The Taxpayers

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 Bee recorded the split record Now 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. Nickʼs 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 on Thaw, 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.

The Taxpayers, a long-running experimental, genre-bending DIY punk band that started in Portland, Oregon in 2007, are back. After a several year hiatus, they've been selling out shows across the US, headlining festivals in Australia, seeing long-term critical acclaim for their albums (Including 2012ʼs concept album God, Forgive These Bastards) and are now set to release their first full-length album in 8 years, titled “Circle Breaker”. “Think of how much the world has changed since we released our last album (2016ʼs Big Delusion Factory),” says Rob Taxpayer. “It seemed appropriate to do something completely different.” “Circle Breaker” moves from the quasi-religious vocal harmonies of “Circle Protector” to the electro-funk of the furious “Evil Everywhere”. Thereʼs chaotic punk (“I Am One Thousand”, “Nightmarish Population”), stripped back heartbreak (“Nobody is a Lost Cause”, “Empty Shed”), and genre spanning epics (“At War With the Dogcatchers”, “Everything Will Be Different”). Perhaps most surprising of all, at least for a mildly nihilistic punk band, are the songs of love and hope (“Naked Trees”, “Future Island”, “Outline of Your Blood”). “These are songs about circles, and they're the most personal songs we've ever shared,” says Rob. “The amount of death and birth we experienced prior to and during the making of this album - the violent deaths of friends and family members, the births of our children…it's been a journey for us.”

Crazy Arms is the 5th LP by Olympia, WA country/punk poets Pigeon Pit, and their first since becoming a nationally touring 6-piece band. It's a melodic call to action for folks who listen to both Bright Eyes 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 arenʼt alone. “The terror breathes beside me: another little act of sabotage” – “Run Your Pockets” As front-woman Lomes Oleander tells it: "Itʼs last call for nuance before we all get put against the wall so Iʼll just cheers to the human spirit: weʼre all fucked up and crazy people. Letʼs 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 thereʼs nothing you can do, thatʼs what kills the human spirit because that force of love and cooperation is humanity, thatʼs what makes sense inside of us. Giving a shit is the unpopular opinion. Iʼm just writing about what it feels like for me to try to hang on in a world thatʼs trying to kill the human spirit."