeply personal expression.

A hollow piano and relaxed snare usher in B-side “Well Alright,” another tune based on a repeated two chord progression. It doesn’t do much to start, but just as I’d normally began to reach towards that skip button, DeRose enters with the line, “You tell me that I look like I’m gone when I’m around” and the song launches into an anthem for dissatisfied couples (if dissatisfied couples even have anthems…I guess it’s like having “our song” but instead of nuzzling you just sit in cold silence). Like on “The Distance,” “Well Alright”’s main hook is achieved by introducing new harmonic movement to the mix in conjunction with a higher vocal melody. To the extent that it’s a formula, it’s a formula for success. At one point DeRose sings, “I’m trying to find the answers in myself, I’m trying to find the reasons in my head, I don’t wanna drift away the days.” There’s a resonance here with “The Distance” in so much as Peasant is very clearly on a search. Though he’s settled down since his post-high school excursions, he’s embarked upon a new exploration–more mature perhaps, but more difficult to complete. It’s the inevitable dichotomy between living a stationary life while making creative and intellectual progress, all the while sustaining those vital personal connections forged in the preceding decades. It ain’t easy, but if the broader search for that perfect balance does indeed continue for Damien DeRose, he can rest assured that he’s created something special in the music presented on this 7-inch. If you’re looking for more Peasant, his latest LP Shady Retreat is out March 2nd on Paper Garden Records.

Ben Heller

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Will Stratton is poised at a moment of spiritual and artistic growth, and lucky for us he is committing it to tape (or hard drive, rather). His first two records, 2007’s What the Night Said and 2009’s No Wonder, were received warmly by fans of beautiful acoustic pop songs with spiderweb-delicate fingerpicking and hushed, intimate vocals. For them he garnered innumerable Nick Drake comparisons and honest, thoughtful praise from many corners of the media. Coke Machine Glow called No Wonder “a lovely, humble, mature record from a person who seems like a lovely, humble, mature human being,” and this is exactly how it feels to listen to it. Mature and humble are hardly the attributes that get the blog hormones flowing these days, but in some ways we are reaping the benefits of the fact that Stratton hasn’t completely blown up in the hyperbolic, slavering world of blog music journalism. No Wonder was a perfectly lovely album that could have been replicated for an entire career (see Damien Jurado, for example). It is dramatic enough to be moving without coming anywhere close to gaudiness, simple and understated enough to seem completely uncontrived, intelligent enough to ring true in a way that surpasses platitudes, and warm enough that you get an immediate sense of the human heart behind the songs. The drama in it comes from delicate internal moments like walking home, alone and lovestruck, after a party, the way it often does in real life, at least for the kind of people who tend to listen to melancholic acoustic pop music that is heavy on the I-IV chord progressions and literate lyrics (I can be mildly snarky because I count myself squarely in this camp). Stratton could have had a lovely career working within those straight-forward song forms, but he has the searching and self-critical personality of an artist, rather than just a craftsman.

Stratton was very young when he recorded those two albums (he still is, really), and had he been launched into the slobbery jaws of even indie-stardom, we might not be seeing the kind of growth we can see in his new music, some of which he has kindly allowed Ampeater to convey to you, the people. The appeal of the delicate, melancholy, direct songs of his first two albums is strong, and it hasn’t been banished by any means, but here Stratton begins to mold it into something less predictable and more expansive. I’ll let him speak for himself because he is incredibly eloquent: “There is a single spiritual position that exists in songs like [Nick Drake's] “Which Will” that is so strong that, when you hear it, it seems like it becomes the only thing that exists in the world(…)That kind of music, written from a place of such isolation, has the illusion of clarity. Maybe it has real clarity, it’s hard for me to say. Either way, I’m tired of being in that place. I want to forge out on my own and wind up some place I don’t recognize. I want to learn to express very specific moments of anger, flirtatiousness, joy–all things that are more or less absent in Nick Drake’s music–with the same sort of gutwrenching precision that he used to express the false sense of omniscience that accompanies deep despair.”

After all that setup, you’re probably expecting some death metal or fifteen minute guitar solos or synthy 80’s pop. Well, there’s none of that, but improvisation does play a key role these songs in a way that it never has before. A-side “Bluebells” commences with an open piano-figure that recalls the beginning of Bon Iver’s “Babys”, but which is harmonically static and probably comes instead from interest in recent minimalist classical music (our conversation was educational for me in this arena, to say the least, but I recommend checking out John Luther Adams, David Lang, Arvo Part, & Gavin Bryars for starters). Over this piano drone, Stratton lays out a few minutes of warm, tumbling guitar, all of which was improvised. He has lately taken to using first takes, saying that “it keeps me thinking on my toes.” This interest in spontaneity is another bold move, directly in opposition to the precise and measured craft of his previous work, yet one which serves the song to the very same extent that Stratton’s simpler pop forms served his earlier work. Here it serves as both a counterweight to the minimal and gorgeous piano/vocals outro and as a kind of mood-setter, capturing an expansive, still feeling that isn’t easily conveyable through traditional songwriting. It’s something we haven’t heard from Stratton before, a sound that seems to call to mind wide open landscapes at dawn, the sun slowly infusing the crevices of rocks with its light.

