WKNC 88.1 FM - North Carolina State University Student RadioOn Photon and The Magpies will be playing at Local Beer Local Band Night at Tir Na Nog this Thursday, April 9. For those that don’t know, Local Beer Local Band Night is WKNC’s and Tir Na Nog’s weekly event showcasing the best local bands with local beer specials! So come out and support your community!! You can write off the money you spend on beer on your taxes! Oh yeah, it’s FREE to get in!
Tune in on Wednesday at 1pm as DJ Chuck will be interviewing On Photon!
Break out your chain belts, leather vests, and peace symbols and join WKNC at the Shakori Hills Grassroots music festival on Saturday April 18th. We’ll be broadcasting live all day and to celebrate, we’re giving away 5 pairs of day passes for the festival this week. Make sure to tune in for your chances to win and don’t forget to check out the live interviews with some of the performing bands.
The Line Up:
Wednesday April 8th, DJ Chuck will be kickin’ it with Holy Ghost Tent Revivial from 1-3pm
Monday April 13th, DJ Special K will be hanging with the guys from Butterflies from 4-5pm
Interviews with Lost in the Trees, New Familars, and The Old Ceremony are TBA
While it was a beautiful day in Raleigh, NC (and a perfect day for First Friday), the rain seemed to follow our baseball team all the way to Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. It’s been a rough year for the Pack, and the constant rain delays turned into double headers can’t have helped their focus or consistency.
While it might have been frustrating for baseball fans, it did mean that the Local Beat received an impromptu extra hour–back to the 5-8 timeblock! A little before the 6:00 hour, Brian Walsby, drummer of Double Negative and renowned comic artist, and Charles Cardello, co-founder of Bifocal Media, joined us in the studio. We talked a little bit about the Manchild 4 comic and Melvins CD release party. Walsby described Double Negative as a cross between Cat Stevens and Bread.
A little later on, Scott Phillips of Goner, Scott Williams (also of Double Negative) and Chris Jones (of The Loners) stopped in. We talked about party/show events as well as the growth of Raleigh as it relates to the cultural scene, and the unofficial pre-party dining location, The Remedy. But mostly, we chewed the fat.
Brian Walsby and Friend Interview 4/3
So once again, the party is at Tir Na Nog tonight (Saturday the 4th) and will feature the following lineup:
Goner
Double Negative
With the $10 price of admission comes food, a copy of the 4th installment in Walsby’s Manchild comic series, and a previously unreleased Melvins CD entitled Pick Your Battles, which features live music from two shows: one in Berkeley, Ca, in 1989, and the other in Boston, Ma, in 2008.
After the crew left, we played “Automobiles,” a cut off of the new Hammer No More the Fingers album Looking for Bruce. They are releasing the album tonight at the Duke Coffeehouse alongside the Dry Heathens, the Future Kings of Nowhere, Deleted Scenes, and The Beast. This is all part of what they’re calling “Viking Storm.”
So whether you’re in Raleigh or Durham tonight, you have a pretty epic event to attend. Decisions, decisions.
Our good friends with The North Carolina Museum of Art Contemporaries and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance present the second annual First Friday Scavenger Hunt this Friday, April 3rd. It’s a race to discover the abundance of art in downtown Raleigh with a $1,000 cash prize to the top team. If you missed the pre-registation deadline, you can show up for on-site registration at the City Market between 5 and 6 p.m. Yours truly The Revolution will be on hand, so be sure to stop by our table, say hey and pick up a new WKNC T-shirt.
On a baseball-shortened (6pm – 8pm) Local Beat tomorrow (Friday the 3rd), we will be having Scott Phillips from Goner and Chris Jones from the Loners.
Goner and the Loners represent two of four bands that will be rocking Tir Na Nog Saturday night for the Brian Walsby Comic / Melvins CD Release party.
We’ll be talking about the release party and local music in general. If you have any questions to ask the bands, shoot them to me or call in during the show at 919-515-2400 or 919-860-0881.
See you out on the airwaves!
If you have never listened to the 5 o’clock Shadow with DJs May Day and Spaceman Spiff, put it on today’s to-do list. After sitting down with Proof and Lonnie Walker in recent weeks, today’s special guests are I Was Totally Destroying It. The DBB6 alumni will be performing with North Elementary as part of WKNC’s Local Beer Local Band tonight at Tir Na Nog.
The Decemberists present the ‘complete’ album with ‘The Hazards of Love’
Seth White
The Decemberists have given me hope that the concept of an album is still alive. On their latest, The Hazards of Love, Colin Meloy and crew tell the dark story of two lovers, William and Margaret, and the two antagonists that attempt to foil their plans, the Queen and the Rake. The album’s seventeen songs are perfectly crafted and woven together with common themes and solid transitions. In an interview with Paste Magazine, Meloy commented that Hazards was initially set to be a musical but then reinvented as a rock opera.
An instrumental prelude slowly starts off the album and blends into part one of the title track, there are four altogether. “The Hazards of Love 1” resembles their earlier works complete with acoustic picking, rich upright bass and well-read Meloy’s lyrics circling about “lithesome maidens.” This formula is immediately shed on the following song, “A Bower Scene.” Here, distorted electric guitars thump power chords reminiscent of “Ziggy Stardust” or The Wall. What surprises me the most about this new sound is how well it actually works for the Decemberists, the changes from folk to rock are pulled off effortlessly here.
After an instrumental interlude about halfway through the album, “The Rake’s Song” kicks in. An eerie song featuring thick drums about a widower murdering his children, he pays for that at the end of the album. Following this is “The Abduction of Margaret” – here, the band revisits the sounds of “A Bower Scene” and pushes them to new boundaries.
Shara Morden of My Brightest Diamond is brought in to do the vocals of the Queen. Here, her voice is emotionally empowering and downright evil especially over prog-rock guitars on “The Queens Rebuke” and “The Wanting Comes in Waves.” Along with Morden, the Decemberists brought in My Morning Jacket’s front man, Jim James, to help out with background vocals on various tracks.
The last track, “The Hazards of Love 4,” brings the album to its tragic close as William and Margaret are swept off and drowned by the river. The song is a gentle finale with a wonderful steel guitar solo sandwiched in between the last duet by the two lovers.
There are drawbacks some might see to this take-it-or-leave it concept album. Each song flows right into the next leaving no real breaks – great for an album but causes it to lack the singles of its predecessor, The Crane Wife. But for what it’s worth, they aren’t missed here. As a whole, The Hazards of Love is a conceptual masterpiece from start to finish that Decemberists fans will cherish on their first listen.
88.1 WKNC DJ Pick of the Week is published in every Tuesday print edition of the Technician, as well as online at technicianonline.com and wknc.org.
Fellow WKNC lovers,
Here’s what we got for you this week:
The Presets playing @ Cat’s Cradle Tuesday, March 31st
North Mississippi Allstars playing @ Lincoln Theatre Friday, April 3rd
Rocco Deluca playing @ Cat’s Cradle Saturday, April 4th
Listen on the radio at 88.1 or stream online all week for your chances to win!
SNEAK PREVIEW:
Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival tickets giveaways! More info to come soon!
So on Friday night Adam from A Rooster for the Masses stopped by with special guest James of Baltimore-based Scary River.
The reason for the occasion? ARFTM was playing at the Pour House that night alongside Scary River and the Desmonds, and playing another show Saturday night at The Cave in Chapel Hill alongside Death to the Details.
We chatted for the better part of an hour about everything from South by Southwest, which Scary River was on its way back from, to songwriting inspiration. Oh, and Adam gave away a copy of “Broken Era,” the band’s recently-released album, to a lucky listener.