photo by Cameron Bruegger
reviews by Chance Solem-Pfeifer, Jacob Zlomke, Michael Todd and Sean Holohan | photos by Cameron Bruegger, Michael Todd and Rhett Muller
The people, the working class, the keepers of untold stories never to be written: This is the audience for Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers, Lincoln’s saviors of the soul. And on a work night, late at Duffy’s Tavern, the people of all stripes crammed into the corners, filled the brick ledge between the venue’s two rooms and moved along with Hoyer’s free hand — the other on his keyboard — as he gestured up and down, and they moved in kind like marionettes.
This sort of all-together-now community of musicians and fans formed for the second night of Lincoln Exposed, a festival that encourages rapt audiences, guest instrumentalists and about 300 percent the photographers of a normal Nebraska concert.
The Bourbon sat out the festival for a night, but only because it was hosting the Randy Rogers Band, so the crowd had only one route, between Duffy’s and The Zoo Bar, to discover new bands and enjoy favorites.
Read on for our reviews and photos of each Thursday concert, and stay tuned Monday for our final wrapup of Friday and Saturday nights. Further below, you’ll find the schedule for the second half of this ninth annual festival.
Pat Bradley
Emily Bass
Charlie Burton
Weldon Keys
Honeyboy Turner Band
The Wondermonds
Powerful Science
Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers
Powers
Pure Brown
Handsomer Jaws
Beaver Damage
Pat Bradley at The Zoo Bar
review and photos by Michael Todd
Imagine Pat Bradley on the waves, surfing. Then add snow, a bit of geographical replacement and turn that surfboard into a sled.
Now you have the instrumental guitar song dedicated to that time Bradley and a friend surfed upon the snowy waves by Holmes Lake, hit a jump and lost their sled to the icy waters. Bradley’s speedy trip up and down the fretboard employed just one guitar tone of many, buffeted by about a dozen guitar pedals and frequent small turns of knobs on his amp to perfect the sound. And although this mid-set surf-shop-burner didn’t feature the slight, Waits-ian gravel of Bradley’s strongest vocals, the early crowd at Zoo Bar was enraptured.
Bradley impressed as he switched gears seamlessly among blues, jazz, punk rock and what he called “something pretty,” a couple clean-guitar ballads. All in all, it was a colorful opening set, and testament to what Bradley called the first sober show he’d played in 20 years. It was a precisely picked and varied batch of songs, composed as if he were thumbing through his record collection, grabbed a few diverse albums without looking and built on the inspiration.
Emily Bass
review by Michael Todd | photos by Cameron Bruegger
Sometimes you have to chalk up a feat of musicality to the intangible. About midway through a five-minute, barely two-weeks-old gospel song penned by Emily Bass and her special ensemble of players, Bass belted out the chorus’s “amen.” She hit the note with ferocity, but like Michael Jordan switching from a dunk to a layup midair, Bass swooped down the staff with her voice and caught a thermal to the upper limits of the treble clef. Unbelievably good, and only one moment of hundreds that made this set my favorite so far of Lincoln Exposed.
As the confident and emotive leader of a five-piece that covered a bit of folk and a bit of blues, too, Bass’s voice was complemented by three harmony parts sung by Bass’s mother Jean DeGraff, sister Anna DeGraff (The Blues Messengers) and Emily Schiltz, a vocalist skilled beyond her years (as a graduate of the Academy of Rock, she was likely the only minor at Duffy’s on Thursday). Mark Wolberg lended Bass sturdy upright-bass grounding and a bit of acoustic guitar for the last two songs, and Jeramie Beahm blew the reeds out of his harmonica.
Here’s hoping Bass and company record a collection of songs, because this is Nebraska music that needs to be saved for future generations.
Charlie Burton
review and photos by Michael Todd
With more than a dozen albums to his name and a career stretching back to the ‘70s, Charlie Burton will still write a song about walking the dog.
“My Cocker Spaniel Heart” treated love with a pet-friendly metaphor, a chug-a-chug blues tune that unapologetically found the narrator peeing on the rug of the love given to him. The irreverence lived in tried-and-true structures of one, four and five chords, and it vocalized itself in Burton’s banter between songs, too. Before an economics-driven tune called “Trickle Down,” he discussed his pitching of the song to the Democratic and Republican parties and being turned down before Pope Francis would accept it as his theme song.