It’s onto this landscape that Stratton projects his melancholy song, yet there’s something strangely dusty and distant about the sadness in “Bluebells”. The effects obscure his voice just enough to render it ghostly, almost like a voice from the past (you can just barely hear it hovering behind the guitar solos), and the song is narrated in the second person, making it about the listener rather than the singer. It’s a subtly alarming shift, putting us in the position of being hopelessly lost, rather than safely empathizing with a narrator who is hopelessly lost. The clashing guitars that rise up around the four minute mark, crackling and slashing one another like contentious bolts of lightning, infuse the song with a dissonance that, though it disappears quickly, enhances this air of desperation and sadness, especially when we’re lead out into a beautiful piano and vocal section only to hear the line “by now you must have been certain that it had all been a lie”. When the narrator tells us that we still kept searching for our lost love, it’s hard to tell whether it’s sweet or pathetic, and this ambiguity is crushingly sad. Are we deluded or determined? Both? Also to be noted, over the middle section with it’s minimal backbeat, when Stratton is singing “which way did my darling go?”, is the way the bass note on the guitar gradually bends up from the four chord to the five, introducing some dissonant intermediate notes and a sense of unease and muted violence that wouldn’t be present if he’d just played the chord progression straight.

B-side “The Hudson Line” is as close to Stratton’s earlier work as anything he sent us. His voice is stripped of the effects that mask it on “Bluebells” and left to cut clearly over the beautiful lattice of fingerpicked acoustic guitar. It is a love song, yet it’s not so much a declaration of love as an assessment of a love that has come and gone. The moments of sweetness are now tempered by the temporal distance, and the wistful mood is perfectly captured by the lines “all I know all I know all I know / is all greatness is born out of sin / but somehow I saw you”. The narrator’s relationship with the woman is something born out of sin, yet at the same time it seems to be the one thing that transcends this tautology. It’s a sweetness that is rendered all the sweeter by the darkness of the worldview in which it sits. The background against which these lyrics are set is appropriately lovely and delicate, yet it’s easy to miss just how amazing and skillful the rhythmic interplay is between the thumb and the rest of the hand. Stratton, though he’s no show off, is an incredibly agile and creative guitarist, with a sense of play that allows him to slip away from the expected patterns of folk and rock guitar. Aside from providing a harmonic backbone, the guitar here frequently subdivides the bar into uneven groups of threes, giving the song a rolling feeling mirrored in the lyrics about “galloping along the Hudson Line.”

These exclusive tracks represent the evocative songwriting Stratton is known for, only evolved to the next step. Thankfully for us listeners, he is a person who is constantly pushing himself forward, stretching for something just beyond his reach. We have the luxury of being able to sit back and immerse ourselves in the discoveries he makes along the way, the beautiful music that composes Will Stratton’s journey through the world. Stay tuned for another digital 7” in the coming weeks, as well as greater portions of the interview.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Here at Ampeater, we’re not ashamed to say that we love Canada. The bustling Toronto scene has been a neverending source of marvelous music for us to present triumphantly to the open-eared public: Evening Hymns, PS I Love You, The D’Urbervilles, and now Kat Burns, aka KASHKA.  Burns’ gorgeous voice and sharp songwriting skills (you try and slip the word “dendrophiliac” into a song without sounding like a jerk) help make the wonderful Forest City Lovers what they are, but occasionally, prolific as she is, she churns out some songs that don’t quite fit into the FCL template, and so she’s taken on the KASHKA alter-ego to begin releasing those songs, which swap the Lovers’ sunny summer acoustics for a subdued, wintry electronic sound, probably more appropriate for Toronto.

Burns describes KASHKA as “the outlet that many of my songs drift into when they feel like they may float away otherwise,” and you will instantly understand what she means.  Rather than the roots and leaves of FCL, KASHKA songs sound like streetlights refracted through icicles. They are wintertime compositions (both were literally written during the darkest evenings of winter), sonically filled out with chiming keyboards, tinkling bells, large spaces, and Burns’ lovely, pure voice, which, aside from carrying the melodies, functions as pretty much the best synthesizer ever, whether she’s creating warm choruses of chordal oohs, fuzzy lead lines between verses, or serenely floating contrapuntal melodies à la a string section.  The thing that carries over from the Lovers is Burns sense of precise and tasteful simplicity.  She knows in either case that her voice and knack for melody will carry the song, and intelligently refrains from throwing any kind of half-baked, overly adorned arrangements into the mix.  Her vocals are mixed to the front, so that they may lift the weight of the song, but they are not pushed as far forward as is common to most electro-pop and they don’t share the ridiculously melismatic neo-soul that tends to make you feel like someone spliced some vocals in from a recent American Idol audition.  In fact, it’s easy not to notice how wonderfully skillful a singer she is until you start realizing how many of the sounds that fill out the airy space of these songs are not keyboards but rather her voice.

