Lagwagon / STRUNG OUT / Swingin’ Utters / The Flatliners / toyGuitar / Bad Cop / Bad Cop at Slowdown

All Ages – $20 advance / $25 day of show – 7 PM

+++ LAGWAGON +++
After a nine year lag, it’s time to get back on the wagon with the powerful and long-awaited album Hang from punk rock mainstays Lagwagon.

It’s not that the band broke up or even went on hiatus after releasing 2005’sResolve. They’ve continued a robust tour schedule, and frontman Joey Cape has released a steady stream of original material as a solo artist and with his other projects Bad Astronaut, Scorpios, and Bad Loud (not to mention cranking out cover albums with his other other project Me First and the Gimme Gimmes).

“I’m writing all the time,” says Cape, “but a lot of times it doesn’t feel appropriate for Lagwagon. It’s not who the band collectively is at the time, and the mold is constantly changing. Sometimes it takes a decade for all the stars to align!”

That celestial harmonic convergence finally happened a few years ago when the band was on tour. “The lightbulb over the head came on, and I knew what the record would sound like and what we’d be saying. It’s less of the ‘90s punk rock style we’re known for. But this is the record my band wanted and needed to make.”

Indeed, the overall sound of Hang is darker and more hard-charging than some of Lagwagon’s best-known work, as they address themes including loss, betrayal, aging, the environment, and the plight of the common man. It’s not a totally bleak picture, though: all that disconnectedness underscores the need to make emotional investments, ensuring that empathy doesn’t in fact become obsolete.

The album also includes a musical tribute to Cape’s late best friend, collaborator, and frequent tour mate Tony Sly (No Use For A Name), who died in July 2012, just days after the two had wrapped what would be their final acoustic tour. The title of “One More Song” draws from the closing chant of Sly’s solo track “Liver Let Die,” but was directly inspired by a different song, one we’ll never be able to hear.

“The last few days we were on tour together, he was writing a song and he played it for me and it was amazing,” says Cape about the song’s inspiration. “What happened to that song? I can’t remember it. I can’t recall it well enough to say “this is the last song Tony wrote.”

The band plan to release an arc of three singles with accompanying videos, but won’t be appearing in the clips themselves, opting to work with a creative team that will focus on their words rather than their faces. “I think some of the coolest things you see on YouTube are lyric videos: so sophisticated. It’s filmmaking, it’s about how much vision the person has.”

So you won’t see their faces on their YouTube channel, but there’s an easy way to check out the mugs of a band who once played 284 shows in a single year: on a stage near you once the album is released on October 28. “This is the first record we’ve made in the history of the band that we wholeheartedly agree that we want to play every single song on the record live,” says Joey. “It’ll be great to play new songs. Sheesh, please!”

+++ STRUNG OUT +++
Six years. It’s longer than the president sits in office or most people spend in college. In the music industry, it’s practically an eternity. Bands form, blow up and break up in that time period; new, disturbingly awful trends develop, old forms of media die out, social networks spread their insidious seed through shiny handheld devices no one actually needs but everybody wants.

Six years is also the amount of time that has passed since Strung Out’s last album. The Southern California tech-punk quintet had been so reliable for two decades—write, record, tour, repeat cycle roughly once every two years—that to go this long without new music felt like cause for alarm. Frontman Jason Cruz shared similar feelings.

“You get to a point where you decide if you’re going to go on or stop,” he admits. “Everyone kind of just lived life for a little bit. I think that’s pretty important if you consider yourself a songwriter or an artist of any kind. You have to live and experience other things in your life to have something to write about, to give value to what you’re singing about.”

