Eulogy Presents: **Floating Action + Scott McMicken and The Ever-Expanding**

Friday, Dec 1st, 2023

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Floating Action**

"Floating Action, the ongoing musical masterwork of North Carolina’s Seth Kauffman, defies easy categorization. Kauffman’s heady lo-fi synthesis of folk, surf, blues, funk, and other world (or otherworldly) influences, has yielded a rich back catalog, one worthy of far more attention than it typically garners. Dig in almost anywhere in his 18 years or so of releases and you’ll find sturdy gems that are diverse in genre and yet somehow unified by that Floating Action sound." - Aquarium Drunkard

**Scott McMicken and The Ever-Expanding**

Scott McMicken has always thrived on switching things up. As a founding member of Philadelphia rock mainstays Dr. Dog, McMicken and his bandmates consistently explored new sounds and new ways of writing songs across 10 gleefully eclectic albums before their 2021 hiatus. While McMicken has quietly released solo projects via cassette and vinyl on his own label Press On Records, for his latest effort, he’s done something he’s only done once before: started a band. With Shabang, out via ANTI-, comes the debut album from Scott McMicken and THE EVER-EXPANDING, and he’s made some of his freest and most adventurous music yet: a wonderfully collaborative collection of songs that feel lived in and true.

This is an all ages event

Burial Music Hall

Floating Action + Scott McMicken and The Ever-Expanding

Floating Action - Grease The Palm

Floating Action - Grease the Palm

Floating Action

Scott McMicken

Gigs

Asheville

Eulogy

Eulogy Presents: **Bask - 10th Anniversary Celebration**

with Zombie Queen and Serrate

Saturday, December 16th, 2023

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Bask**

North Carolina’s Bask have spent the last decade exhibiting their progressive blend of heavy psychedelia and soulful Americana across North America and Europe. Sharing the road and stage with artists such as High on Fire, Pallbearer and Guided By Voices. With releases ranging from the pastoral landscapes and country twinged doom of their debut album “American Hollow” 2014, to the cosmic storytelling of sophomore followup “Ramble Beyond” 2017, and the folkloric vibe-soaked odyssey of “III” 2019. Bask enters a new era of heavy riffs, world bending compositions and fanciful visuals sure to delight listeners and live audiences alike. Catch them live this winter on the North East leg of their ten year anniversary tour.

**Zombie Queen (Reunion!)**

Back from the dead and ready to Rock! Exclusively playing truck stop parking lots, it's Zombie Queen! All four members are off of probation and in rotation. Fun for the whole Famdamily! Now booking monster truck rallies, baby showers, and craft nights near YOU!

**Serrate**

*"Serrate, an Asheville-based metallic punk band, mines influence from the sonic worlds of skramz/screamo and hardcore, resulting in a sound that blends viciousness with melody."*

\- No Echo

This is an 18+ event

Bask - 10th Anniversary Celebration 

Bask - Mush! Carry Me Home

Bask

Eulogy Presents: **Setting**

with Wind Cults

Sunday, December 17th, 2023

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Setting**

Setting is Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones. Their debut album “Shone a Rainbow Light On” on Paradise of Bachelors traverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Fueled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, the four stately longform pieces sound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog.

*"9/10. Cosmic improv folk that flows like the river Eno.” – Uncut*

*"That open-endedness is a key quality of Shone a Rainbow Light On, which sees the band moving from misty Popol Vuh landscapes to incandescent Necks workouts, blending acoustic and electric instrumentation to striking effect.” – Uncut*

*"The sort of record for which the phrase ‘organic drones’ was built, Setting have produced a beguiling, earthen record that slots neatly into the pantheon of meandering new-age ambiance.” – The Quietus*

*"Though Settings’ music sprawls, it feels minimalistic in practice, exploring just a couple of chords like Philip Glass and encouraging deeper listening like Pauline Oliveros.” – Pitchfork*

**Wind Cults**

Wind Cults is the Asheville trio of Brett Naucke (electronics), Thom Nguyen (drums), and Adam Lion (vibraphone). The trio utilizes an idiosyncratic improvisational language which prioritizes spontaneity, process, and the unknown. A sonic mishmash of cacophony, harmony, density and repetition, the group embodies musical extremes which branch in every direction.

