The Taxpayers are a long-running experimental, genre-bending DIY punk band that started in Portland, Oregon in 2007. Their critically acclaimed 2012 concept album God, Forgive These Bastards is about the rise and fall of a fictional baseball player, featuring the hit song, “I Love You Like an Alcoholic”. It was released alongside a book of the same name written by Rob Taxpayer. The story was turned into a musical stage production by the Hum’n’bards Theater Troupe in 2018.
After a several year hiatus, The Taxpayers have been selling out shows across the United States, headlining festivals in Australia, and have just released their first full-length album in 8 years, titled “Circle Breaker”, in conjunction with the boundary-defying Ernest Jenning Record Company.
The Taxpayers have announced a series of shows in support of “Circle Breaker”. Details for the shows can be found at www.thetaxpayersband.com
Crazy Arms is the 4th LP by Olympia, WA country/punk maximalists Pigeon Pit, and their first since becoming a nationally touring 6-piece band. It’s a is a melodic call to action for folks who listen to both The Weakerthans and CRASS. A night at the Ryman on slow-burn psychedelics and the dreams you choose to think out loud at sunrise. Crazy Arms is the sound of a band hitting their stride, comfortable in the chaos, letting you know you aren’t alone.
“The terror breathes beside me: another little act of sabotage” – “Run Your Pockets”
As front-woman Lomes Oleander tells it: “It’s last call for nuance before we all get put against the wall so I’ll just cheers to the human spirit: we’re all fucked up and crazy people. let’s get wild with it and love our humanity while we can, all our contradictions and flaws that make us real. this is a bunch of love songs for how fucked up we are, and how beautiful it is how we try anyway. how we struggle every day to change our shared reality, to produce a world around us that makes sense to us. when you see a genocide unfolding on your phone, see fascism and AI swallowing up reality, and you force yourself to push it down and not respond to your humanity inside you that calls you to intervene, when it feels like there’s nothing you can do, that’s what kills the human spirit. because that force of love and cooperation is humanity, that’s what makes sense inside of us. giving a shit is the unpopular opinion. i’m just writing about what it feels like for me to try to hang on in a world that’s trying to kill the human spirit.”
“Dilapidation’s on the inside, a city choking out the night sky. It’s gonna be another late night: whatever makes you feel alive.” – “Keys to The City”
“We’ve been busy as hell the last couple years. we did a lot of touring, and it was really our first-time touring or playing shows as a full band. our full lineup had been practicing 3 weeks or so when we recorded Feather River Canyon Blues (2022). We never played a show together until after that. and we’ve played a lot now, we got to play tiny desk, toured Australia and New Zealand, and got to tour with Laura Jane Grace. and all the while I’m kind of stumbling around the country getting devastated by the immensity of love and humanity as it all falls apart and writing all this new stuff.”
“Every moment, like broken glass, a holding cell, a furtive glance, falls in squares of light across an empty bedroom floor” – “Bronco”
“We recorded crazy arms in my friend Vivienne’s basement, all analog onto a 1/2” tape through a 4-track, so it’s mostly live tracks, which is really fun. you can’t dub over a bunch of instruments or redo individual parts when you mess up. we dragged this piano across town in a van and squeezed it into her basement. it wouldn’t fit into the studio so i ended up playing the piano from the basement with all the mics and wires running out of the studio space. working with all these insane restrictions forces you to get creative and gives the thing you’re working on a sort of living character. it gets fucked up through the process, like a kid becoming a person. it’s more country than the last one, it’s more pop punk, it’s more experimental, it’s more of everything. i’m just having fun with my friends. i couldn’t have any favorite songs, but there’s a song that Maddy (banjo, vocals) wrote on it, which is just so special to me and her voice is so unique and devastating.”
Paper Bee is a Philly based rock band with choral elements and deep basement roots. Soon after originally forming in New England in 2015, Paper Beerecorded the split recordNow I Know You And See How Wide You Are To The World with Loone. After a few years of small tours and local shows, the band took a several year hiatus when songwriter Nick Berger moved to Philadelphia.A new iteration of the band came together during early pandemic times in 2020 to record their first full length album,Thaw, Freeze, Thaw.
Nick’s songwriting explores the soft centers and the sharp edges of loving relationships and overlapping traumas, as well as questioning the nature of belonging, both in space and within queer bodies. Difficult to pin to one genre, the songs onThaw, Freeze, Thaw incorporate a range of sounds from gentle bedroomy synth to harsh sludgy distortion, introspective finger-picking to cacophonous, crescendoing loops, blast beats, off-kilter time signatures, and many places in between. Threads of repeating chord progressions, rhythms, riffs, and lyrics run throughout the album, tying it all together in a circular arc that leads the listener through a story about where home exists, internally and externally.
While living together during quarantine, bassist Sam Cook-Parrott, drummer Anthony Richards, and Nick on guitar and vocals, dove into sculpting and reworking the album as a much needed creative outlet during the chaos of that time. The dynamic instrumentation reflects the camaraderie and joy of the experience, learning to read one another to seamlessly flow through the songs. Sam’s understated and emotive bass lines, Tony’s driving yetrestrained drumming, as well as vast and intricate vocal harmonies from Cherise Nystrom, Maryn Jones, and Sam create a rich, well rounded, and densely woven soundscape.
Throughout 2021 and 2022 Paper Bee has grown into an engaging and reliable local band in Philly. Without any releases showcasing the current line-up, they’ve managed to perform regularly, building momentum for a much anticipated album. 2023 will see the release of their full-lengthThaw, Freeze, Thawas well as touring and more shows at home.
