Cool Shows Next Week 11/5 – 11/11

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Wednesday 11/7

Gorgon City at First Avenue – TICKETS

British dance duo Gorgon City have announced a fall North American live tour in support of their forthcoming sophomore album, Escape, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2014’s Sirens. Laced with a flurry of the pair’s latest tracks, including “Go Deep,” as well as “Hear That” feat D Double E and upcoming single “One Last Song” with JP Cooper and Yungen, Escape showcases Gorgon City’s sonic diversity, ranging from more downtempo summer chill-out anthems, to more club-ready productions, influenced by the duo’s gruff basslines, and deep house inspired chords. The album also contains last summer’s whopping hit “Real Life,” a Balearic anthem they created with Duke Dumont which became the soundtrack to the Ibiza 2017 season.

 

Friday 11/9

Gunnar Gehl at the Varsity – TICKETS

Opening for PRETTYMUCH

17-year-old Gunnar Gehl is a trove of vivid memories. He pays attention to the small moments within the ordinary then preserves the feelings they give him through writing and singing. His music aims to capture all of his thoughts that occupy the time and space in between hellos and goodbyes between two people.  A Southern California native, Gehl is still close to his roots both locally and musically. His biggest influence is John Mayer, who struck him for the way the singer-songwriter becomes crystalline through guitar. When Gehl himself picked up a guitar when he was 7, he found something that made everything feel possible. Now all of his songs begin with the instrument that helped him find his voice.

While he now numbers more than 172,000 Instagram followers, Gunnar insists amassing likes and views is secondary to working on his craft. Citing Shawn Mendes, Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber for their success and work ethic, Gunnar no longer makes music wondering what others will think, but for himself, to recapture the feeling he once experienced listening to Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” a favorite of his dad, who solidly supports his son’s musical ambitions.

 

Saturday 11/10

Ryan Montbleau at the Aster Cafe – TICKETS

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

Ryan Montbleau returns to Aster for a special solo performance live in the cafe!

The peg is his new live album ‘Woodstock Sessions,’ which was released on October 26th.  The album was recorded during a December 2017 live session in front of an audience at Applehead Recording, where the first two Ryan Montbleau Band albums  were recorded. He’s joined on most of the tracks by the electrofolk duo Tall Heights, running through a repertoire of previously released songs in fresh, stripped-down arrangements, plus three songs ever before released. ‘Woodstock Sessions’ captures Montbleau in his element at an exciting time in his career, with over one million monthly Spotify listeners and plans to embark on a cross-country solo acoustic tour in support of the new release. Montbleau’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s classic “Fast Car” has become a Spotify hit too, with over 31 million streams and counting. Touring relentlessly for 15 years, both with a full band and solo, Ryan has shared the stage with Mavis Staples, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Ani DiFranco, The Wood Brothers and more. His intimate songwriting prowess and dynamic voice channel fellow troubadours Ray LaMontagne, Josh Ritter and Shakey Graves while also playing with the pop sensibilities and storytelling of early John Mayer, Amos Lee and the Avett Brothers.

 

Decker at Day Block Brewing – TICKETS

In the simplest terms, decker. is a singer/songwriter based in Sedona, Arizona. A more apt description, however, would be to call him a musical mystic. He himself describes his sound as psychedelic desert folk, drawing inspiration directly from the vortexes of the red rock mountains and canyons where he resides in an area so widely known for its resounding energy that millions of spiritual travelers flock there every year in an attempt to harness its power. With a handful of self-released recordings to his name that have garnered praise from KEXP, Magnet Magazine and No Depression, decker. signed with revered independent label Royal Potato Family in 2017 to release a 10-song retrospective entitled Into The Red. In 2018, he returns with a full-length collection of new material, Born To Wake Up. Where previous albums have leaned darker in mood and content, this latest finds him maturing in his artistic viewpoint, offering more optimism and light across a range of songs like Awake, Smudge and The Matador. Glide Magazine recently wrote, “decker. is one of the countrys most criminally underrated songwriters. With the release of Born To Wake Up, that should all be changing.

 

The Dodos at the Entry – TICKETS

To make Certainty Waves, their seventh album as The Dodos, guitarist Meric Long and percussionist Logan Kroeber had to forget everything they knew about what it meant to be The Dodos. Like the duo’s breakout sophomore album Visiter (which celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2018), Certainty Waves finds The Dodos embracing the unlimited possibilities of a time when there were no preconceptions of what the band should sound like.

Questions like whether the band needed to be more than just “acoustic guitar and drums,” and just what exactly the ratio should be of acoustic vs. electric guitar suddenly took a backseat to the realization that so much emphasis was mistakenly being put on form rather than spirit. Perhaps not surprisingly, this epiphany occurred while the band was re-learning Visiter for a show in which they were to perform the record in its entirety. “It completely surprised me how much electric guitar is on that record,” reveals Long. “The narrative had always been we were just acoustic guitar and drums.”

 

Sunday 11/11

The Music of Cream at the Fitzgerald – TICKETS

Following their successful inaugural tour across Australia and New Zealand in 2017, the pedigree of hallowed ‘60s trio Cream—Ginger Baker’s son KOFI BAKER, Jack Bruce’s son MALCOLM BRUCE and Eric Clapton’s nephew by marriage WILL JOHNS—have come together for the first time in North America to pay homage to the band’s extraordinary legacy with THE MUSIC OF CREAM – 50TH ANNIVERSARY WORLD TOUR. The eight-week outing stops in 39 cities throughout North America this fall, including ST. PAUL on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11 at the FITZGERALD THEATRE, and will mark 50 years since the original lineup’s farewell U.S. tour of 1968.

During its heartbreakingly short lifespan, Cream was an explosive musical cocktail that provided the super-group blueprint for others to follow. The group’s third album, Wheels of Fire (1968), was the world’s first platinum-selling double album, and collectively they sold more than 15 million copies of their albums worldwide. Not surprisingly, Rolling Stone ranked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group (inducted in 1993) as 67th in their ‘100 Greatest Artists of All Time’ list.

Apart from an equally brief reunion in 2005 of seven shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall and New York’s Madison Square Garden, Cream retained an almost mythological status in the music world, right up until the passing of Jack Bruce in 2014. This, for many fans, marked the end of an era and an acceptance that there would never really be another opportunity to celebrate the group’s legacy.

 

Rock and Roll Playhouse Phish for Kids at First Avenue – TICKETS

The Rock and Roll Playhouse, a family concert series hosted at First Avenue, Brooklyn Bowl, The Capitol Theatre, Industry City, Ardmore Music Hall, The Sinclair, Boulder Theater, and Thalia Music Hall, allows kids to “move, play and sing while listening to works from the classic-rock canon” (NY Times). Using the songs created by the most iconic musicians in rock history, The Rock and Roll Playhouse offers its core audience of babies and kids games, movement, and stories and an opportunity to rock out. The Rock and Roll Playhouse is an early and often first introduction to a child’s lifelong journey with live music and rock and roll.

 

 

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