This is all ages

Setting 

Setting - A Sun Harp

Setting

Eulogy Presents: **GRRL x Made of Oak**

with DJ Lil Meow Meow

Friday, Dec 22nd, 2023

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 8PM || Show 9PM

**GRRL x Made of Oak**

James Mapley-Brittle (GRRL) and Nick Sanborn (Made of Oak, Sylvan Esso) make and spin very different music but often end up playing the same parties, thanks to the eclecticism of the North Carolina dance scene. After a conversation they had one day surrounding a shared obsession with peak-hour club music, Sanborn wondered about a collaboration. About a track that existed that somehow made sense for each of them to play at their irrespective sets. It could be massive. But what would it sound like? The two got together every now and again to jam and find a creative chemistry; it didn’t take long for the shared language to emerge, and they recorded the subsequent jolt of energy out at Betty’s studio in Chapel Hill. For both Made of Oak and GRRL, Inertia, their debut collaborative EP out now via Psychic Hotline, feels like the beginning of something entirely new.

**DJ Lil Meow Meow**

DJ Lil Meow Meow is an Asheville-based DJ known for her late night parties stacked with infectious dance cuts and surprising gems. @djlilmeowmeow

GRRL x Made of Oak

Pinebender

GRRL

Made of Oak

Eulogy Presents: **Sluice + Truth Club**

Thursday, Jan 18th, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Sluice**

Sluice is the recording project of Durham based musician/engineer Justin Morris (Fust, Weirs, Aunt Sis). Radial Gate, the second release as Sluice, features a wide collection of local talent including Avery Sullivan (Fust, Indigo De Souza), Oliver Child-Lanning (Fust, Weirs), Luke Norton (HC McEntire), Frank Meadows (Fust, Tomberlin, Bellows) and Natalie King (Toss) to name a few. Radial Gate continues the Sluice theme of nature’s intersection with industry, and lyrically explores the ideas of isolation and depression giving way to community and personal growth. “Could you pass me a beer, oh no it fell in the river. Hey man that’s all right, goodnight.”

**Truth Club**

“So, how to proceed?” Travis Harrington asks on the final track of Running From the Chase, the commanding new album from Truth Club. How do you move forward when the present moment is rife with mounting challenges — when you’re caught between the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future? Running From the Chase was written in part through a time of intense personal hardship for Harrington, but it was through these struggles he and his bandmates (drummer Elise Jaffe, guitarist/bassist Kameron Vann, and guitarist/bassist/singer Yvonne Chazal) gained a deeper appreciation of the power of their shared creative endeavor, both the cathartic release found in the dynamic squall of their music and in the friendships forged by this communal pursuit. Their album doesn’t have an easy answer to Harrington’s searching question, but under these songs’ bruising exteriors, you can hear the sound of a band looking towards one another to learn how to move forward.

Running From the Chase was recorded with producer and engineer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Snail Mail, Angel Olsen) at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios through the spring and summer of 2022. Farrar immediately made them feel right at home, which allowed the band to bring a sense of curiosity, commitment, and experimentation to the process. Dynamics were considered in songwriting as well as sequencing; off-kilter “77x” builds an eerie scene over a minimal slowcore foundation before the following track “Clover” thrusts into a playful headbanger.

Throughout Running From the Chase — whose title alludes to the need to balance one’s individual desires with external expectations and pressures — Harrington’s lyrics plunge into despair and frustration, confronting possibilities with a hint of hope and a strong undercurrent of dejection. The result is an album that’s sweeping and sophisticated, balancing considered introspection with a stunning, newly expanded sound.

Sluice + Truth Club

Student Housing

Truth Club - Tethering

Sluice

Truth Club

Eulogy Presents: **Dylan LeBlanc**

Saturday, January 20th, 2023

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Dylan LeBlanc**

Dylan LeBlanc is engaging and soft-spoken in person, yet his striking new album Renegade reflects the power of his live show – one that he simply describes as rock ‘n’ roll. While the album was recorded in just 10 days and tracked in three, the intensity of the project marks the culmination of more than a decade on the road.

“I like the idea of a renegade — branching off from society or from the structure of the way our world is designed,” he says of Renegade, his first album for ATO Records. “It felt right to call it that. I wanted to write about the crueler, nasty aspects of the world and life.”

LeBlanc considers the new album a departure from his past work, but only because there’s more of an edge to these sessions, recorded with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb in Nashville’s Studio A. This time around, LeBlanc primarily stayed plugged in for the sessions, giving Renegade a Tom Petty feel, charged with a streak of ‘80s rock. “I never really played electric guitar live in the studio like that,” he says. “I’m so used to the rhythmic, acoustic thing. It was just like playing in a show.”

Since 2016, LeBlanc has toured with Alabama rock group The Pollies as his backing band. He’s known most of the band members since childhood, growing up together in Muscle Shoals, and considers them his closest friends. Because they’ve been playing songs on Renegade live, it was only logical that the Pollies backed up LeBlanc in the studio, too.

