One of my current favorite bands, Hot Mulligan, will be playing a sold out show at Amsterdam Bar & Hall on Saturday, November 13th.
Like many bands last year, Lansing, Michigan’s Hot Mulligan—the #1 Hot New Band per their Facebook page—put out an LP in 2020 that they didn’t get to tour. This year, they’ll release I Won’t Reach Out To You, a six-track EP that operates as a response to their 2020 full-length You’ll Be Fine. The EP is bookended on the first and last tracks by a resounding glance-back at a world that simply doesn’t exist anymore: “Stay home, stay home/You said it wouldn’t make a difference whether we could be together or not.”
Hot Mulligan are just as likely to write a beautiful, devastating treatise on growing apart—both literally and spiritually, from your friends and your old self—as they are to make a song and video about putting on sunglasses (which they have done). This is the Hot Mulligan way: life is serious and scary, but you just gotta make a meme about it with your buds.
Supporting Hot Mulligan will be another favorite of mine, Prince Daddy & The Hyena. Cosmic Thrill Seekers, the new record from Albany punk rock band Prince Daddy & the Hyena, is many things. It is an odyssey of epic, The Monitor-esque proportions, a great, galloping sonic roadtrip across space and time and Albany, boomeranging around a horn of punk, pop, indie, garage rock, and orchestral, Queen-style arrangements and theatrics; it is an exploration of the fall-out after an acid trip, manic self-destruction, bottoming-out and recovering, and then slipping again; it is a candid, acute documentation of frontperson Kory Gregory’s cyclical mental health states as told through three acts and 14 songs/chapters; it is an existential presentation of eternal return theory, a victory via surrender to impermanence; and perhaps most of all, it is about Dorothy Gale and The Wizard Of Oz.
As if those two bands alone weren’t enough, Sincere Enginess will be playing too! Sincere Engineer has announced details on Bless My Psyche, their new album out September 10, 2021 via Hopeless Records. Recorded in their hometown of Chicago, with long-time collaborator/producer, Matt Jordan, Bless My Psyche is the follow up to 2017’s Rhombithian, and continues to juxtapose hopeful expectations and the disappointment of reality through wry and witty lyrics and catchy indie punk. “I think my music is relatable and I hope it makes people feel like they’re not alone” shares singer, Deanna Belos, “I do it because it’s fun and I don’t want to do anything else.”
Getting the night started off right will be Super American.
This show is sold out but be sure to follow the venue and bands on social media for any last minute ticket drops!
