Don't be fooled by his spacey demeanor: When it comes to music, Bobby Bare Jr. means business. A true-blue born-and-bred Nashville musician, Bare has been performing since childhood, even earning a Grammy nomination for a duet with his father, country legend Bobby Bare, at age 6. Growing up in a musical family that celebrated country music influenced Bare the younger, and he eventually found his calling making post-rock with a hint of country and soul. Constantly collaborating with a variety of different musicians, he mainly records with his band, Young Criminals Starvation League, whose lineup varies with any given performance. With a live album, an EP and three full-length albums under his belt, he has created his own musical identity not only within the industry but within his family. Life has been good to Bobby by allowing him to build a career doing something he loves, and not even evil elves can bring him down.

More info on !!! (Chk Chk Chk) here.

During the Seventies when disco and punk were the rage, only a handful of bands were daring enough to play hard rock and heavy metal music. "You could almost count those bands on one hand," said Starz lead guitarist Richie Ranno. "They were Aerosmith, KISS, Queen, Ted Nugent, Starz and Angel. We kept the flame alive between the original hard rock groups and heavy metal today." 

All together Starz recorded four studio albums, Starz, Violation, Attention Shoppers, and Colesium Rock and gathered critical acclaim with their ability to mesh the smooth with the hard. "We loved pop melodies," admitted Ranno in retrospect, "and we also loved heavy guitars. We liked to combine hooks with a harder edge. Our singer Michael Lee Smith had a great sense of melody. In the course of four albums, we only used orchestrations or keyboards once, preferring to mix heavy rock productions with melodic overtones." 

Their success has been documented in the historical chapters of hard rock and heavy metal. In Kerrang's critical listing of the 100 greatest heavy metal albums of all time, Starz was listed at #94, with Violation at #84. In a similar poll in Hit Parader magazine, Violation was listed at #82. Starz's greatest asset was their live performance and until a chance meeting between Metal Blade's founder and Starz guitarist Richie Ranno, one of rock's greatest secrets was buried in the archives. At the height of their career, Starz released a special "radio only" live record intended for broadcast, bot not liscenced for sale. It was called Live In Louisville and only a scant 2,000 copies were pressed. It was heralded by Kerrang as the greatest live record never released! 
  "One day" Richie said, "out of the blue, I got a letter from Brian Slagel, who wrote that he was a big Starz fan and was interested in re-releasing the Starz albums for the first time on CD. He asked if I owned the liscenses to any of the records, and I told him I had the rights to the live record." Starz Live In Action is a combination of the famous Live In Louisville performance recorded in 1978 with another concert taped in Cleveland in 1977. Together it is over sixty-five minutes of classic Starz music, covering songs from all four studio albums and the famous "Waitin On You/Colesium Rock" medley which includes a clever collection of the greatest rock guitar riffs of all time. 

"We always considered ourselves a live band," Richie confessed. "In fact, we toured with Peter Frampton in major halls before we even had any product to sell! We felt confident that we could get any audience up on their feet and got encores wherever we played." This same spirit is captured on Starz Live In Action. If you are a Starz fan, this special recording is a must for your collection. If you are unaware of this great band, consider these thoughts. Many of the Eighties most successful bands were influenced by Starz, from Cinderella and Poison to Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. Tom Keifer said the first concert he ever went to was a Starz show... "They really kicked ass," he remembered. Jon Bon Jovi met guitarist Richie Ranno backstage at a Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey and took the time to tell 30,000 screaming fans that when he was young, he looked up to Starz. They were the band he imitated when practicing in the garage. In Jon's words, "What ever your dreams may be, always shoot for the Starz!"

The Madeira

The Madeira plays surf music born of screaming wind over the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, deafening echoes of waves pounding the Gibraltar Rock, joyous late-night gypsy dances in the small towns of Andalucia, and exotic cacophony of the Marrakesh town square. It is the surf music of the millennia-old Mediterranean mysteries.

Pierced Arrows

 

For more info see Coit Road Market's website

SHOOTER JENNINGS & HIEROPHANT 

The acclaimed singer-songwriter is kicking off a bold new chapter in his career with new band HIEROPHANT and Black Ribbons (Black Country Rock/Rocket Science Ventures), a mind-blowing 70-minute opus that completely obliterates genre distinctions. On this unprecedented work, twanging dobros coexist with Nintendo chipsets; brutally assaultive passages alternate with moments of unabashed tenderness, and surreal Floydian soundscapes float above smoking slabs of whiskey-soaked southern soul. It’s an electrifying thrill ride across a dense, dark and gloriously decadent musical landscape.   