Cruz & Co. were able to put their time off to good use, focusing their energy on the creation of Transmission.Alpha.Delta, out March 24 on their longtime label Fat Wreck Chords. The album didn’t come together easily, though; according to Cruz, writing was a yearlong process, as was recording. “We have an excess of ideas, and everyone in the band likes to put their elbows up and fight for their ideas,” he explains. I think that conflict is healthy. It’s all part of collaborating.” The process was further knotted by adding in another strong voice in producer Kyle Black, whose previous production credits ranged from Paramore to Comeback Kid. “There was butting heads in the beginning,” Cruz admits. “We’ve been doing something for 25 years and then some kid steps up and tells you to try it a little differently, all of us were like, ‘What? Who is this guy?’”

Early tensions were resolved, though, when the band realized they had an ally behind the boards. “Kyle was the first producer we’ve worked with that was a true fan of the band,” the vocalist says. “A lot of people saidTransmission.Alpha.Delta is reminiscent of some of the earlier stuff we did, and I think Kyle had a lot to do with that, celebrating what this band is but at the same time hopefully elevating our artform.”

And elevate it he did; Transmission.Alpha.Delta is an album well worth its half-decade wait, with incredible songs like “Magnolia,” “Modern Drugs” and “Tesla” lyrically tackling difficult issues like drug addiction, faith and even the technological brainwashing of today’s youth while musically measuring up with the best moments of the band’s back catalog. “The biggest theme of this record was that we were all outside our comfort zone,” Cruz says. “Instead of just soloing, we’ve incorporated the solos into the actual structure of the songs. We mixed up the tempos, and we switched to E flat, which gives the guitars a better tone. I think we created a journey from where each song begins to where the song ends are two completely different places. I love that about Strung Outsongs.”

Cruz is is own harshest critic, so when the singer says this might be his favoriteStrung Out album, he really means it. “I judge the record by how accurately it describes my life,” he says. “As long as it’s a representation of who I am, and sincere and not pandering to any ’90s bullshit—I fuckin’ hated the ’90s. I don’t want Strung Out to be a nostalgia punk band at all. I wanna be right here, right now. I consider it an honor to be a musician and to contribute to everything that came before me.”

That urge to keep pushing to be modern and relevant and not rest on their laurels is what continually sets Strung Out apart from so many of their nostalgia-obsessed peers. “I’m not interested in looking back at all,” Cruz states. “I have no time or energy for that. There’s too much shit to be done. When I’m sitting in a diaper and on a morphine drip, maybe I’ll look back. Maybe I’ll actually listen to one of our old records.”

It’s clear Strung Out are rejuvenated and ready for more. And even though Cruz might not listen to Transmission.Alpha.Delta again until a few decades from now, odds are their fans will listen to it more than enough in the interim.

+++ SWINGIN’ UTTERS +++
After more than a quarter century as a band, there’s really only one thing you can count on being the same with each new record from the Swingin’ Utters, and that is that they’re going to make it a little different. “From the first record, I wanted to mix it up as much as we could,” says co-founder Darius Koski. “Playing with different genres and instrumentation makes it more interesting. As long as it’s a cohesive record, it works for us.”

That dedication to not replicating any standard “Swingin’ Utters sound” has resulted in what may be their most cohesive (and paradoxically, one of their most diverse) records yet: the brand new long-player Fistful of Hollow, which explores the Utters’ interests in far afield sounds including Britpop, mod, Celtic, country, folk, and—of course—a solid foundation of West Coast punk rock.

Helping lend to the album-to-album multiformity is the fact that for the second album in a row, a member made his first forays into tunesmithing for the band. Devotees will remember that last time around (on 2013’s Poorly Formed), guitarist Jack Dalrymple stepped up to the plate, and this time around bassist Miles Peck got his first at-bat, co-writing four of the album’s fifteen tracks with vocalist Johnny Bonnel.

“It wasn’t weird when Miles brought these songs, ‘cause they’re not punk songs,” says Koski. On working with Peck, Bonnel says, “Collaborating on art has got to be one of the most gratifying things for me. I’m surrounded by truly unique and interesting brains in the Swingin’ Utters.” Acknowledging that punk bands get easily pigeonholed sonically, Koski adds “We’re not that type of band anymore. I think people expect we’ll have some weird stuff on the record.”

