Friday 5/24

Cold Kingdom at Route 47 – TICKETS

Minneapolis, MN Hard Rock Band COLD KINGDOM has released the official music video for “A New Disaster,” the debut single off of their upcoming LP, due out May 24th, 2019.

“The process we went through to create this album really pushed us to find the things we needed to address and talk about in these songs, because we didn’t have a lot of time to waste. It ended up becoming the most adventurous thing we’ve ever done as a band. Every song comes from a very real and genuine place, and as a result we have a record that we’re extremely proud of and excited to be playing live throughout 2019.” – Cold Kingdom

 

Saturday 5/25 and Sunday 5/26

Memory Lanes Block Party at Memory Lanes

With all the press Soundset is getting, it’s easy to forget about Minneapolis’ other Memorial Day weekend tradition. The Memory Lanes Block Party. A great collection of edgy mostly local bands you can’t beat the value at only $ 5 per day. 

MEMORY LANES BLOCK PARTY DAY 1 Saturday 5/25
(3:00pm-10:00pm) Outdoor Stage:
3:00 – DJ Kingorilla / DJ Manny Duke
4:45 – Sister Species
6:00 – Malamanya
7:20 – Lady Midnight
8:00 – Nazeem & Spencer Joles
8:40 – Manchita
9:20 – Mixed Blood Majority
9:30pm Indoor Stage:
Shannon Blowtorch, DJ Fundo, Michele.Be, Nick Jordan

MEMORY LANES BLOCK PARTY DAY 2 Sunday 5/26
(3:00pm-10:00pm) Outdoor Stage:
3:00 – DJ J-Ho
3:30 – Gully Boys
4:15 – Motorgirl
4:55 – Short Fuses
5:45 – The 5,6,7,8’s
6:50 – The Turbo A.C.’s
8:00 – Guitar Wolf
9:15 – Nashville Pussy
10:00 – Mojo Spleens (Beer Tent – unplugged!)
9:30pm Indoor Stage:
DJ Rock The Monkey, The Toxenes. Trim Reaper
Midnight – Live Band Karaoke with:
Nato Coles & the Blue Diamond Band

 

Wednesday 5/29

Ages and Ages at the Entry – TICKETS

For the past two years, Tim Perry and Rob Oberdorfer, the creative braintrust behind the offbeat but often upbeat group Ages and Ages got together twice a week to work on new music, along with drummer and co-producer Evan Railton. Not terribly out of the ordinary, really. They were, after all, in the process of creating a follow up to their acclaimed 2016 album Something To Ruin.

But beyond just the simple act of getting together with friends to create, it proved to be a necessary ballast. In the wake of the 2016 election when every day seemed to bring a new bit of insanity to our lives, this was something to look forward to and something to help them make sense of it all. Call it musical group therapy. “Art is supposed to help get at the root of the human experience and what it’s like to be alive,” Perry says. “And the challenge is how do you make music that confronts these complicated, important and sometimes very dark questions and do so in a way that still bounces around and maintains some level of optimism?”

It’s a thin needle to thread but Ages and Ages have done just that on their forthcoming album Me You They We. The 10 songs on this self-released LP don’t shy away from the uneasy feelings so many of us have been having since 2016. They shine a light through the murk with a glistening sound and lyrics that are unblinking yet suffused with a sense of hope.

 

Operators at the Turf Club – TICKETS

Operators is a Montreal based project created by Daniel Boeckner, (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits), Devojka, and Sam Brown (Divine Fits, New Bomb Turks) in 2014. The band released an EP (EP1) in 2014, and released their first LP (Blue Wave) in 2016, via Last Gang Records. Operators supported these releases with a series of international tours across North America, and Europe.

Like Handsome Furs, Operators’ music has resonated particularly well with Eastern European audiences. The band has been well received across clubs and premier festivals, such as Primavera (where they were asked to play two years in a row – something that is usually unheard of).

While recording their sophomore LP, the members of the band kept busy with a series of other endeavours, including the promotional cycle around Wolf Parade’s Cry Cry Cry LP, a series of performances in which Operators played material from the Handsome Furs catalog (which all sold out in less than six hours), and Boeckner’s original song for the critically acclaimed 2018 film Mandy.

 

Thursday 5/30

Chromatics at First Avenue – TICKETS

Chromatics is an American electronic music band from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2001. The band consists of Ruth Radelet (vocals, guitar, synthesizer), Adam Miller (guitar, vocoder), Nat Walker (drums, synthesizer), and Johnny Jewel (producer, multi-instrumentalist). The band originally featured a trademark sound indebted to punk and lo-fi that was described as “noisy” and “chaotic”. After numerous lineup changes, which left guitarist Adam Miller as the sole original member, the band began releasing material on the Italians Do It Better record label in 2007, with their style streamlined into an Italo disco-influenced sound.

In “Time Rider”, Chromatics employ the metaphor of a motorcycle as an inter-dimensional bridge between the future and the past. In this dream, the motorcyclist mirrors myths of the grim reaper as Ruth Radelet eerily asks “Can I take your hand? I want to ride with you into the storm.”

