It’s been a quiet last few weeks in terms of college/indie music and now this weekend we’re confronted with a “midwest dilemma” in the form of multiple shows happening at the same time. Ah, decisions, decisions…
The primary log-jam is tonight. Over at the Benson Theater it’s the return of Midwest Dilemma, which is celebrating the release of a new album 13 years in the making, titled Searching for the Cure for Loneliness, which I previewed here. Expect an army of musicians on stage with frontman Justin Lamoureux – he said he hopes to have more than 12 musicians playing with him for this show. It’ll be like a full-on Benson folk reunion, as post-Omaha singer/songwriters Kyle Harvey and Brad Hoshaw will open the show, which starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $18 via the Benson Theater website.
Meanwhile, downtown at The Slowdown, Omaha indie legends Neva Dinova celebrates the release of their new album, Canary, which actually doesn’t come out until Sept. 27 on Saddle Creek Records. No matter, as the band likely will be playing it in its totality. I’ve heard an advance of this record and it already owns a place on my best of 2024 list. Opening for Neva are Omaha acts Size Queen and Mike Saklar’s The Sun-Less Trio. $25, 8 p.m.
Choose wisely…
But that’s not the end of your choices this weekend. Saturday is pretty packed as well.
Indie folk royalty Gillian Welch & David Rawlings are headlining at The Astro in La Vista Saturday night. Their latest, Woodland (2024, Acony Records) scored a massive 8.0 from Pitchfork, and yeah, it’s a beaut. Tickets are $55-$102. Starts at 8 p.m. with no listed openers.
Meanwhile, two festivals are happening Saturday.
Tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 5 p.m. the Little Bohemia District is hosting its annual Little Bo Backyard Bash. The event is located at 1408 S. 13th Street, and is one of the most chill neighborhood events I’ve attended. This year, the music line-up is first-rate with Saving Fiona, McCarthy Trenching, Head of Femur and Left Handed Country. Food trucks, beer trucks and other stuff. No cost listed, which tells me it’s free (it was last year). More info here.
Then tomorrow night at The Waiting Room its Fletchival: A Benefit for Vic Fletcher. Vic has been a beloved fixture of the Omaha music scene for decades, and this benefit concert will help raise money as she battles ongoing health challenges. Performing at Fletchival: Bryan Poole, The Mercurys, The Album Party, Bad Bad Men, Filter Kings, Damones, and Midwest Dead Coalition. $20, starts at 5 p.m.
And that’s all I got. If I missed your show, put it in the comments section. Have a great weekend!
Although born in Duluth and having lived in South Carolina and the Midwest most of his life, singer/songwriter David Dondero is something of a legend among those who grew up during Omaha’s Golden Age of indie music, circa the early 1990s.
Dondero’s first band, Sunbrain, released albums on Grass Records, a label that also put out albums by Omaha bands Mousetrap, Cactus Nerve Thang and Commander Venus, the emo act where Conor Oberst got his start.
In fact, many an astute music critic had cited Dondero’s quivering vocal style as having influenced Oberst’s famous shakey bray heard on those Commander Venus albums as well as early Bright Eyes records (Oberst also has cited Sunbrain as an influence).
Dondero’s own quivering vocal style had somewhat mellowed by the time I first saw him perform at the short-lived downtown bar/ music venue The Junction in 2002, where he played songs off his seminal solo album, The Transient (Future Farmer Recordings).
“Everything I’ve heard about him was true — he’s pretty amazing,” I wrote in a review of that Junction show. “His set, while subdued and withdrawn, was riveting. Dondero is a throw-back to classic American folk singers, taking a distinctively traditional style and placing it squarely in our time with lyrics that are introspective and rooted in the everyday. The comparisons to Simon Joyner and Conor Oberst are justified (or for that matter, their comparisons to him).”
Over the years, Dondero played at a number of Omaha venues including The Cog Factory, O’Leaver’s, and 2010’s memorable Concert for Equality held in downtown Benson, which included performances by Cursive, David Rawlings & Gillian Welch and Bright Eyes.
Dondero returns to Benson next Wednesday, Sept. 18, at Ming Toy art gallery for a performance and reading from his new book, Chaos the Cat. I caught up with Dondero last week while he was driving a lonely Louisiana highway headed to a gig in New Orleans in his Toyota Camry, which in addition to being his tour wagon is his Door Dash and Lyft driving wagon.
On the road with Chaos the Cat
For this tour, Dondero said he’s playing mainly for small crowds of 15 to 20 people in houses, coffee shops, bookstores and gallery spaces like Ming Toy for a program that consists of song performances, readings from his book and Q&A.
