Jim Gaffigan
Uptown Amphitheatre
Aug. 15, 2015
The Head and the Heart
The Fillmore
June 11, 2014
On Twitter and Facebook, fans expressed their displeasure saying they were "bummed" and disappointed. The band took to social media:
Charlotte- please read this about our show tonight. We are so sorry to have been shutdown. We had many songs left. pic.twitter.com/aRthTnkGrg
- The Head & The Heart (@headandtheheart) June 12, 2014
Rumors quickly spread that there was a bomb threat and people blamed the venue for not doing more. If the rumors are true, why blame the venue for ending a show and getting people out of the venue? Did patrons want them to "yell fire" and get people to panic and run? Fans should instead be blaming the person who made the threat for ending the show early.
The Fillmore, on Thursday morning, issued the following statement:
"After the band's final song, an apparently intoxicated individual on our property outside the venue claimed he had put a bomb on the property. Charlotte police apprehended the individual, deemed the threat non-reliable but nonetheless, in the interest of safety, a decision was made to end the show without an encore."
If the show had continued, The Head and the Heart was scheduled to play a new song, "Springtime," "Summertime," "Let's Be Still" and "Down in the Valley." As it stands, fans were left a bit confused and dispirited.
Hooterfest
Chop Shop
June 7, 2014
From the opening notes of heavy rock band Butterfly Corpse to the closing set of humorous folk by Smelly Felly, the third annual Hooterfest benefit show for the Carolina Raptor Center showcased a variety of local music. Radio Lola offered blues-driven rock and No Anger Control brought punk angst, while Tattermask and Something Clever brought more heavy rock to the NoDa venue. Here's a slideshow from the event:
Jack White
The Fillmore
June 5, 2014
"Some musicians don't care about this stuff, but I let the crowd tell me what to do," White says in a Rolling Stone cover story (which contained a few get-yr-dukes-up nuggets of its own). "There's no setlist. I'm not just saying the same things I said in Cleveland last night. If they can't give me that energy back? Maybe I'm wasting my time." Recall that White drew criticism back in 2012 when he walked off the stage at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, reportedly as a result of a lackadaisical audience. (White reportedly asked at one point during that show: "Jesus Christ, is this an NPR convention?")
If White does indeed feed off his audience, Thursday's sold-out crowd gave him plenty to draw from. (A solid portion of the crowd on the rail showed up not only hours before doors opened, but hours before the box office opened at noon. For a sold out show. One crew of four from Lynchburg, Virginia, camped out overnight to be the first in line and the first on the front row. Directly behind them, a woman who's catching nine dates of this leg of White's tour.)
LIttle Big League, It Looks Sad, Serfs Alright
Area 15
May 30, 2014
After the noisy thrash of Alright and Serfs, the indie-rock band It Looks Sad, with its guitar-pop sensibilities, was a sharp musical change of pace to the evening. Recently signing with Charlotte-based record label Tiny Engines, It Looks Sad has been covered by Pitchfork who excitedly mentioned an upcoming EP release later this summer.
"Seasons" and "Radical" were highlights of the band's set that sounded like rays of sunshine on a cloudy evening and revealing why the band's profile has been on the rise.
Overall, the evening felt a lot like a homecoming. Area 15, located between Uptown and NoDa, is home to a number of small operations and also functions as a DIY concert venue. Headlining the night, Little Big League fronted by Michelle Zauner stepped up in front of the crowd ready to perform. Proceeding after a few local bands, Zauner and crew performed with a stoic professionalism of a band who was in the final days of its May tour.
Matrimony
Neighborhood Theatre
May 30, 2014
Charlotte's Matrimony performed at the Neighborhood Theatre on May 30 as a release party for the band's Columbia Records debut, Montibello Memories. Named after the street where singer/keyboardist Ashlee Hardee Brown and her brothers, drummer Jordan Hardee and multi-instrumentalist CJ Hardee, grew up, Hardee Brown noted the night was bittersweet as the home had been sold that very day.
As the band took the stage, smoke set off the building's fire alarm causing a premature evacuation of the venue into the NoDa streets. Soon after, singer/guitarist James Brown, Hardee Brown and CJ (with his banjo) were out front singing their song, "Flee or Fight," much to the delight of the attendees within earshot.
When the crowd finally filed back in, the band played a set filled with songs from the new album, as well as music from its two previous EPs.
Tegan and Sara, Lucius, The Courtneys
The Fillmore
May 19, 2014
Sandwiched on this night between the bar-band fuzz-pop of The Courtneys and the polished pop-rock of Tegan and Sara, Lucius was a stunning breath of fresh air.
Reverb Fest
Neighborhood Theatre
May 17, 2014
In January, I moved up to Charlotte from Columbia, S.C., where I was music editor of the city's altweekly Free Times. Not too long before I left, I started noticing billboards up around downtown Columbia, mostly by interstate on-ramps and major intersections, promoting Charlotte as a tourism destination. They'd show happy young yuppies lounging in the shadows of Uptown skyscrapers.
Charlotte's got a lot, they'd read.
(Ironically, billboards advertising Columbia's tourist hotspots, such as they are, started springing up in Charlotte after I'd moved up here. Quelle ironie!)
Columbia's a small town, and its music scene is similarly small. The benefit to that is, naturally, camaraderie, which was a comfort in Columbia. If someone needed support, he or she could fall back on fellow musicians. Benefits, like the ones that have sprung up in the wake of one local musician's brain cancer diagnosis, are common.
Though I've held residence in Charlotte since the New Year, I hadn't spent a lot of time in the city - I did some touring with some bands I play in, spent some time in my ancestral home of Boston, and pitched in as a spare hand at the Columbia alt-weekly I'd just left. It wasn't until mid-March when I spent any amount of time in Charlotte, let alone seeing its musicians. Those I had seen I was already intimately familiar with, and Creative Loafing readers probably would be, too: Bo White, Great Architect, Joint D≠, Hectorina, Junior Astronomers.
Which is what attracted me, as a relative newcomer, to Saturday's Reverb Fest. Its lengthy bill offered, to me, an opportunity to see a great number of bands - many of which I hadn't yet seen.
+++, Sleeper Agent, Wild Cub, Nostalghia
The Fillmore
May 15, 2014
+++ (Crosses) was one of four bands performing as a partnership between the Fillmore and 106.5 The End for the New Music Revolution events (this was the fourth). The series is a great way to check out new acts without breaking the bank - tickets were just $10.65. That, and if you don't like the band, chances are they won't be on stage for very long.