Weird might not be a proper description for the head-bobbing title track (penned by Darius himself), but extraordinary definitely is, in both senses of the word: it is quite excellent, but also quite out of the ordinary, with a jangle reminiscent of many mainstays of late ’80s/early ’90s college radio. The title and cover art are also a tip of the hat to a heralded album from one of the greatest bands of that era, The Smiths and their classic Hatful of Hollow.

Since returning from an eight year recording hiatus in 2011, Swingin’ Uttershave been downright prodigious, releasing three albums in four years. And with so many influences, and so many band members pitching songs into the mix, it won’t be long before there’s a whole new batch of songs for you to suckle from the sonic teat of the Utters. “If it was up to me, we would’ve had a record every year from the time we started,” exclaims Darius, “but we’re just glad to get back on the map again an go on a real tour and see what happens.”

Pick up Fistful of Hollow on November 11, and look for the band to swing through a town near you this winter supporting old pals Lagwagon before heading out on their own headliner in the spring.

+++ THE FLATLINERS +++
If you spent every minute, every penny of your adult life on the road, you might make a record like Dead Language.

There’s something that happens when four people have been playing music together, day in and day out, for ten years. In every basement, every colossal concert hall, every small European nation that would have them, the same four people playing the same four instruments. A full decade of plane tickets and van repairs and hangovers and fast food. At some point, the interaction between instruments, between members, transcends the brotherly love of most touring bands and enters the terrifying realm of twin telepathy. The Flatliners aren’t just four dudes banging out riffs five hundred miles from home every night. They’re four dudes banging out riffs in the hallways of the Overlook Hotel just like the unsettling twin girls in the The Shining. You see what I’m getting at yet?

It’s been three years since Cavalcade (2010), The Flatliners’ most successful album to date. A behemoth of a record, it brought famous friends like A Wilhelm Scream and Dillinger Four into the fold for huge songs like “Shithawks” and “Bleed.”

Which is why Dead Language is the perfect response – it’s the brutally crisp sound of four people in a room, the sonic payoff of a decade of learning how to play as one fierce unit. Its strength doesn’t come from racks of guitars or bass drops, but from its sparse precision. The band’s songwriting chops are as honed as their playing, allowing them the freedom to bang out their point quickly (“Young Professionals”) or take their time to make an impact (“Ashes Away”).

The Flatliners’ records have always been an accurate, honest portrait of where the band lived, from the youthful explosion of Destroy to Create (2005) to the nuance of blooming adulthood on The Great Awake (2007), Which is why Dead Language, the band’s most direct and vital record to date, is the monument to the honesty of ten years in the trenches that it has to be.

+++ TOYGUITAR +++
Winter weather got you down? Well, Fat Wreck Chords has good news for your seasonal blues: a sonic scrip called In This Mess from the California combotoyGuitar!

The band is built on the sunny vocals of Jack Dalrymple (whom you know and love from his long tenure in Swingin’ Utters), who dragged his Utters cohort Miles Peck into the mix. The two eventually recruited their sometime Re-Voltsbandmate Paul Oxborrow (“In the grand and time-honored tradition of band incest,” cracks Paul). To accompany the fuzzy vox, bouncy bass, and jangly guitars, the boys looked south from their Bay Area environs and pulled in the driving drum beats of Los Angeles sticks maven Rosie Gonce. Together, the foursome collaborated to churn out the most blissed out, full throttle album of beachy sounds you’ll hear ’til spring.

When asked whether a summery, surfy vibe was the end goal, Oxborrow says, “I don’t think there was anything intentional, but I will say that we recorded the album in the middle of July, on vintage-y Fender equipment, and heavily under the influence of fish tacos, so maybe some of that rubbed off.”

“Plus Miles’s approach to those ‘Mexi-solos’ and Rosie’s approach to drums,” adds Dalrymple. “It could also be my sea foam green guitar cuz that screams surf poseur too.”