Making electro-pop (making good electro-pop, rather) has a couple of inherent challenges, both of which KASHKA rises to effortlessly.  First, for your voice to slot nicely among all the pristine synth swells and gentle blips, it has to be as on pitch and tightly controlled as your SK-1. As you can hear in pretty much any moment of her Ampeater single, this is not a problem for Burns, whose voice is as agile as it is pretty, and somehow never cloying or tiring in the way of so many singers gifted with exceptional vocal cords (this quality probably owes a lot to her aforementioned intelligent restraint).  The second major challenge is that when you’re creating a music that essentially exists only in digital space, and never as a full set of live sounds in a room, it’s really easy to succumb to the temptation to layer the hell out of it (I know this because I pretty much always do so, no matter how pure my intentions are when I set out).  This is true of all recording done mostly by overdubs, but I think it’s a special difficulty with electronic music, which has no acoustic corollary, and in which it is easy to get excited about different synth sounds and just turn everything into consonant-sounding mud, which is one of my least favorite sounds (it is a term that is also applicable to jam bands).  KASHKA never has this problem.  Her music, with its softly muted beats and warm clouds of voices, is perfectly refined and alluring.  There’s not a hair out of place, and there are no screams for your attention, and this is precisely why it holds your ears so easily.

Despite the refinement and unflashiness I’ve been harping on, KASHKA doesn’t come across as sparse or stark because those words imply a kind of spiritual darkness that just isn’t there.  Though the songs are wintry, they are full of the warmth of huddling up by the fire after a long walk in the snowy evening, full of hope in the face of adversity.  The first lyric on A-side “Hands In” is, in fact, “put your hands in my heart tonight / just warm them there,” which is all about love as a balm for cold weather, cold weather being of course a shorthand for the larger cruelties of the world.  The song begins with a quick but relaxed three note keyboard pattern that manages to provide the entire harmony of the verse without ever playing a single chord.  The harmony is so simple that we don’t need any more for our ears to understand exactly where we are, and what’s brilliant about it is that we barely get any more:  another, far quieter, single-note line, some muted percussion.  Eventually some single-note guitar appears, along with some distant jangling bells, a light keyboard melody, and some tom fills that always seem to signal the arrival of hugeness, yet which always lead to nothing, not even a crash on the downbeat.  All these elements slowly and gradually coalesce to create the filled out song, and just at the moment when you hear this, it slips away, leaving only the echo of the bells (which are brilliantly buried in the mix so that you may not have even noticed them until this precise moment).  The only response is to listen to it again.

“Lonely Creatures” begins with an absence as well, withholding all the low end through the first verse to achieve that untethered, airy sound before eventually culminating in the busiest, thickest sound on the whole single, which is of course still rather delicate. My absolute favorite moment in the song only comes once (of course), and it’s right at 2:15, in the middle of the chorus, where Burns comes in with an ethereal ooh which is broken up into sixteenth notes in a way that echoes the rolling beats of the chorus and calls to mind images of rippling water.  But it’s hard to even pick a favorite moment in “Lonely Creatures.” All of the background vocal work is unbelievably beautiful, and so is the third repetition of the chorus line, when it slides up with the ease of warm breath rising into cold air.  The call for all the lonely city-dwellers to come together and create a spark of heat together is a perfect call-to-arms for someone concerned primarily with spreading love and warmth, and though it makes for a stark contrast with the “icy breasts of morning” and catalogues of inhibitions in the lyrics, what stays with you after listening is not the icy expanse of the backing track but the humanity and warmth of Burns’ voice, reminding us that, when faced with the harsh winters of the world, our greatest asset is the heat radiating from our bodies and the love radiating from our hearts.

P.S. If you were wondering how “Lonely Creatures” would sound if you accidentally played Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” over it, the answer is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Hey everybody! A while back our friends at the Hype Machine asked us to help curate a special show at Housing Works in Soho, NYC. They had an idea for an event that would be part show and part CD swap (with all proceeds going to support Housing Works), and thought we might have good recommendations as to some under-hyped bands. We settled on Shark? and Cuddle Magic, and Hypem brought The Morning Benders in to close–it’s gonna be a great, great show. Come on out, support Housing Works, support some local bands, and have a good time!