Lee Bains & the Glory Fires, Loamlands at Comet Ping Pong

Friday, August 2nd 2022

Lee Bains & The Glory Fires + Loamlands

10pm - $15 - All Ages

LEE BAINS & THE GLORY FIRES

Birmingham, AL

https://leebainsiii.bandcamp.com/

While Lee + the Glory Fires have spent a decade propagating what the New York Times calls “pandemonium with a conscience,” Bains and rhythm section Adam and Blake Williamson recently found themselves listening to records that were more produced, arranged, and textured than their own past work, to records that struck them as timeless and immense, ones that invited you in, to get lost in the details. On many bleary-eyed interstate drives, they talked about wanting to make a classic record – not a transparent document of their playing live with the occasional embellishment – but a record. They talked about working with a producer who had made such albums. About taking Bains’ songs and deconstructing them, stripping them down to their most minimal elements, reimagining them, and building them back up again. They talked about closely considering arrangements, digging into their varied influences. Swapping instruments. Getting high-fidelity sounds. Inviting guest musicians. Incorporating percussion and synthesizers and horns and strings. Maybe even doing a song or two without a blaring electric guitar, or even–gasp–without a guitar at all. So, that’s what they did. They contacted Athens, GA's David Barbe, whose work with the Drive-By Truckers, Sugar, Son Volt, Vic Chesnutt and countless other artists has earned him a legendary reputation amongst Southern independent rockers, and they agreed to set about bringing this vision to fruition.

Just as the album’s music meanders between jagged rock’n’roll and churchy swells, feedback-drenched dirges and orchestral rave-ups, the lyrics lead us through those rich varied lands and time itself: black-masked protestors face SWAT tanks in smoggy cities; Muscogee warriors encircle a colonial fort along a muddy river; incarcerated workers noisily strike in a maximum-security Pr*son surrounded by cottonfields; coal miners barricade the entrance of a mine; kids talk politics in the alley out back of a punk show; families gather outside a country church to prepare a dinner on the grounds. As we encounter these people and places, we sink deeper into what Bains calls “old-time,” that which connects us to those who have gone before, to the land, to each other, and to something deeper and older still. While tackling such lofty political, historical and philosophical concepts, the album is also the band’s most intimate, vulnerable and spiritual to date. The perspective is both outward- and inward-facing, Bains never taking on the persona or experience of others, but rather writing about the way his own limited experience and perspective of the band’s place can lift the veils of false narratives, and uncover “piles of winding stories” through time. Throughout the record, great forces–whether exploitative or liberatory, reconciliatory or confrontational, grand or humble, condemning or merciful–show up in the smallest, most personal moments of our lives and relationships, both public and private. Little by little, we are drawn into a long arc of freedom, justice, and beloved community, and into a celebration of and thanksgiving for those who do its work.

LOAMLANDS

Durham, NC

https://loamlands.bandcamp.com/

Loamlands is a distorted country music outfit based in Durham, North Carolina that places queer storytelling at the forefront. Their music intimately grapples with identity, gender and experiencing a queer existence in both modern-day and historical southern culture. It is a project build out of love of this geographic area and our queer and otherwise marginalized elders and peers. It is a reckoning. It is a desire to join other poets and artists in visible vulnerability and accountability. We are obsessed with growth, storytelling / creating, distortion and some bleep bloops. We home some of these stories connect with y’all and invite you into conversation with us and each other. We hope to reflect loudly, humbly and publicly on our collective and individual lived queer experience down here. And we hope you have fun w/ us. And think we’re cute.

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Host or Publisher Comet Ping Pong Live Music