Guitarist Jared Alberico backed Burton and soloed his way through the first of three Lincoln Exposed sets. Tonight, he plays Parrish Studios with Dean the Bible’s “apocalyptic jug-folk” and Saturday, he sits in with Ron Wax at Duffy’s Tavern.
One of the best parts of Lincoln Exposed is hearing musicians like Alberico in the different settings of their two or three bands they serve in as official members or the ones they simply volunteered to join for a night. Within just a few days, instrumentalists can shapeshift from one end of the spectrum to the other, proving that yes, even from the short-sighted perspective of one person, Nebraska music is ever-encompassing.
Weldon Keys
review by Sean Holohan | photos by Cameron Bruegger
From the moment I found out about Lincoln’s Weldon Keys through an album review on Hear Nebraska, I knew I needed to see them live. I got the chance Thursday night at Duffy’s on the second day of Lincoln Exposed and they did not disappoint.
The country-rock band opened their set with "Sofia (Part Two)," a twangy song about heartbreak. “You look so pretty when you danced through my door, but I wasn’t quite ready to give you anymore,” singer J.D. Kuskie drawled.
“Sofia is centered around a woman who breaks the heart of the narrator, but the woman is purely fictional,” bassist David Merritt says.
The highlight of the set was lead guitarist Mark Bestul’s marathon of guitar riffs and solos throughout each song. He sprinted out of the gates in "Sofia (Part Two)" and didn’t let up until the last note of the set. Accompanying his complex riffs was an array of guitar effects such as chorus, delay and tremolo, which were littered throughout the set. Bestul passionately rocked out in his own corner of the stage while the other members stood stoically through the set and ended it fittingly by giving his fingers a break and leaning his guitar against his amp, creating feedback. He was done, the guitar could make its own noise now.
Honeyboy Turner Band
review by Sean Holohan | photos by Cameron Bruegger
As if The Zoo Bar didn’t look bluesy enough already with its black walls plastered with old, yellowing show posters and a viewing area dimly lit by little globe lights, Honeyboy Turner Band completed the look Thursday night.
With members clad in suits, sunglasses, fedoras and berets, Honeyboy Turner Band looks and sounds like the prototypical Chicago-style blues band.
Case in point: in their closing song “Honeyboy’s Your Man” singer John “Honeyboy” Turner proclaims great romantic heartbreak only to interrupt himself halfway through the song with a wailing two-minute harmonica solo.
“We wrote the song in a sleazy hotel room in Topeka and it is about thinking and knowing that you’re good enough for a woman,” Turner says.
The band reminded me that I was indeed in a blues bar. Turner is a charismatic frontman and has serious chops on harmonica. The other members in the band are equally as talented on their respective instruments. One song even featured three of the four members playing the kazoo over a drum beat. Honeyboy Turner Band can pretty much do it all, including dress themselves to the nines.
The Wondermonds
review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Cameron Bruegger
Collectively, the four members of The Wondermonds have more than 80 years of experience playing music in Lincoln. And so Tom Harvill, Benji Kushner, Mike Keeling and Ted Alesio know how to play their instruments. They probably know exactly what they’re capable of and what their limitations are.
And yet the joy of watching the instrumental funk/soul quartet is that they exuberantly hide that fact. They jump around and grin and mug like there’s some possibility they may mess up the song. So when they, of course, cover the strains of The Meters and Booker T. & the MGs to absolute dynamic perfection, it’s somehow surprising.
Every time an instrumental solo was tossed his way — as in covering The Meters’ “Sassy Lady" — Kushner bunny-hopped into the air, glanced down at his electric guitar and looked legitimately amazed by what he was about to do. Similarly, the keyboardist Harvill would remove his hands from his keys entirely (its base was tipped upward at about a 55-degree angle) only for them to snatch back on at the last moment, riffing with the right hand and just rhythmically brushing the bassnotes with his left, as though he were shooing away a fly in rhythm.
“Infectious” is a brutally overused word in writing about music, mostly because any publicist or reviewer can write it to mean “fun” or “upbeat” But what does an infection do? What’s the only thing an infection seeks to do? Spread. When Kushner pointed a finger at Harvill and grinned and then Harvill shimmied just a little while throwing a backward glance at the drummer Alesio who went from stone-faced to grinning, we saw the zest in the band is a kind of contagion. Fittingly, they ended with a Booker T. & the MGs song “Chicken Pox.”