Intentional or not, everything about this album—and this band—screams “fun,” right down to what Jack calls the “very not serious ring” to the band’s name, which he thinks he may have stolen from former fellow “swinger” Spike Slawson…or maybe from NOFX manager Kent Jamieson. “It was soooo long ago,” he says of his long-forgotten nominative theft.

Paul agrees that the name fits the band’s vibe to a tee, though. “When I went to see them at their first show—before I joined—it seemed like the name just fit perfectly,” he says. “Maybe because they were ripping so hard, so effortlessly, and having so much fun that they made their instruments look like toys? That sounds corny, I know, but it’s true. It’s never not fun playing with these ding dongs.”

Matching the carefree vibe of the music and the laid-back creative process the combo employ while writing together, the anonymous foot wheels on the cover of the album came to them serendipitously. “There’s this dude on Instagram I follow, Travis Jensen,” says Jack. “He takes these really great pics. I saw those skates and it just kinda clicked: subject matter, roller skate fun, and crack!”

So strap on your skates and turn up your speakers, because summer comes early this year.

+++ BAD COP / BAD COP +++
For Bad Cop/Bad Cop, the past three years have been full of momentum. The kind of reckless activity of driving for 20 hours straight to make a show, performing with whoever, whenever possible and jumping the pond without a proper full length just because they have moxie. However, the hustle began to take its toll as explained by vocalist and guitarist Stacey Dee, “We just finished recording our 7”, Boss Lady, but we didn’t know what we were going to do with it, I mean we had no resources.” In 2013, Bad Cop/Bad Cop performed at Lilith Bear and felt it would be a good idea to invite Fat Mike to see them play. After all, Stacey Dee and Fat Mike are friends and had been working on his concept album, Home Street Home, where Stacey sang the part of Sue, the main protagonist. Vocalist and guitarist Jennie Cotterill expounds, “We said, ‘At least try to get him to come to a show.’ Which is still a really hard sell. But Lilith Bear was an easy trap: He’s not gonna run into anybody he knows. Bears are cool so nobody would fan out on him. There were about 15 drag queens performing. And Muñecas were throwing the show and that’s a really fucking cool band. So he took the bait.” After their performance, Mike bought a round of shots and inquired if they had any material recorded, to which they happily replied that they had a finished 7″ and almost an entire album written. Within a week, Fat Mike signed Bad Cop/Bad Cop to Fat Wreck Chords and released Boss Lady in April of 2014. The EP drew national attention and garnered the band a spot on Alternative Press’ 100 bands you need to know about in 2015.

On June 16th, Fat will release Bad Cop/Bad Cop’s first full-length album, Not Sorry. All thirteen tracks showcase the band’s uncanny ability to blend aggressive instrumentation with polished vocals. Produced by Fat Mike and recorded by Davey Warsop at Hurley Studios in Costa Mesa, the album absolutely brings the rock. In their music, you might hear the influence of some of your favorite punk bands of the ‘90s like The Muffs, No Use for a Name, Dance Hall Crashers and Face to Face. But Bad Cop/Bad Cop has their own unmistakable sound. Tracks like “Old Dogs”, “Nightmare”, and “Support” display the band’s hard-playing style, catchy hooks, three-part harmonies, impossibly high energy and a message of positivity and inclusiveness. One listen to Not Sorry and you’ll know why Bad Cop/Bad Cop have generated so much buzz in such a short time. Cotterill adds, “We are grateful for the scene we came up in as well as for the opportunity to share our music with new audiences. We never thought we’d have the privilege to sign with Fat, but we’re sure gonna do our best now that we have.”

In 2015, you’ll have many chances to see Bad Cop/Bad Cop. Catch them on Fat Wreck Chords’ cross-country Fat Wrecked for 25 Years anniversary tour, out on their own, and culminating in their first appearance at the legendary Fest in Gainesville, Florida.