“I’ve also been asking for volunteers who are willing to read certain parts of the book with me,” he said. “So it becomes kind of a dialogue, both from the book and then through Q&A.” The performance concludes with more songs.
He said the tour is more conducive in these alternative spaces rather than bars. “I used to be a hardcore drinker,” he said. “I’m a sober person now for nine years. So I prefer not playing bars, but still do. I don’t want the shows to be alcohol-centric; I’d rather it be about the songs and the writing.”
According to its description by publisher, San Francisco’s Unrequited Records, Chaos the Cat takes readers on a journey into the heart of California’s cannabis legalization era, where a secluded pot farm becomes the backdrop for a clash between preservation and exploitation. Amidst this backdrop, a diverse group of characters converges, each seeking their own form of self-improvement. At the center of the conflict is a trio of antagonists whose schemes threaten the harmony of the farm, pitting greed against enlightenment. The tale is narrated by Chaos, the cat, the reincarnation of an artist deeply connected to the farm.
Dondero said the book was inspired by his time working as a carpenter on a pot farm in Mendicino County, California. “The message of the book is about people who have tried to reset their lives by getting out of their patterns that they had been in in the city,” he said. “There’s some conflict in the story ideologies, and there’s a lot going on with different people in it.”
The book already has sold out its original limited-edition casebound pressing, with the second edition now available via IngramSpark and Amazon. For the Sept. 18 Ming Toy show, entrance requires a $15 donation, but for $25, patrons also will receive a copy of the book.
Music is the Main Thing
Dondero said while he enjoys writing, he doesn’t think it’ll ever be his “main thing.”
“Music is always going to be one of my main things, but (writing) is definitely becoming one of my main things,” he said. “I’m really engaged in trying to write a short story a week and then record a sound backdrop. It’s a writer challenge for me, to keep moving with it and become a better writer.”
His last album, Immersion Therapy, reflects the loneliness and anxiety of life during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was written. Oregon label Fluff and Gravy Records, who released the album, were “like my family,” Dondero said. “We lived together and I played their house through the years, and we’d become friends, and then I ended up living in their garage studio through the pandemic.”
These days Dondero lives in Pensacola with his his girlfriend, Natalie. How has he managed to make a living playing music since the early ‘90s? “I wouldn’t call it a living,” he said. “I’ve pieced together a life of borderline poverty for my whole time, working odd jobs and playing music in between. It’s a juggle; it’s not like it’s provided a living by a stretch.”
Dondero said he set up a Patreon website in 2017 whose subscribers receive exclusive music, writings, videos and more. “It’s been a lifesaver,” he said. “It’s the only guaranteed, stable income where I know how much I’ll be making a month.”
Touring remains an important income source, and Dondero said it’s become easier over the years. “When I first started booking tours, you had to send cassettes in the mail and you’d ring up a huge debt in long-distance phone charges,” he said. “You’d be in the hole several hundred bucks before leaving for the tour. Now you can book a tour on your cell phone and that’s much easier. And you can promote much easier.”
But Dondero said the music itself has become worthless from an income point of view. “It’s like, once it’s out there, it’s out there,” he said. “It’s not really worth anything unless people choose to give you money for a record at a show or something or to subscribe. The two-year break from my habit of playing music kind of got me out of a never-ending cycle of credit card debt. I was able to pay off all my stuff during the pandemic. Now I’m back to square one.
“My goals are just to put out good work and hone my skills as a guitar player and learn how to be a better writer,” he said. “It’s kind of like the life source for me — the process of working on projects and having something to complete is what keeps me rolling, while just getting used to the idea of failure — which is 99% of the time. So when those little wins come every now and again, you can really savor them.”
David Dondero plays music and reads from his new book, Chaos the Cat, Wednesday, Sept. 18 at Ming Toy Gallery, 6066 Maple St. Capacity is limited to 40 patrons. Entrance is a suggested $15 donation at the door (There are no pre-show ticket sales) or $25 gets you in and a copy of Chaos the Cat. 7 p.m. start time. No seating provided, so bring a lawn chair or a cushion.
I began to lose touch with Tim Kasher and Cursive sometime after I Am Gemini came out in 2012 – a record I own on vinyl and have listened to only a few times and almost never all the way through – just a very difficult listen. Then came Vitriola in 2018 that included maybe my favorite Kasher-penned song of the past decade or so — the wholly ignored “Remorse,” that was never released as a single despite its jaw-dropping beauty. Then came Get Fixed in 2019, which I can’t remember having listened to (though I know I did).