Chromatics will play their first public concerts in over 5 years. The last time Chromatics was on stage was for the filming of their Roadhouse appearances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This six-week North American tour will be the first time the band performs live with vocalist Ruth Radelet in many of the cities. Onstage, the group will be playing their favorite moments from Night Drive, Kill For Love, Cherry, & Dear Tommy.

Montreal’s Desire will be performing in direct support of Chromatics. Frontwoman Megan Louise sings in French and English over Italo Disco laced Dream Pop. Their single “Under Your Spell” made a splash on the silver screen in Nicolas Winding Refn’s cult classic Drive alongside label mates Chromatics, Electric Youth, & Kavinsky.

 

 

Friday 5/31

Nick Murphy (FKA Chet Faker) at First Avenue – TICKETS

In the making of his sophomore album, Nick Murphy spent four years traveling the world solo with a microphone in his suitcase, recording his vocal tracks in whichever spaces and environments most inspired him. During that time, the Melbourne-bred singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist formerly known as Chet Faker immersed himself in intense self-examination. With its penetrating songwriting and kaleidoscopic palette, Run Fast Sleep Naked is a hypnotically candid document of that searching, an album equally informed by constant questioning and steadily arriving at fragments of truth.

Co-produced with Dave Harrington and mixed by Murphy and Phil Weinrobe, Run Fast Sleep Naked is the latest in a series of widely acclaimed releases including 2017’s Missing Link EP and Murphy’s 2014 full-length debut Built on Glass—a platinum-selling effort that won him seven ARIA Music Awards, including Best Male Artist and Producer of the Year. Although Murphy captured his vocal performances in spaces across the globe—including his grandmother’s living room, a studio in Tokyo, a vacation rental he shared with his family in New Zealand, and his own New York City apartment—the musical component to Run Fast Sleep Naked was mainly recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn. And in sculpting the album’s shapeshifting sound, Murphy enlisted over 20 session musicians and a full orchestra, embedding each song with unexpected textures and wildly varied tones.

Nick Murphy has played sold-out shows on five continents, appeared at major festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, and taken the stage at The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Since the release of his debut album, he’s dropped the Chet Faker moniker and made his debut under his own name with the brooding 2016 single “Fear Less,” with follow-up single “Stop Me” premiering in mid-2016 and Missing Link arriving in spring 2017. Don’t miss Nick Murphy reveal what’s next in 2019.

 

Saturday 6/1

Diane Coffee at the Entry – TICKETS

The ever-evolving spectacle that is Diane Coffee — the gender and genre-bending alter ego of Shaun Fleming — returns with Internet Arms, a swan dive into a lush, digital glam wonderland. Fleming’s path to stardom can be traced all the way back to his childhood days as a Disney voice actor, but for the past six years he’s explored the depths of his identity and channeled it outward in the form of the enigmatic and exuberant Diane Coffee.

In 2018, after performing as King Herod in the Lyric Opera’s critically-acclaimed run of Jesus Christ Superstar, Fleming emerged from the recording studio with Internet Arms. Born from the fear and uncertainty of a future in which humankind is both dependent on and poisoned by technology, the album finds Diane Coffee trapped in a digital world, enslaved by AI. “Did you know the technology exists to take a photo of anyone you know and use it to create… well, let’s call it, ‘adult entertainment’?” Fleming asks. “And did you know that an estimated 70% of all online activity isn’t human? Where does that leave us? We don’t interact with each other anymore because we’re always online. Not to mention we can manifest any version of ourselves at the push of a button when we’re logged in, so when we encounter humans they’re not even real.”

Facing this existential crisis, Fleming’s anxieties became his muse as his writing explored the scenarios of this dystopian future: “It’s a personal study on how I feel about living with constant blurred lines of the self and the projected self.” This notion shaped the sound of Internet Arms as well, compelling Fleming to gravitate toward synths, electronic drums, and other futuristic sounds from the past and present to create his version of a digital landscape, as well as a digital version of himself. “The songs are what have always dictated the sound. Working in the realm of clean, modern pop production has been an exhilarating change of pace. Diane Coffee now sounds like a digitization of its former self because I also feel trapped in this digital world,” Fleming explains.

 

Perry Project at Bryant Lake Bowl – TICKETS

Originally from the Mojave Desert of California, Tracy Perry Jr formed Perry Project on Myspace in 2007 while staying in Seattle for a means to seek out other musicians and to form a band. While searching for bandmates, Tracy continued to pick up his cheap electric guitar, writing songs on his own and falling in love with the songwriting process. Perry Project eventually became a solo acoustic act, occasionally with other musicians joining him on stage. In 2015 Perry Project added 4 permanent members after moving to Minneapolis, which can be heard on their latest 2019 release “Regardless of Everything, Are You Okay?”

Now out of the Twin Cities, the Rock-Alternative-Pop band Perry Project releases their newest album. It will be their 2nd studio album. Their sound has been described as Dream Rock. Similar Bands Include: The Killers, Beach House, Oasis, and The Sundays.

You will hear them perform the new album in full for the first time at the Bryant Lake Bowl on Saturday, June 1st, 2019. Be the first to pick up their new CD!

The new album is an important step in the band’s new direction musically and represents the first effort with contributions by the 4 new members