This is an All Ages event

Dylan LeBlanc

Cautionary Tale

Eulogy Presents: **Katy Kirby**

with Allegra Krieger

Monday, February 5th, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Katy Kirby**

Katy Kirby is a songwriter and indie rock practitioner with an affinity for unspoken rules, misunderstanding, and boredom. She was born, raised, and homeschooled by two ex-cheerleaders in small-town Texas and started singing in church, amidst the pasteurized-pop choruses of evangelical worship, about which she shares acute perceptions.

Like many bible belt late-millennials, Katy grew up on a strict diet of this dependably uncool genre. She recalls, “In the mid-90s, the American evangelical church was making music of an extraordinarily digestible, almost unprecedentedly easy-listening kind, stylistically void and vaguely dubbed Christian Contemporary Music, or CCM. It was pop that wasn’t quite pop, determinedly hanging on to the openhearted melodies of a decade prior, straightforward so as to be easily memorable, and in a key that an average churchgoer could sing along to.”

Accordingly, Cool Dry Place finds her dismantling it. “I can hear myself negotiating with that worship-ish music, fighting that deeply internalized impulse to make things that are super pleasant or approachable.” She hasn’t fully overcome the itch to please, but to a listener’s benefit. Instead of eradicating the pop sensibilities of her past, she warps them, lacing sugary hooks with sneaky, virulent rage, twisting affectionate tones into matter-of-fact reproach, and planting seemingly serene melodies with sonic jabs. The fun is in the clash.

Take “Portals” for example, a song of country-traditional chords and gentle vocal delivery that might have easily materialized as a placid ballad. Rather, Katy drenched its soft core in metallic noise and oscillating string textures. You can imagine someone bussing glassware from a table nearby, while Katy sits you down at a booth and trusts you with notes on a pre-breakup, the first couple of minutes living in the last part of a relationship.

With the same masterful trickery, “Traffic!” juxtaposes sound and sentiment, a jittery combination of saturated pop and Rainforest Cafe’ faux-tropicalia projecting (arguably false) sympathy toward a character absorbed in his own self-inflicted misery. Though her chorus wails jubilant, Katy weaponizes its catchy gusts to criticize privilege: “Nobody has it better than you.”

Katy’s residual ties to church life are audial alone; spiritually, she has worked to detach. “Until a couple of years ago, I spent much of my time falling out of love with God. My life until then hadn’t just been participating in a church so much as completely, profoundly believing—youth group, sure, but also a few attempts to cast out demons. Learning how to think or see things outside of that very intense, clarified space was like rewiring my brain. I guess that if there’s one thing that unifies these songs, it’s that they’re figuring out what to do, or how to love, or who to rely on outside of that context.”

The nine tracks that make up Cool Dry Place are miscellaneous in subject (motherhood, late capitalism, disintegrating relationships,) but unified by the angle from which they’re told, from a person re-learning to process life with intense attention. Each song is a catalog of fragments, the number of segments in an orange or the cut of an obsessively-worn shirt, distilled into meditations on the bizarre and microscopic exchanges that make up modern life — a relationship splintering, an uncomfortable pause, an understanding finally found. These emotional dioramas are moderated by the angular storytelling that unites Gillian Welch and Phoebe Bridgers, a favor for the conventions of short fiction over confession.

Kirby readily admits that Cool Dry Place feels like a late-bloomer’s record. “These songs were written and recorded over an embarrassingly long period of time, by a few different versions of myself.” The album began in Nashville years ago. Kirby had moved there for college, changed majors five times, briefly dropped out, and finally graduated with a handful of songs, a circle of artistic allies, an amorphous collection of leftist beliefs, and an English degree. She flailed in the solo-artist archetype for a period of time before turning to friends capable of constructing a satisfying full length. Kirby, Alberto, Hunt, Logan, and Zook spent over a year carving out bits of spare time to record in bedroom studios, living rooms, and a now-demolished former residence of Keith Urban. Tracking was finally completed over Thanksgiving 2019 at Kirby’s childhood home outside of Austin.

As its title track flips the advisory on a package of Tylenol into a hymn to human need for protection and acceptance, Cool Dry Place asks a listener to embrace the precious and contradictory nature of being a person. Katy Kirby is an artist simultaneously tender and angry, vulnerable and protected, calculated and resigned.

**Allegra Krieger**

“I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” – Allegra Krieger’s fourth record and her first with Double Double Whammy – is her most mature and alluring work yet. It contains all the signatures of her best lyricism: delicate and precise phrasings, moments that flicker between beauty and banality, meaning that forms through the accretion of observations, memories, and unexpected adages. This is an album that is at once post-theistic and devoted to a relationship with the divine, each song blinking in and out of “the fragile plane,” a place Krieger describes as “a middle ground in the universe,” both abstract and peaceful, where time, bodies, and names don’t exist.