One note: If you watch Dan Jenkins in Halfwit these days, you can see rejuvenation on his face, compared to the final year or so of Ideal Cleaners. In terms of musical stimulation, it appears that breaking up that veteran Lincoln hardcore trio was the best thing for him. Same goes for Keeling and Alesio in The Wondermonds. They smiled and posed and Keeling jigged like I hadn’t seen before.
Powerful Science
review by Sean Holohan | photos by Cameron Bruegger
Having watched a blues band right before seeing Lincoln’s Powerful Science at The Zoo Bar, I was not prepared for the music that was soon to come my way. As soon as the band started, I was instantly hooked.
The experimental, ambient rock ‘n’ roll band opened their set with the song “Tear Out My Eyes” — a song featuring a snare roll throughout sounding very much like a marching band and prominent, funky bass lines. Singer and keyboardist Josh Miller matter-of-factly explains that it is about revenge.
“The song is not about revenge towards anyone in particular, it’s just about good old revenge,” he says.
From there on out, every song was a treat in its own way. Miller’s keys were usually the focal point of each song. In one, Miller sung about getting a haircut over ambient and swooping pitches he produced from his keyboard. In another, drummer Peter Kapinos played drums and rapped, sounding very reminiscent of a Beastie Boys song. With the set also sprinkled with three-part vocal harmonies and dueling keyboards, Powerful Science pretty much covered the gamut of sounds. They were entertaining and definitely brought a fresh, surprising set of songs to my second night of Lincoln Exposed.
Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers
review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Rhett Muller
As a music journalist, there's a part of you that hopes musicians will self-develop new storylines around their work — that they’re thinking about and unpacking their art in the same ways a critic might.
In the inverse, there was a real simplicity to the way Josh Hoyer explained his brand new album Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers when it dropped last month. From interview to interview, the story didn’t change — that Hoyer set out to make music by the people and for the people, to help them beat (or at least hold off) their daily battles. As I watched Hoyer and the Shadowboxers Thursday night at Duffy's Tavern, though, my misplaced critical hopes went out the window.
Hoyer is strapping on these songs. He sits behind his piano and preaches the communal opiate of the common people: He essentially says that their lot in life is to work too hard, care too much and The Man will give you nothing for it. In the process, he looks half like a maestro and half like Chuck D gesturing the bounce of the crowd into action.
There’s no pondering the song “Illusion,” no need for a new take on it. Because its message is too simple, too intrinsic for the 99 percent to have to let go of. On the government and on our institutions, the song offers: “What it is, what you see, it’s not the same thing.”
“Illusion” is not a manifesto, it’s a chant. It’s affirmation by way of a soul music 9-piece that the biggest crowd of Lincoln Exposed thus far — comprising metal heads, hippies, dads wearing workout clothes from Scheels and college students — were all right to come there.
Powers
review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Rhett Muller
When you turn music into structurally geography ("this part comes up from the song" or "that part exists on the outer edges”), Powers presents a fascinating problem.
If there’s a top sheet to a Powers song by way of one of the lead guitars of Kelly Houchen or Dave Arredondo, the other and bassist Jason Morris are rumbling underneath. But that’s only measuring by pitch. It’s not apparent in the slightest which layer of the song comes first or which is more important or that they could ever exist without the other.
Take the song “Future Tiger,” which holds a similar conundrum for the vocal rhythms of Arredondo and Houchen. The former are long and sustained, while Houchen’s are more a piece of spitball percussion.
Thursday at The Zoo Bar, Powers demonstrated again that in their avant-punk genre they understand its complexities better than probably any such band in Lincoln. One important wrinkle that appeared in “Future Tiger” and throughout the set was that when Jordan Elfers' drums, the bass and the two guitars would clump together for big hits, one guitar would also continue soloing through the break. Just enough confusion to spice up the patterns, just enough order to make heads bang.
Through their debut EP and nearly enough new material for an LP (which is all the more complex and almost tribal-sounding than the EP), Powers strikes me still as a band somehow in its creative infancy, that if you checked in with them in two years, save for sheer love of volume, they might be excitingly unrecognizable.
Pure Brown
review by Jacob Zlomke | photos by Michael Todd
By the end of Pure Brown’s set at Duffy’s on Lincoln Exposed’s second night, a respectable number of attendees are tracing moving footprints in the brown, melted snow and slush on the the bar’s white tile floor. It’s something like dancing, but we’re near the end of a long night of shows, so “something like” is the closest we’ll get.