Within that same timeframe, The Good Life (another Kasher-penned project) released Everybody’s Coming Down (in 2015) and Kasher released three solo outings – Adult Film (2013) (with the infectious single “A Raincloud is a Raincloud”; No Resolution (2017), and most recently, Middling Age (2022), with the delectable “I Don’t Think About You.”
Kasher also created a Patreon website, which I don’t subscribe to. He’s prolific, to say the least. But despite this, I’m not aware of any song from any of the above albums receiving airplay on Sirius XMU or any other national channel. Kasher has reached a point in his career where he can keep releasing albums year after year and his core fans will continue to buy them (or stream them) and show up when he rolls through town.
Conversely – or whatever – Conor Oberst and Bright Eyes, who shared the national limelight with Kasher/Cursive and The Faint in the 2000s, continues to be heard on Sirius XMU with or without Phoebe Bridgers singing on the track. Is it a matter of fame or quality that drives XMU programmers to choose one over the other? I cannot say.
So, to those Sirius XMU programmers – or maybe just Jenny Eliscu: Give Cursive’s latest album, Devourer, a chance, if only for the obvious pop songs, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Devourer, which comes out Sept. 13 on the band’s new label, Run for Cover Records, is a throwback of sorts to the kind of records the band made 20 or so years ago, circa Happy Hollow, The Ugly Organ and, yes, Domestica. The band, which has now ballooned to seven members, while every bit as pounding and “angular” as you remember, has never sounded more properly structured, which is a stupid way of saying the songs are more focused, more compact, more self-contained vs. the too-often meandering complications of the past couple decades.
That said, Devourer isn’t a “pop” album by any means. Cursive/Kasher albums are typically concept in nature, and this one is no exception. The core idea: Accept living with bitterness, dissolution and regret as you wallow in middle age, angry that all those wrong decisions you made along the way will now doom you to disappointment as your remaining years slip away.
Kasher is the king of self-revelatory navel-gazing, and whether he denies it or not, you have to believe the bitterness in these songs were born of personal experience. That, or he’s the king of make believe.
The album jumps out of the gate with a trio of hard-rocking bummers. “Botch Job” and “Up and Away” underscore a life wasted, whereas “The Avalanche of Our Demise” bemoans mankind’s perceived apathy toward impending catastrophe – whether from climate change or (from Kasher’s West Coast vantage point) an inevitable earthquake that drops California into the sea. “At the beginning of the end / Will you run and hide / Or sleep in?” It’s a message that may resonate more clearly with a Z Generation stuck with the task of fixing the rest of the alphabet’s mistakes… or suffering for them.
The follow-up track, “Imposturing,” acknowledges that Kasher (and you) might be getting tired of the complaints, but hey, it’s a living: “No one wants to listen to sins / Regurgitated on colored wax again / You played your best cards / When you were young and insolent.” I’m not so sure.
Sonically, those four are the hardest rocking of the batch thanks to Matt Maginn’s bass work, which drives this record. Kasher and Ted Stevens’ guitars are gritty and angular as you’ve come to expect, but for my money, it’s Patrick Newbery’s synths and Megan Siebe’s cello that put this album in Ugly Organ territory, adding sharp shards of color to Cursive’s dark-toned doom-swing.
Which brings us to those pop numbers I mentioned earlier.
“Dead End Days” is a hand-clapper, with Ted sharing vocals with Tim and Newbery providing a soaring synth glide-path. “Dark Star” swings with a funky synth line, a Clint Schnase-powered dance beat and Siebe’s sinewy cello, while Kasher imagines he’s the snake in the garden. That cello surprises throughout the album’s second half. On “What Do We Do Now” Newbery’s synth line combines with cello and his own trumpet to allow you to imagine Jon Brion playing within Cursive’s usual thunderous syncopation.
The only downside is Kasher’s dark-cloud downer message, which can get overwhelming especially when matched with an overdose of angst and frustration that bleeds into overkill on tracks like “What the Fuck” and “The Age of Impotence.” OK, you’re disappointed, we get it. Even when he’s trying to resolve it, like on album closer “The Loss,” he overshadows a line like “The nightmare is over” with the ender “Death is all it costs / What a brutal, devastating price.” Spoken like a fellow born-again atheist.
See the album performed live when Cursive plays at The Waiting Room Oct. 18 and 19.
Okay, two shows worth mentioning this weekend, both happening tonight.