Krieger’s peripateticism has clearly informed her songwriting. She spent her childhood on the blistering beaches and cold Catholic pews of northern Florida. Before settling in Chinatown, she drifted through suburban Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland cleaning motel rooms, planting trees, tending bars, and picking olives. In “Terribly Free”, she walks with the rats in Manhattan; in “I Wanted to Be” she bites into a ripe orange somewhere in the south; in “Nothing in This World Ever Stays Still” she stands outside of a sports bar in LA watching coastal smoke rise from the hills; later, she describes being “moved by whatever’s moving us.”

It’s with an almost deadly self-awareness that Krieger assembles a world in which people and places leave as quickly and easily as they arrive. “I never forgot,” she tells us in “I Wanted to Be,” “that as something grows something else must rot.” Yet Krieger doesn’t linger too long in honest exhaustion. Soon, she’s drinking coffee and watching a child dance across the street. Later “a brief but brilliant sun touches the hills” and she takes on the child’s inclinations, telling us, “if you feel like dancing, you must let it out, no room for question, no room for doubt.”

Krieger initially collaborated with Luke Temple and Jeremy Harris to record her vocals and guitar to tape at Panoramic Studios in West Marin, CA. As the album continued to form, Krieger envisioned instruments – like the French and English horn (Nancy Ranger and Priscilla Reinhart), electric guitar (Jacob Drab), and pedal steel (Kevin Copeland) – as characters which would walk in and out of the soundscape. What emerged from conversations with composer Sammy Weissberg, are brass parts that have a dark, almost surreal logic: horns arise to emphasize a word or phrase, fall out completely, only to rush back with dissonant orchestrations that gesture simultaneously toward deterioration and generation. Krieger herself plays pedal steel on “I Wanted to Be,” a song which was finished at Science is Magic Studios, and takes the form of an ouroboros: the chorus feeds into itself in a seemingly endless cycle before colliding into a rising clash of Krieger’s pedal steel and Drab’s electric guitar. While Krieger takes inspiration from Elliot Smith’s honesty, Judee Sill’s cosmic reaching, and Joni Mitchell’s sharp noticing, the dream-like association, harmonic dissonance, and angular melodic ascensions in each song are singularly and delightfully Krieger’s.

“I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” is a daring collection of songs by an artist who scries with both the cold glass eye of truth and the beating heart of empathy; who portrays life in all its twisted complexities and in turn makes the felt and invisible, visible**.**

This is an All Ages event 

Katy Kirby

Cool Dry Place

Katy Kirby - Cool Dry Place

Allegra Krieger

Eulogy Presents: **Squirrel Flower**

with Greg Mendez and Tombstone Poetry

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Squirrel Flower**

Less than an hour south of Chicago, along the shores of Lake Michigan, sits the Indiana Dunes, a protected expanse of shoreline recently designated a National Park. When Ella Williams first visited the Dunes, she was awed by the juxtaposition of its natural splendor within the surrounding industrial corridor of Northwest Indiana. “Every time I go there, it changes my life,” she says, without a hint of hyperbole.“You stand in the marshlands and to your left is a steel factory belching fire and to your right is a nuclear power plant.” Across the water, Chicago waits, its glistening towers made possible by the same steel forged here. For as long as she’s been making music, Ella Williams’ songs have been products of the environments they’re written in, born out of the same world they so vividly hold a mirror to. This environment is where her magnetic new album, Tomorrow’s Fire, lives.

The music Williams makes as Squirrel Flower has always communicated a strong sense of place. Her self-released debut EP, 2015’s early winter songs from middle america, was written during her first year living in Iowa, where the winter months make those of her hometown, Boston, seem quaint by comparison. Since that first offering, Squirrel Flower has amassed a fanbase beyond the Boston DIY scene and released two more EPs and two full-lengths. The most recent, Planet (i), was laden with climate anxiety, while the subsequent Planet EP marked an important turning point in Williams’ prolific career; the collection of demos was the first self-produced material she’d released in some time. With a renewed confidence as a producer, she helmed Tomorrow’s Fire at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville alongside storied engineer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo de Souza, Snail Mail). Williams and Farrar tracked many of the instruments, building the songs together during the first week, and then assembled a studio band that included Matt McCaughan (Bon Iver), Seth Kauffman (Angel Olsen band), Jake Lenderman (aka MJ Lenderman), and Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs) lending their contributions.