It wasn’t always this way.
The trio, consisting of Tom Adelman on guitar, Jay Weinand on bass, and Hunter Carter on drums, followed Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers. Last time Hoyer and crew played Lincoln, they sold out the Bourbon to more than 700 people. Duffy’s was packed in a similar spirit for their fiery set last night.
Then enter three dudes in a band virtually unknown compared to the Shadowboxers, each dressed in nondescript earthtones. Frontman Adelman takes to the microphone: “I know you want to hear some music,” he begins, before telling a story about why the band is going by Two-Sided Colon tonight. He also referred to the group as a Tom Waits cover band (“Just like Tom Waits, we don’t know any Tom Waits songs”), Uncle Milkman, and also just, “a band.”
Really, though, they appear to love their instruments and draw as much as they can from them. The set opens with theme to Tetris, and while they played some originals, at least half their songs were throwbacks to old Nintendo games. The result is a technically proficient, melodic prog-rock trio the likes of which Lincoln has perhaps not seen since Machete Archive disbanded.
Maybe Adelman doesn’t want to be a frontman. It sure seems like that, with his chiding sarcasm between songs. Because he nevre mentioned his band’s name, it would definitely seem he’s got no high aspirations for Pure Brown. But nonetheless, he’s genuinely funny on stage, charismatic, and, along with Weinand and Carter, someone who clearly loves to play his instrument, and is damn good at it.
Whether he’d admit it or not, that makes him a decent frontman to a very good band. And by the end of the set, the crowd at Duffy’s agrees.
Handsomer Jaws
review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Michael Todd
A hair more surfy, but in the same alt-rock arena, Handsomer Jaws immediately followed Powers at The Zoo Bar on Thursday night.
The trio of Andrew Nelson (formerly of Fraternal Durango), Josh Kornbluh (Root Marm Chicken Farm Jug Band and The Crayons) and bassist Sam Eschliman aren’t yet a year old as a band, but concocted a few interesting experiments in three-man simplicity.
The song “I Walked Into the Front of Your House Just To See You” began precisely with those words twice in a row before it gave over to Nelson’s anguished yells while Eschliman cooed in a falsetto. Then the chaos broke for a second for the small edit of “I walked into the back of the store just to see you…” before the guitar overtones completely clouded the song again.
In this way, there’s something intuitive about this very early writing from the trio. No blatant or pre-planned exhibitions of skill, but songs something like a more roguish, less sensible “Snake Stand” that hinge on an emotion so grave that we only need the one mysterious lyrical line before the whole thing cracks open.
After the song Nelson offered simply that the tune was “deep and dark and dirty” and that the audience could ask him about its real meanings after the set. No need, really. You said it all.
Beaver Damage
review by Jacob Zlomke | photos by Michael Todd
Before Beaver Damage begin their first track, “Be Real,” as the final act at Duffy’s on Lincoln Exposed’s second night, anyone with the least passing cognizance of metal music could have anticipated what was about to happen.
The long hair, the black T-shirts, the huge Marshall amps, the guitar with sharp angles, the frontman who could definitely crush a skinny music journalist with his bare hands but also definitely wouldn’t because that would be anti-Beaver Damage. “We’re about having a good time,” BJ Nigh tells the audience. Make no mistake, this is a metal band.
With carefully staggered set times, every Lincoln Exposed set begins with a smaller crowd than it ends. Beaver Damage is no exception, but where crowd size could be a hindrance to a band’s live energy, it has little bearing on Nigh and company’s intense performance. Right away, Nigh’s reaching out over the audience with clenched fists and pointing fingers.
Eventually, the audience thickens, and Beaver Damage continues to lay down intense guitar work, heavy drumming, and screaming vocals like sheets of torrential autumn rain. A fight briefly breaks out and is quickly quelled. Otherwise peaceful, the late-coming metalheads are into what Beaver Damage has to offer. Late into a cold and snowy deep winter night, their set is a way to warm up , move around, and shake off the frustration of the long winter.
Schedule
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska's managing editor, Chance Solem-Pfeifer is HN's staff writer, Cameron Bruegger is an HN multimedia intern, and Sean Holohan is HN's editorial intern. Reach them all through Michael at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.