Down at Slowdown’s frontroom, Psymon Spine headlines. I never heard of this New York band prior to bumping into the listing this morning while perusing the Slowdown website. The core members — Noah Prebish, Peter Spears and Brother Michael — have collaborated with the likes of Joe Goddard of Hot Chip and Nick Millhiser of LCD Soundsystem and Holy Ghost. Their dance-punk sound reminds me of DFA acts like The Rapture, and their latest, Head Body Connector, released by Northern Spy Records in February, carries on that tradition. Opening act Wedding is Anna Schulte, who was backed by Nate Van Fleet, Michael Frederickson, Ben Brodin and Nick Costa on her 2023 recordings. Sgt. Leisure also is on the bill. Just $15. Bring your dancing shoes.
Meanwhile, at The Astro Amphitheater in La Vista, Aussie experimental psych-proggers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard headlines. Very Lips-ian. You might remember the show’s opener, NYC’s Geese, who played a drummer-less set at the 2022 Maha Music Festival. $50-$99, 7 p.m.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot – It’s Benson First Friday! If you’re in the Benson area tonight, drop by Ming Toy Gallery (6066 Maple) where we’re hosting Vox Humana, a special art show curated by Mari Dailey that features art from 14 local artists including Jamie Burmeister, Anna Stoysich, Mike Eggert and Eduardo Gardea. The opening runs from 6 to 9 p.m.
And that’s all I got. If I missed your show, put it in the comments section. Have a great weekend!
I haven’t been to a rock show since mid-August. — since Petfest, to be exact. It’s one of the longest lulls between rock shows for me in recent memory, but late August was a slow time for indie/college music in Omaha.
One of the esteemed gentlemen who runs One Percent Productions – Marc Leibowitz – once told me that without him and the indie rock shows he books I’d have nothing to write about. He may have been right, but despite what Leibs said, there’s always things to write about, and moving forward to fill these lulls in touring indie shows, I’ll return to writing album reviews on a more frequent basis.
Album reviews easily are the toughest thing for me to write, and while I question their value in this age when music is (practically) free, I still get a ton of label requests to write about releases (Ah, but not like the old days, when the labels sent CDs! I loved to come home to a mailbox overflowing with manila envelopes…). We also used to have a lot more local indie bands recording and releasing albums, which simply ain’t the case no more…
Anyway, the balance of the month is looking busy as does October. Check out the updated “Up-and-Coming’ calendar below. On top of the list is tonight’s show at Reverb Lounge.
Austin’s A Giant Dog have come through town a few times over the years, including shows at Milk Run back in 2016 and on the River City Star in 2017 (Shipwrecked! Fest). They describe their sound as “… raucous ear candy culled from the hook-driven melodies of Slade, the glammy swagger of Marc Bolan, the morbid fantasy of Killer-era Alice Cooper, and the unpredictable wit of Sparks.” That’s quite a spate of comparisons.
That said, the five-piece, fronted by vocalist Sabrina Ellis, does have a throwback sound that recalls over-the-top FM radio rock, especially on their latest EP, Raw (2024, Merge Records). Expect onstage theatrics? Opening tonight at 8 p.m. is local indie rockers Bad Actors. $20!
And here’s the rest of the up-and-coming touring indie/college music calendar for the balance of September into October. Let me know if I’m missing anything.
Sept. 5 – A Giant Dog @ Reverb
Sept. 12 – Soft Kill @ The Slowdown
Sept. 12 – Magdalena Bay @ The Waiting Room
Sept. 14 – Gillian Welch & David Rawlings @ The Astro
Sept. 18 – David Dondero @ Ming Toy Gallery
Sept. 21 – Built to Spill @ The Waiting Room
Sept. 22 — Bright Eyes @ Steelhouse
Sept. 23 — M. Ward @ The Waiting Room
Sept. 24 – Why? @ The Slowdown
Sept. 25 – Descendents @ The Admiral
Sept. 26 – Foxing @ The Slowdown
Sept. 27 – Shovels & Rope @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 1 – Odie Leigh @ The Slowdown
Oct. 1 – Jungle @ The Astro
Oct. 4 – Brigitte Calls Me Baby @ Reverb
Oct. 4 – High Vis @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 4 – Turnover @ The Slowdown
Oct. 5 – Fontaines D.C. @ The Slowdown
Oct. 7 – Saturdays at Your Place @ Reverb
Oct. 8 – Boris @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 9 – Jeffery Lewis @ Grapefruit Records
Oct. 10 – MJ Lenderman & The Wind @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 10 – Melt @ The Slowdown
Oct. 10 – Pixel Grip @ Reverb
Oct. 12 – The Red Pears @ Reverb
Oct. 16 – Mdou Moctar @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 17 – Superchunk @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 18-19 – Cursive @ The Waiting Room
Oct. 20 – Jeff Tweedy @ The Admiral
Oct. 22 – Psychedelic Furs/Jesus and Mary Chain @ The Astro
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