Before Tomorrow’s Fire, Squirrel Flower might’ve been labeled something like “indie folk,” but this is a rock record, made to be played loud. As if to signal this shift, the album opens with the soaring “i don’t use a trashcan,” a re-imagining of the first ever Squirrel Flower song. Williams returns to her past to demonstrate her growth as an artist and to nod to those early shows, when her voice, looped and minimalistic, had the power to silence a room. Lead singles “Full Time Job” and “When a Plant is Dying,” narrate the universal desperation that comes with living as an artist and pushing up against a world where that’s a challenging thing to be. The frustration in Williams’ lyrics is echoed by the music’s uninhibited, ferocious production. “There must be more to life/ Than being on time,” she sings on the latter’s towering chorus. Lyrics like that one are fated to become anthemic, and Tomorrow’s Fire overflows with them. “Doing my best is a full time job/ But it doesn’t pay the rent” Williams sings on “Full Time Job” over careening feedback, her steady delivery imposing order over a song that is, at its heart, about a loss of control.

Williams cites artists like Jason Molina, Tom Waits, and Springsteen as fonts of inspiration for Tomorrow’s Fire, musicians who knew how to write into the mind of a stranger, who could tell you the story of a life in under four minutes. “The songs I write are not always autobiographical, but they’re always true,” Williams says. Nowhere is Springsteen heard more clearly than on “Alley Light,” an electrifying song narrated from the perspective of a down-on-his-luck guy whose car is fated to die any day now and whose girl just wants to escape. There’s a vintage sheen to it, but “Alley Light” captures the very familiar feelings of loss that come with living in a 21st century city, where you blink and the storefronts change. Williams notes, "It’s about a man in me, or a man who I love, or even a man who is a stranger to me."

The album glides effortlessly over emotional states of being, lightness and heaviness. “Intheskatepark,” written in the summer of 2019, four years later sounds like a dispatch from a bygone world. The scuzzy pop production nods to Guided By Voices, as Williams sings about crushing under summer sunshine. “I had a light,” Williams repeats mournfully on “Stick,” her voice at once aching and powerful, a sense of rage fermenting as the song goes on, until it explodes in the second half. “This song is about not wanting to compromise, just being at the end of your rope,” Williams says. “Stick” harnesses that exasperation and turns it into a battle cry for anyone who is exhausted but feels like they’re not working hard enough, who had to get a job they hate to make rent, who lost their light and can’t seem to find it again.

Tomorrow’s Fire might sound like the title of an apocalypse album, but it’s not. Tomorrow’s Fire references the title of a novel Williams’ great-grandfather Jay wrote about a troubadour, named for a line by the Medieval French poet Rutebeuf, a troubadour himself: “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner/ Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight.” Centuries on, the quote spoke to Williams, who describes the fire as a tool to wield in the face of nihilism. Tomorrow’s Fire is what we take solace in, what we know will make us feel okay in the morning, how we light the path we're walking on.

Closing track "Finally Rain" speaks to the ambiguity of being a young person staring down climate catastrophe. The last verse is an homage to Williams’ relationship with her loved ones — ‘We won’t grow up.’ A stark realization, but also a manifesto. To be resolutely committed to a life of not ‘growing up,’ not losing our wonder while we’re still here.

**Greg Mendez**

For Greg Mendez, reflection doesn’t mean a static image in a mirror, or even a face he recognizes. It’s more a kaleidoscopic mirage, where paths taken shapeshift with the prospect of paths untread, and the subconscious merges with the intentional. On his self-titled new album, the Philadelphia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist investigates the shaky camera of memory, striving to carve out a collage that points to a truth. But there isn’t a regimented actuality here; instead, Mendez highlights the merit in many truths, and many lives, and how even the hardest truths can still contain some humor.

While this is technically Mendez’s third full-length album, his back catalog boasts an extensive range of EPs and live recordings. He’s a prolific and thoughtful songwriter, understanding the joy in impulse, and shying away from the clinical sheen of overproduction. 2017’s “¯\_(ツ)\_/¯” and 2020’s Cherry Hell garnered acclaim for their quiet, lo-fi urgency, exploring themes of addiction and heartbreak with an intentional, authentic haze, and it’s this approach that has solidified Mendez as a staple in the DIY community for years.

Greg Mendez was written in fragments, some stretching across more than a decade, with Mendez reworking old ideas and arrangements, and others blossoming much more recently. The weight of time––and perhaps the anxiety in running out of it––clouds the album, as Mendez prods at some painful experiences from his childhood and early adulthood. The common thread connecting the characters is their evident imperfections, and the various degrees of damage they cause, both knowingly and unknowingly. But where do we draw the line between a good person and a bad person? For Mendez, it’s never been that easy.

“There's a lot of pretty bleak memories in the songs but one thing that I hope comes through is that nothing is ever fully dark,” he explains. While recognizing the severity of certain situations, Mendez is also careful to showcase the absurdity of our reality, and how that can often highlight a softness around the edges. Opener “Rev. John / Friend” begins with a cartoonish organ, like a sermon waiting to start, correlating with the album’s artwork: a Virgin Mary staring at Mendez’s name. It’s a smirk at the serious, where earnesty can still be encouraged, and the light and the dark can effortlessly co-exist.

