Shakori Hills Spring 2012 - The Local Bands

With over 60 bands attending the four-day festival,Shakori Hills' spring 2012 iteration has more than enough variety to please every taste. We're going to be taking the weeks leading up to the festival to introduce you to some of the acts we're most excited about. It's starting today with bands from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle and North Carolina as a whole. Look for new Shakori updates every Wednesday.

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 Bombadil

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Saturday, Grove Stage: 11:00pm

As one of the resounding highlights of the Hopscotch Music Festival, Bombadil was a not-so-surprising but thoroughly exciting addition to the Shakori Hills line-up. Having recently released their second album, All That the Rain Promises, Bombadil's star is rising. After a hiatus related to health issues, Bombadil is roaring back to form, expertly crafting their singular mixture of Bolivian folk, roots rock, and chamber pop as if they'd never missed a beat. It is highly recommended that everyone make every effort to catch their set at the Grove Stage Saturday night. This is a quartet of masterful musicians and unparalleled showmen whose live performances vacillate between bombastic energy and restrained solemnity.

Two Raleigh, NC Festivals Add New Venues

Photo courtesy of progressenergycenter.com

The burgeoning metropolis of Raleigh, NC is already gearing up for the 3rd Annual Hopscotch Music Festival this September (check out our extensive past coverage here). For those of you unfamiliar with the event, the aptly named Hopscotch Festival takes place across over a dozen different venues in downtown Raleigh, all within reasonable walking distance of each other, consisting of a large outdoor stage in City Plaza and an assortment of bars, clubs, and theaters of all shapes and sizes. Back in November, a mere two month after 2011's stellar weekend, the folks at Hopscotch announced that they would be adding the main gallery of Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum as their fifteenth performance venue, indicating that the festival was continuing to build on the expansive growth that it made after between 2010 and 2011. It turns out that was only the beginning.

In Brief: Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival, Spring 2012

Photo courtesy of The Bottom String.

Recently, Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance released a scintillating taste of what is sure to be an EXCELLENT lineup for their Spring Festival, to be held April 19th-22nd. Featuring returning favorites and some fresh blood, there's no way to complain about this preliminary list. Myxem favorites Driftwood are returning, as well as Midtown Dickens, Mandolin Orange and Holy Ghost Tent Revival. After stunning the entirety of our staff at Hopscotch, seeing Bombadil make it onto the lineup was a delightful surprise. Having been recently introduced to Curtis Eller's banjo-based roots-ragtime, seeing his name pop up was both unexpected and certainly a good reason to dig further into his catalog.

The preliminary lineup announcement is after the jump AND on Shakori Hills' website

Album Review: "All That The Rain Promises" by Bombadil

All That the Rain Promises by Bombadil was released on
November 8, 2011 by Ramseur Records

If you've been with Myxem for a while, you may remember our coverage of the third day of the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC. We talked at length about Bombadil, a Durham-based band that we caught a glimpse of between sets from the Flaming Lips and Lost in the Trees. It takes a very special performance to stand out between two musical powerhouses such as those, but when the dust cleared and the copious glitter from the Flaming Lips show finally washed out of my hair, the memory of Bombadil's set at Fletcher Opera Hall still burned clearly in my mind. They completely took me by surprise with a display of sheer, raw talent that had me listening to their back-catalog (specifically 2009's epic Tarpits and Canyonlands) and nothing else for about a solid month.

Now, a full two months later, Bombadil has released their third album, All That the Rain Promises. I've been excited about this one for quite some time and can say with complete honesty that I am nowhere near disappointed. All of the key elements that drew me to Bombadil in the first place are present in full force; the album opens with "I Will Wait", an emotional dirge reminiscent of traditional Southern hymnals, before going into the elegant guitar work and slow build that comprise "The Pony Express." From there, we are treated to another admirable collection of tunes steeped in the band's quirky sort of charm, with the composition of each one managing to outshine its predecessor at first listen. Lyrically, the band doesn't stray too far from the eloquent pseudo-folk storytelling we've come to expect from them (with the notable exception of "A Question" which reads like a playground love-note), and I quite frankly have no problem with that. There are certainly attempts to get more ambitious vocally, such as the penultimate ballad "Short Side of the Wall", but for the most part Bombadil stick to what they know, and they seem it know it damn well.

After a brief hiatus brought on by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Daniel Michalak's health issues, Bombadil has come roaring back into the North Carolina music scene, and with All That the Rain Promises, they have shown that they are anything but rusty. The album is a complete and seemingly effortless return to form that is impossible not to enjoy. I cannot recommend it highly enough and will be waiting patiently to hear what this incredibly talented group comes out with next.

Rating: 9.4/10
Standout Tracks: "The Pony Express", "One Whole Year", "Laundromat"

Hopscotch '11 - Day Three Review

The Myxem crew awoke battered and beaten on Saturday morning; two full days of Hopscotching can really kick your ass. Regardless, this was our big day and we were going to enjoy the hell out of it. I was about thirteen years old when I first heard the Flaming Lips. I was an awkward eighth grader who listened to a lot of classic rock and watched a lot of VH1, where they played a clip of "Do You Realize??" during just about every commercial break. It was this that inspired me to check out the whole album, which led me to the Soft Bulletin, which led to Clouds Taste Metallic, and the rest is history. Today would be my first time ever seeing the Lips live, a moment that my awkward teenage years had been building up to. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. But, before that glorious moment, there was lot on the agenda: bands to see, day parties to attend, and a whole lot of walking around.