Thomas Dean takes unusual pleasure in digging through crates of junky records. It’s partly the aroma of acidic paper inserts mingling with that of musty cardboard sleeves. It’s partly weirdo cover art, bonkers band names, and eyebrow-raising (or head-shaking) album titles. But mostly, it’s the music. Dean loves the thrill of sliding a random slab […]
Sally Rose leads her trio Shagwüf in Sweet Freakshow, an anniversary performance to celebrate five years of stirring up crowds with the group’s psychedelic, retro swagger. “The most punk thing you can do in divisive times is to write music and try and bring bodies together, to sweat and celebrate being alive and compassionate,” says […]
By Sean McGoey arts@c-ville.com Star Wars enthusiasts have a lot to be thrilled about this year: The first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dropped in April, setting the table for the conclusion of the latest trilogy and sparking speculation over the inclusion of Emperor Palpatine’s sinister laugh at the end of the […]
Around 11 last Monday night, Holly Renee Allen could hear her son playing guitar in his room, picking out the notes to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Dueling Banjos.” As she listened to her 14-year-old work through the classic songs, she thought about the callouses on her own fingertips, the [...]
It’s hard to decide what deserves your attention at a Falsies concert. Is it the music? The musicians themselves, constantly swapping guitars for saxophones, for drums, for keyboards? Or is it band founder Lance Brenner in his yellow chicken suit, gesticulating wildly while shoving a microphone [...]
Paul Curreri remembers getting rid of his CD collection. He and his wife, Devon Sproule, both musicians, were packing up their Austin, Texas, home to move back to Charlottesville in 2015, when Curreri realized he hadn’t added to his CD collection in a while. “There wasn’t a bad one in the [...]
Girl Choir is distortion driven. The Chuggernauts opt for a punk-rock pirate vibe. And while The Unholy Four strives for old-school hard rock, Wild Rose keeps it modern as a quartet. Expect a blend of grit and tenderness when punk rock meets punk ‘n’ roll during an evening with these four local [...]
It’s time for us to take up the sticks and beat this drum again. Here’s our never-complete (but still pretty comprehensive) look at what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. We’ve focused mainly on albums and EPs, but there are dozens of other bands and artists releasing [...]
Nick Evans sometimes wakes at “god-awful hours of the night” to find his brother, Will, in the living room, sitting quietly amid microphones, coiled cables, amps, guitars, and drums, his shoulders hunched toward his computer, the blue-white glow of the screen illuminating his face, [...]
As Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture. When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began transforming the sounds we were used to hearing, 250 years ago, people said it was the death of classical [...]
It’s a rainy Friday in late October, the first cold night of fall, and the people who’ve dared to venture outside tiptoe quickly around autumn leaves sticking slick on the Downtown Mall bricks. A few stories above, it’s warm and cozy inside the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, where a small crowd has [...]
Nathaniel Star gets most of his ideas in the shower. It’s where he ruminates on a beat, hums melodies, and devises lyrics. When he knows he has something good, he’ll hop out of the shower, wrap himself in a towel and dash, water dripping all over the floor, into his studio to record it. “I’ll [...]
In the yard of Brennan Gilmore’s farmhouse outside of town, a jagged line of trees lie on their sides, torn from the ground by a recent tornado, chunks of red dirt still clinging to the roots. In the distance, mist settles in over the mountains, and the whole scene feels quintessentially [...]
Between sips of seltzer and small handfuls of Chex Mix, Juliana Daugherty lovingly runs her hand along her cat Monday’s back. “I’m still kind of shocked that I managed to get it out in the world,” she says, eyeing a thick cardboard box at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s full of vinyl copies of [...]
When a band’s music is described as genre-defying, it often means its musicians are struggling to find a successful sound. In the case of Adar, the local singer-songwriter does transcend genres and her songs successfully incorporate several types of music—funk, rock, and jazz—to create a [...]
Many associate Will Marsh’s band Gold Connections with Car Seat Headrest thanks to several collaborations, but Marsh’s group stands solidly on its own. After a label switch, the long-awaited release of Popular Fiction arrived in 2018, marking an impressive step forward. The album shows off the [...]
When you’re an independent musician in a competitive town like Charlottesville, it’s never too soon to get started. Jacob Lourie’s musical career began during his senior year at St. Anne’s-Belfield School. This month heralds his first full-length release, Sad Boi Bops Vol. 1, and it promises to [...]
Two of UVA’s favorite crooners join forces for a rare, one-night-only show. Nathan Colberg graduated back in 2017, and his music career has quickly gained traction with beautiful, keyboard-driven tracks like “Charlottesville” (understandably, a local favorite), and his first full-length, Silo. [...]
Overcoming injuries, battling “drinking issues” and months at a time on the road would change, possibly derail, most bands. But Sons of Bill put its collective heart on its sleeve and used these challenges to craft its newest album, Oh God Ma’am. Released in June, the record shows an increased [...]
Rob Cheatham is an ideal modern country artist—his twang echoes the sounds that currently dominate the genre, while his lyrics harken to the storytelling abilities of forebears like Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard and cover topics such as love, be it unrequited or shared, and hard drinking as a [...]
Though Will Thomas Reed is currently based in Nashville, where he’s paying his dues in the country music scene, his heart is here in his hometown of Charlottesville. For the release of his latest EP, To Whom It May Concern, Reed returns to celebrate with a release party and will surely bust out [...]
Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of [...]
Unranked and surely incomplete, here’s an alphabetical list of what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. It’s longer than last year’s, and based on interviews and conversations with many of these artists, I suspect it’s because the past year hangs heavy in our hearts. And so, we [...]