Throughout the album, Mendez extends an empathetic and relatable hand. The scrappy-pop of “Goodbye / Trouble” waits for “the sound of God,” searching for a sense of love or purpose, but the searcher falls apart in the process. The stripped back, finger-picked “Best Behavior” probes the spite and immaturity that can arise when we feel hurt or wronged, and how lonely that can leave us. “Maria” mimics those moments when we reach back to a story and find ourselves immersed in its scenery, using melodic swells to charge like a memory that floats in front of us, creating a gauze until we manage to tear ourselves out of it. “Everytime you say you wanna know me I get anxious, cause I would probably tell you about some dumb shit,” the song begins, glancing at those who also feel wary to show their full selves.

Mendez encourages us to look beyond the rigidity of a one, true self. Some of the “I’s” on Greg Mendez are not Mendez at all but someone unknown, a person formed to explore the shadows in his periphery. Writing from a different perspective doesn’t happen intentionally, and Mendez only tends to notice it after sitting with the song for some time. “It's kind of like dreams, where they end up being the stuff that your brain is processing, but you’re not aware that you’re doing it,” he says. It’s an exhale, where Mendez allows his instincts to flourish.

Greg Mendez is an intimate dialogue between the chapters we’ve experienced, and how they can inform the reality we perceive. It’s a reminder that we are constantly shifting, ever-changing selves and that if we ruminate too long, we may find ourselves stuck in the seriousness of it all. Here, Mendez allows us to take the time to notice what happens outside of the framework we may have built for ourselves, and the beauty that can occur when we finally do.

**Tombstone Poetry**

Tombstone Poetry is a 5-piece band hailing from Canton, North Carolina. An eclectic mix of each members’ inspirations - Tombstone fuses Shoegaze, Post-Rock, Folk Rock and more. This year they have released two EP’s under Boston-based DIY label Candlepin Records, with a full-length in the pipeline.

Squirrel Flower 

Squirrel Flower - Full Time Job

Squirrel Flower

Greg Mendez

Eulogy Presents: **bar italia**

Friday, March 22nd, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**bar italia**

bar italia is a London-based band.

*https://baritalia.bandcamp.com*

bar italia 

bar italia - Nurse!

bar italia

Eulogy Presents: **Sheer Mag**

Sunday, March 31st, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Sheer Mag**

Sheer Mag’s dizzying rise initiated in 2014, when the Philadelphia band self-released the first of three 7-inches and started playing the Northeastern DIY circuit. Ironically, the music stood apart because it sounded so familiar. Indebted to ‘70s arena rock, power-pop, and proto-metal, Sheer Mag’s songs reminded a lot of us of the music we grew up with, but maybe couldn’t relate to because it was big, brash, and unapologetically macho. Sheer Mag reclaimed some of that energy without perpetuating the toxicity. On their debut album, Need to Feel Your Love (2017), the band surveyed their contemporary political landscape through the lens of history. Singer Tina Halladay transported herself back to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, denounced redlining practices that undermine the popular vote, and paid homage to White Rose activist Sophie Scholl. On paper, it’s a mouthful, but accompanied by guitarist/lyricist Matt Palmer, guitarist Kyle Seely, and bassist/producer Hart Seely, those songs became hook-laden rallying cries.

Two years later, Sheer Mag have returned with their sophomore album A Distant Call. They’re still writing about surviving our current hellscape, but this time around, the politics get extra-personal. The album verges on being a concept piece, and the protagonist resembles Halladay herself. The songs document a particularly alienating time in her life when she was laid off from a job. Broke and newly single, her father (with whom she had a fraught relationship) passed away, leaving her with more wounds than felt possible to heal.

“We’ve been waiting to write these songs since we started the band and we were able to take these experiences and build a story out of them,” Halladay says. Palmer adds: “We don’t want people to be bogged down by pretension or theory. You don’t need to have read Das Kapital to know that capitalism is terrible. A Distant Call makes an argument for socialism on an anecdotal level. We’re talking about how late capitalism alienates and commodifies whatever is in its path without using the term ‘late capitalism.’” Palmer and Halladay’s new approach to lyricism extended to the recording process, too. Once the Seely brothers had laid down the tracks, Halladay recorded vocals with producer Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Code Orange) as opposed to on an 8-track, which was the band’s preferred method on previous releases.

