UNDERLINED PASSAGES @ ZEN WEST with James Bontempo & Truth Tables & more

UNDERLINED PASSAGES @ ZEN WEST with James Bontempo & Truth Tables & more

Get ready for a night of awesome music at Zen West! Join us for a live event featuring performances by UNDERLINED PASSAGES, James Bontempo Truth Tables,Radiation Puppy and The Clydes . So grab your friends and come on down to Zen West for a great time!

Doors @ 7pm / All Ages Show/ Kitchen opening untill 10pm

Adv tickets $12.00 / $15.00 dos

UNDERLINED PASSAGES :

https://www.facebook.com/underlinedpassages

Landfill Indie, Underlined Passages' fifth full-length, is a bit of a sleeper protest record. Reacting to the fickle dismissiveness of modern indie rock audiences and the relegation of contemporary alternative music to a million subcategories and enclaves, songwriter Michael Nestor offers eight songs in Landfill Indie that play like an eclectic late-90s mixtape.

This is on purpose, of course, to underscore the irony that the same audiences that are okay with the corporate fractionation of indie rock into a million clades are also currently basking in the glory of a late' 90s-early' aughts revival.

Teaming up again with longtime producer Frank Marchand (Bob Mould, War on Drugs, The Thermals) and mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Music (Sufjan Stevens, The Promise Ring, Dismemberment Plan) and Cefe Flynn (Chroma Mastering), Underlined Passages is releasing the record in three formats (cassette, vinyl, CD) with unique track listings and song sequences to underscore the boutique nature of physical media.

The record suggests that current audiences are opining for days of yore yet missing the fact that “days of yore” were not always better. Case in point: the record's namesake is a direct protest against the music snobbery displayed in the Vice article on the term “landfill indie.”

Topically, the record deals with middle-aged perspectives on maintaining purpose, questioning relationships, and reexamining oneself squarely in light of our culture's movement into a digitized, avatar-centric reality. Michael alluded to this in a recent Voyage Baltimore interview, where he said,

“We try to write indie rock music that concerns what is real to us now in middle age and does not cater to the tropes that resonate with the younger set nowadays. Although easily dismissed as a “get off my lawn” perspective, it is far from that. There is resonance and rhyme across the different phases of life, and we have weaved these metaphors through our music as we have drifted from our 30s into our 40s.”

Lyrics like these from the song “brythe:” “Here we are, come together/Your revolution/I did not notice. All this time/come between us/Some revolution/I did not notice” showcase Gen-Y/late Gen-X antipathy to the recent focus on keyboard culture. Michael will be the first to note that some of the lyrics to the record were created using AI Chat GPT, which is part of the irony he is trying to paint with this perspective.

However passive-aggressively protesting, the record is still predominantly hopeful, very much in line with previous Underlined Passages efforts.

There is a wistful nostalgia for meaningful relationships and substantial conversations with people who “get you.” Like in the lyric for “erydy:” “Nobody to work it out/everybody twist and shout/Crying on the kitchen floor/we don’t have that time no more.”

James Bontempo & Truth Tables:

https://www.facebook.com/truthtables

Radiation Puppy

https://www.facebook.com/radiationpuppy

The Clydes

https://www.facebook.com/theclydes