Binding the whole thing together with alchemical deftness is acclaimed novelist Stephen King, who provides the voice of Will O’ The Wisp, a late-night talk-radio host who is in the last hour of his final broadcast before the airwaves are overtaken by “government-approved and regulated transmissions.” In retaliation for his muzzling, he speaks his mind like never before, punctuating his rants with selections from the discography of Hierophant. Throughout the album’s 14 songs, Will O’ The Wisp flits in and out, painting an apocalyptic picture of what America could become in the not-so-distant future, while offering his loyal listeners—from whom he is about to be permanently cut off—the unvarnished truth. 

In September of 2008, Jennings left New York and headed to Los Angeles to begin recording the album. He took the long way, driving cross-country in an old RV. It was during this trip that everything changed—the financial systems fell and the world went into a panic.   

With Black Ribbons, Shooter Jennings has created something true to himself, to his art and his beliefs. Sonically, it draws from Jennings’ disparate influences—the Beatles’ White Album, Skinny Puppy and Ministry to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas. At the same time, it forms an intensely personal song cycle, as this young artist probes his own roiling psyche and the tumult of modern-day existence.“ 

 

Likened to watching “Hee-Haw on mescaline”, The DEFiBULATORs wield an arsenal of guitars, banjos, fiddles, and junkyard percussion, with relentless energy and virtuosity. The DEFiBULATORs jump-start new life into vintage country music and deliver a unique sound that’s anything but old timey. Razor sharp harmonies by Bug Jennings and Erin Bru, along with dark and surreal lyrics, illuminate songs that are gritty and witty; spinning tales of deception, debauchery, depleted bank accounts, fanaticism, vintage firearms, biological anomalies, airline intoxication, and animal ennui.

Though the band formed in NYC, its members hail from all corners of the country.  Singer/banjoist Bug Jennings and washboard/harmonica player Metalbelly were both raised in Ft. Worth TX, only to be accidentally reaquainted years later in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park.  Meanwhile, singer Erin Bru drifted over from Los Angeles, Smitty the Giant Fiddler was  being dairy fed in Wisconsin, and a trio of east coasters would eventually round out the group. Lead guitarist and Hoboken native, Roadblock initially met Jennings while working at a Manhattan bbq joint, finding a shared obsession of classic country music music.  Fellow Garden state-er Mike Riddleberger was later recruited to play drums, along with Philadelphia bassist, Freddy Epps.  The band cut it’s teeth on classic bluegrass and rockabilly tunes,  learning hundreds of standards and obscurities, gigging relentlessly in NYC, while peripherally writing the original songs that would eventually comprise Corn Money.

Produced by John Hill (SANTIGOLD, DEVO) and Terrence Bernardo (TAXI TAXI), mixed by D. James Goodwin (MURDER BY DEATH, CAMPHOR), and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound,  The DEFiBULATORs’ debut full-length album, Corn Money is making waves in the world of alternative country. 

 

Indigenous 

Mato Nanji, the longtime leader of the South Dakota-based Indigenous, is a Native American artist who was born to play the blues. He pares his musical approach right down to the bone on The Acoustic Sessions (Vanguard, June 8), the seventh full-length album under the Indigenous nameplate, in a series of strikingly intimate and immediate performances of songs handpicked from the band’s first decade of existence. These captivating performances transcend genre, locating the heartfelt, powerfully understated expression at the core of Mato’s writing.

“This album is a collection of some of my favorite songs that celebrate 10 years of releasing albums, starting with Things We Do in 1998 and finishing with Broken Lands in 2008,” he writes in his notes to the The Acoustic Sessions. “I wanted to do something special to thank all the Indigenous fans out there for supporting us from the beginning, and for the continued support as we open a new chapter with this album. Every song that I have ever written began with the acoustic guitar, so it only felt natural to create and acoustic album. For me, everything has always been about making music. It is who I am and who I always will be. I am honored to have the opportunity to share a part of who I am with all of you.”

The plainspoken, heartfelt eloquence with which Mato explains his inspiration for making this album can be found in every song penned and every note played by this refreshingly humble and earnest artist. On The Acoustic Sessions, Mato revisits, in chronological order, 10 linchpin songs from his body of work, stripping away everything but their musical and emotional essences, joined only by producer/multi-instrumentalist Jamie Candiloro (Ryan Adams, Willie Nelson) and his wife and songwriting collaborator Leah Nanji, who sings backing vocals, with violinist Lisa Germano (John Cougar Mellencamp) contributing to certain songs. The spare settings serve to isolate Mato’s lived-in, character-rich vocals and burnished guitar lines, which are totally of a piece with his writing.

Read the rest of Indigenous' bio here!