A Distant Call opens with Halladay’s measured scream before “Steel Sharpens Steel” kicks in. It’s a prologue that foreshadows our protagonist’s journey from feeling down-and-out and destitute to self-actualization. “It’s a chain reaction/ When you turn the other cheek/ Remember if you’re looking for action/ And you’re feeling dull and weak,” Halladay snarls on the chorus, channeling Judas Priest over the boot-stomping rhythm section. The story really gets started on “Blood from a Stone,” when we learn that our protagonist’s SNAP application was declined, and she’s “living check-to-check.” It’s heavy power-pop so sleek it gleams. “We had some more soul and dance songs on the last record and we’ll probably return to that at some point,” Palmer says. “But on this record we wanted to focus on making straight-up rock music.”

That isn’t to say that A Distant Call doesn’t draw from a wide-range of influences within rock. The twinkling lap steel guitar on “Silver Line” sounds-off to Fleetwood Mac, showcasing a softer side to Sheer Mag. The lyrics find our protagonist in a desperate state, self-medicating with alcohol. When she recognizes her own predicament in the headlines, though, her depression eases off momentarily. “Well there’s a picket line down in West Virginia/ The bosses caved but wildcats continue/ Today my job said to not come back/ So now I’m striking for nothing with no contract,” Halladay sings. In the next song, the jangling “Hardly to Blame,” our protagonist is dumped by her partner. Heartbroken, she wanders the streets of Philadelphia, which has turned into “a puzzle” that she “can’t solve ‘cause it’s not true.” On “Cold Sword,” she snaps back to reality upon learning of her father’s death. Forced to reconcile with familial trauma, our protagonist asks: “How could I learn to love/ From somebody so abusive?” The question goes unanswered but the undeniably catchy chorus provides some form of catharsis.

“I tend to think of ‘Cold Sword’ as the fulcrum that the album pivots on. The protagonist recognizes that this is the only life she has, and in spite of the pain and suffering she experiences, she starts to want to make the most of it,” Palmer says. The bright melody of “Chopping Block” brings levity, as Halladay sings, “Between the parties there’s no light/ We need workers to unite/ We can decide to have another world/ But we’re gonna have to fight.” Our protagonist’s confidence blooms on “The Right Stuff” when she addresses anyone who might think her weight is concerning: “If you’re worried about my health/ Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” In recognizing that beauty standards are a capitalist ploy designed to keep women imprisoned, our protagonist starts down a road to self-acceptance, and maybe even love.

The conflicts our protagonist comes up against coalesce on “The Killer.” The system at-large has been the culprit all along, and she recognizes that rich politicians running the country have more control over her life than she does. They’re “shaking hands on the senate floor” and brandishing their hypocrisy like a weapon: “He’s got you right between the eyes/ Waving the flag for human rights.” It’s the penultimate track on the album, and it best exemplifies Sheer Mag’s growth from those nascent three EPs to now; the production is razor-sharp, and the gang vocal motifs are as playful as they are ferocious. There’s a glimmer of hope in the struggle, and Sheer Mag close the album with a message of resilience. “They wanna see us fall,” Hallday sings, “But I hear a distant call.” In the background, a faint whisper beckons from just outside the realm of possibility. “Keep on running,” it urges.

This is an all ages event 

Sheer Mag

Sheer Mag - FAN THE FLAMES

Eulogy Presents: **Helado Negro**

Sunday, January 21st 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Helado Negro**

Born in South Florida in 1980 to Ecuadorian immigrant parents, the world-building multi-instrumentalist Roberto Carlos Lange stitches together memories, impressions, and atmospheres to make detailed dreamscapes as Helado Negro. He produces, engineers, and mixes his own songs, literally creating and populating his own sonic world. Lange has a degree in Computer Art and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design and works extensively with video, sculpture, sound, and performance. He brings that toolbox to whatever he makes, and there’s a seeming effortlessness to the complexity. His songs are awash with vibrant melodies, sharp lyrical vignettes, and subtle, even whispered hooks. Since his 2009 debut, Awe Owe, across multiple projects and collaborations, through his breakthrough records, 2016’s Private Energy and 2019’s This Is How You Smile, and to 2021’s Far In, Lange’s work continues to move past easy genre assignments. Showcasing that interest in open-ended multidisciplinarity, in 2022, he and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, created the multidisciplinary exhibition, Kite Symphony, with Ballroom Marfa—it was a collection of impressionistic installations, drawings and sound pieces that encourages listeners to “open their ears to the sky, the sound of cacti, and the feeling of the wind on their skin.” Lange’s ninth studio record, Phasor, picks up on that interest in the natural world but in the form of pop music. Deep, atmospheric, and meticulously executed, it’s Lange’s tightest collection to date. Lange has been awarded a United States Artist fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. He lives in Asheville, NC.

Helado Negro

Helado Negro - Lotta Love

Eulogy Presents: **Chastity Belt**

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801

Doors 7PM || Show 8PM

**Chastity Belt**

Live Laugh Love.

It’s a phrase you might encounter in a certain type of cursive on the wall of a certain type of home. On the opposite end of the mood board, it’s also a stick-and-poke tattoo on Chastity Belt guitarist/vocalist Julia Shapiro’s left ankle (just below a highly improvised Shrek), and the title of the band’s fifth album. It’s fun, it’s funny, but it’s also sincere, not unlike the band’s history—a joke that became real because it was always real—and the enduring bond that has been their band’s foundation for the past 13 years.

In their decade-plus together, the four-piece—Shapiro (she/her), Lydia Lund (guitar, vocals - she/her), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals - she/her), and Annie Truscott (bass, vocals - they/them)—have created a resonant body of work. The early days of “Nip Slip” and “Pussy Weed Beer” (hits from their iconic debut full-length No Regerts, which recently celebrated 10 years) and the “Cool Slut” era of 2015’s Time To Go Home were raucous bonanzas of dry wit and self-evident feminism. A newfound gravity on 2017’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone shifted the lyrical mood toward introspection as they continued to refine their trademark sound: lush intertwining guitars, meticulous rhythms, a careful balance of melancholy and optimism. Two years later, the dreamy Chastity Belt marked a renewal of vows to their musicianship and friendship, each member coming into their own as artists, convening with a fresh perspective on collaboration.

Live Laugh Love is a natural continuation. Against the bizarre backdrop of the past few years, Chastity Belt remained a supportive space for the members to grow and experiment, drawing on the ingredients most essential to their process since the beginning: authenticity and levity. Recorded over three sessions in as many years (January 2020, November 2021 and 2022), the focus became more about enjoying their time together in the studio than making it feel like work. Their ease and familiarity with engineer Samur Khouja in LA, who also recorded their last album, made for a particularly enjoyable process, even using extra time to work out a couple joke songs to entertain only themselves (fingers crossed we hear their medieval jig, “Shilling for the Shire,” on a bonus edition someday). Once completed, they returned to renowned engineer Heba Kadry (Bjork, Slowdive) who mastered the album.

Album opener “Hollow” sets the tone with a gently driving rhythm while guitar layers stream like sun rays through an open car window. A warmth radiates through Shapiro’s voice, even while grappling with feeling lost and stuck. “The older I get,” Shapiro says of the lyrics, “the more I realize that I might just always feel this way, and it’s more about sitting with the feeling and accepting it, rather than trying to fight it.” That wisdom seems to anchor Live Laugh Love. Chastity Belt has never shied from navigating the spectrum of difficult emotions, and an existential thread weaves throughout the subject matter. And yet the songs feel more grounded than ever; there’s a sense of quiet confidence and self-assurance that comes with being less numb and more present. Facing discomfort takes more fortitude, after all.

Live Laugh Love finds the members in their prime as musicians. Their parts trace intricate patterns over one another, but there’s room to breathe between the layers. Everyone contributes to the writing, sometimes switching instruments, and for the first time, all four members sing a song. It’s never been more apparent that they are creative siblings, cut from the same belt. “We’ve been playing music with each other for over a decade,” says Shapiro, “so it really does feel like we’re all fluent in the same language, and a lot of it just happens naturally.”

“Laugh” seeks in the balm of friendship, aware of the anticipatory nostalgia that hits during a good time that you’re already missing before it’s gone; the heavier guitar tones on “Chemtrails” streak ominous chord progressions over Grimm’s precision timekeeping, lamenting memories that won’t fade easily. During a transitional time, Truscott came across a note in their phone that read, “it's not hard all day, just sometimes,” which inspired a poignant line in the chorus of “Kool-Aid,” their first song as lead vocalist on a Chastity Belt recording. Another standout, “I-90 Bridge” shines with a silvery melody that soars as Lund belts one of the most resounding moments on the album: “Tell your girlfriend she’s got nothing to fear/I’m set in my head/My body’s a different story.” The track “Blue” saunters nonchalantly with a wink; you can almost hear Shapiro’s smile as she sings “Faking it big time/So I can hit my stride/Man, it feels good to be alive,” channeling early Chastity Belt channeling early ’90s before channeling the late Elliott Smith in a spiral of distortion and insight: “Don’t get upset about it/It’s gonna pass/Tell all your friends about it/They’re gonna laugh.”

“We have such a strong sense of each other’s musical inclinations” says Lund. “I think this allows for a lot of playfulness…we can kinda surprise each other, like a good punchline would.”

Living, laughing, loving… maybe it really is that simple.

Eulogy

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